Conflict continuities special section

It is tempting to interpret the eruption of armed violence in various parts of the world as a break with the past. However, in this special section, the authors call for attention to “conflict continuities” to understand contemporary violence. Challenging the conventional focus on causes or consequences, they argue that past violent conflict may serve to generate new conflict, in reworked forms. They foreground the psychosocial dynamics of conflict, particularly as they affect social relations and worldviews, often reproduced through cultural narratives. The special section brings together five studies from across Africa. In different ways, they reveal how conflicts are remembered, reiterated, and reproduced in narratives that circulate in families, communities, and national-level politics, thus embodying a generative force for new conflict and struggle.
 
This special section was organized by the ASCL CRG ‘Conflict continuities’, and features contributions by ASCL colleagues, including work on Social Media, Duress and the Malian Conflict, The Liberation Lens in Southern Africa, and Domestic Pedagogies of Peace and Conflict in Rwandan and Banyamulenge Refugee Communities in Rwanda.
 
This special journal section was published in Conflict and Society Volume 11 (2025): Issue 1
 

Author(s) / editor(s)

Berckmoes, de Bruijn, Bruls, van der Hoog, a.o.

About the author(s) / editor(s)

Lidewyde Berckmoes is an anthropologist and carries out research on regional conflict in Africa.
 
Mirjam de Bruijn is an anthropologist whose work has a clearly interdisciplinary character. She has done fieldwork in Cameroon, Chad and Mali and an important theme throughout is how people manage risk (drought, war, etc.) in both rural and urban areas.

Luca Bruls is a PhD candidate in the NWO-funded project Digital warfare in the Sahel: popular networks of war and Cultural Violence. Her PhD project is a study of religious networks in times of conflict in the Sahel.

Tycho van der Hoog is a former PhD candidate at the African Studies Centre Leiden.

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