Elsey, Mair & Kolanoski 2018 - Violence as Work - Published version.pdf (original) (raw)
Related papers
Violence as Work: Ethnomethodological Insights into Military Combat Operations
Psychology of Violence, 2018
Objective: The objective of this article is to outline an ethnomethodological approach to the study of professionalized violence or violence as work. It focuses primarily on violence in the context of military combat operations and the “situational” analyses and assessments military personnel themselves undertake when engaging in violent action. Method: We use a video from one incident (WikiLeaks’ Collateral Murder release) as a demonstration case to set out the methodological bases of ethnomethodological studies of combat violence. As part of this study, we show how transcripts can be used to document the interactions in which situational analyses feature as part of coordinating and executing linked attacks. Results: Based on the video and our transcripts, we explicate how the military personnel involved collaboratively identified, assessed, and engaged a group of combatants. We show that the incident consisted of 2 attacks or engagements, a first and a follow-up, treated as connected rather than distinct by those involved on situational grounds. Conclusion: Moving beyond controversy, causal explanations, and remedies, the article describes how structures of practical military action can be investigated situationally from an ethnomethodological perspective using video data. By treating collaborative military methods and practices as a focus for inquiry, this article contributes to our understanding of violence as work more broadly.
Investigative Methods: An NCRM Innovation Collection, 2022
Using public domain video and/or audio-recordings, transcripts, internal reports and inquiries as data, the authors investigate specific and often highly controversial incidents in which Western militaries employ the use of force. Analysing the interactional organisation of such incidents as they unfold "ethnographically" (incorporating fieldnotes, interviews, biographical accounts and other relevant resources), their collaborative research examines the assessment of threats, the identification of combatants and the distinction between lawful and unlawful military action as interrelated and co-established features of that work. Of interest to social researchers but also military personnel, lawyers and campaigners, among others, this case study outline how they methodically investigate the use of force with reference to a particular case, the Uruzgan incident, using available interactional data and related resources while remaining alive to their very real limits.
Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis and the Study of Action-in-Interaction in Military Settings
The Routledge Companion to Military Research Methods, 2016
In this chapter we discuss what ethnomethodology and conversation analysis can contribute to studies of the military, specifically understandings of ‘action-in-interaction’ in military settings. The chapter is methodologically focused and explores how work in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis provides an alternative way of approaching the problems posed in studying the different forms of practice that constitute ‘soldierly work’. Rather than approach these issues in the abstract, and in line with the central thrust of ethnomethodological (e.g. Garfinkel 1967, 2002; Heritage 1984; Lynch 2007) and conversation analytic studies (e.g. Heritage 1995; Pomerantz & Fehr 1997; Sacks 1995; Schegloff 2007), we shall outline this approach through a discussion of the methods employed, and difficulties encountered, in the course of research we conducted into a specific case. This was a fatal ‘blue-on-blue’ or ‘friendly fire’ attack on British infantry by American aircraft during the Second Gulf War (see Mair, Watson, Elsey & Smith 2012; Mair, Elsey, Watson & Smith 2013). What initially drew us to the incident was the availability of a cockpit video-tape that was leaked to the public during a controversial coroner’s inquest in 2007, some four years after the attack took place. Crucially this videotape contained the audio communications between the two pilots involved in the attack and the ground forward air controller (GFAC) they were working with, providing unparalleled access to such an incident as it unfolded. Our interest in the footage was twofold. We wanted, firstly, to see what insights we could glean from data of this kind about combat as experienced first-hand, ‘first-time-through’ (Garfinkel, Lynch & Livingston 1981); and, secondly, we wanted to look at what the three official inquiries made of the incident (including two military boards of inquiry, alongside the coroner’s inquest) and explore how they had used (and problematised) the video as a resource for analysing the actions of the pilots. This methodological strategy reflects the ‘duplex’ forms of analysis that ethnomethodology and conversation analysis rest upon (Watson 2009): in this case, an analysis of the pilot’s communicative and sense-making practices coupled with an analysis of locally situated reconstructions of those practices by a number of authoritative auditors. This analysis of members’ reconstructions of practices, rather than ours as researchers, involved us ‘tacking’ between the video and after-the-fact accounts of what the video could be said to show. In order to explain how we proceeded, we will initially discuss the problems we encountered in transcribing the video and what those difficulties themselves revealed about what the pilots were doing. After that, we turn to the ways in which we established links between the video and the reports published by the official inquiries, reports which offered competing and apparently conflicting interpretations of what happened and why. Based on this, and having linked our research to wider work in the field as we go, we will conclude, finally, by returning to the question of what ethnomethodological and conversation analytic research adds to our understanding of action-in-interaction in military settings: namely, a focus on its specificities and the forms of organisation internal to it.
War on Video: Combat Footage, Vernacular Video Analysis and Military Culture from Within
Ethnographic Studies, 2018
In this article we present an ethnomethodological study of a controversial case of 'friendly fire' from the Iraq War in which leaked video footage, war on video, acquired particular significance. We examine testimony given during a United States Air Force (USAF) investigation of the incident alongside transcribed excerpts from the video to make visible the methods employed by the investigators to assess the propriety of the actions of the pilots involved. With a focus on the way in which the USAF investigators pursued their own analysis of language-in-use in their discussions with the pilots about what had been captured on the video, we turn attention to the background expectancies that analytical work was grounded in. These 'vernacular' forms of video analysis and the expectancies which inform them constitute, we suggest, an inquiry into military culture from within that culture. As such, attending to them provides insights into that culture.
Critical Studies on Terrorism, 2019
The social sciences speak of violence through its meaning, performances, manifestations and representations; however, the inner workings of violence are less explored. In order to suggest a different mode of seeing violence, I explore the inner workings of violence through the pleasures of and fun among Shi’i volunteer combatants. I apply Walter Benjamin’s motion of pure means to explain how violence becomes self-referential and nonrepresentational via combat-zone ethnography amongst Iraqi Shi’i militants who fought against ISIS in Iraq. I address the fine line between pleasure and fun in order to highlight the inner workings of violence during combat and to encourage a fresh bottom-up anthropological perspective in assessing the parameters of the persistence and resilience of volunteer combatants. My approach advocates moving beyond recruitment and ideological interpolation by questioning the allure of combat through an ontological framework that includes combatants’ perspectives and narratives
This report was written by the organizers of the workshop "Accounting for Combat-Related Killings," which took place at the Goethe University Frankfurt in July 2014. Scholars from Israel, the United Kingdom, the United States,, Canada, and Germany came together to present and discuss case studies on the discourse practices involved in accounting for combat-related killings in different national and transnational contexts. Intending to reflect on the methodological skills needed to analyze newly available process data, the workshop brought together scholars using different methodological approaches (here mainly ethnomethodology and critical discourse analysis). In regard to the global trend towards increasing numbers of so called permanent, asymmetric, small, and permanent wars, the report turns to concepts, methods, and empirical findings that foster understandings of the difficulties war generates at social, cultural and political levels as well as the manner in which the...
Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung Forum Qualitative Social Research, 2015
This report was written by the organizers of the workshop "Accounting for Combat-Related Killings," which took place at the Goethe University Frankfurt in July 2014. Scholars from Israel, the United Kingdom, the United States,, Canada, and Germany came together to present and discuss case studies on the discourse practices involved in accounting for combat-related killings in different national and transnational contexts. Intending to reflect on the methodological skills needed to analyze newly available process data, the workshop brought together scholars using different methodological approaches (here mainly ethnomethodology and critical discourse analysis). In regard to the global trend towards increasing numbers of so called permanent, asymmetric, small, and permanent wars, the report turns to concepts, methods, and empirical findings that foster understandings of the difficulties war generates at social, cultural and political levels as well as the manner in which these predicaments are negotiated, denied, or deflected. The report summarizes the workshop by presenting the papers in a specific order, beginning with accounting in combat, followed by tribunals of accounting, and finally the sedimentation of accounting in cultural representations.
Military Violence in Its Own Right
Conflict and society, 2017
In this article, we use the case of the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories to off er a microsociological analysis of military violence in noncombat situations. Utilizing the insights of Randall Collins, we suggest that in order understand these encounters, the emotional dimensions of violent behaviors must be linked to the interactional dynamics that trigger the transformation of these emotions into violent actions. We review the emotional confi gurations that characterize military occupations and discuss a range of violent behaviors initiated by these emotions. Finally, our analysis goes beyond the microsociological level to complement Collins's model by showing the trans-situational implications of our analysis. We focus on the emergence of violence leaders (the "violent few"), the importance of actual and real audiences, and the development of a violent military habitus.
Journal of Perpetrator Research, 2020
ield research can be dangerous. Talking to individuals who have participated in armed formations and who have been in a position to perpetrate violence, be it as soldiers, heads of repressive cooperatives, interrogators in prisons, or members of militias, poses problems that are uncommon in other fields of ethnographic research and qualitative interviewing. Increasingly, literature in the fields of peace and conflict studies deals with methodological problems such as danger during field stays; 1 ethical challenges; 2 research fatigue; 3 power relations and their representation; 4 the partiality, power, and positionality of the researcher; 5 and the phenomenon of over-researched communities. 6 The problem is that instead of incorporating this current methodological awareness and discussions into the study of perpetrators, many analysis continue to derive evidence and expert authority from interviews with purportedly 'dangerous' and 'hard-to-reach' people and/or conduct fieldwork in allegedly perilous 'danger zones'. At the same time, they often ignore basic demands of qualitative and ethnographic fieldwork,