This week on Midnight Oil, we speak to Nikkie Wiegink, an assistant professor at Utrecht University who studies social reconstruction after war, armed group dynamics, disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of combatants, coal mining and the anthropology of infrastructure. Her new book, “Former Guerrillas in Mozambique,” is a groundbreaking ethnography of how relationships between combatants forged in wartime continue to shape political, economic and social relations even after those combatants have been “reintegrated.”

Now that I study dispossession and resettlement issues associated with coal mining as well as civil war combatants and their lives after conflict, I’ve had occasion to think about what draws those interests together and makes me so curious about both of them. In a way, both are about understanding what underlies processes that are often framed as "bad" or "evil." What are the inner workings of war, but also what are the inner workings of dispossession?

My philosophy is that people generally think of what they do as good. Being part of problematic or evil constellations of dispossession or extraction, people frame it for themselves as something good, which can mean many things. I'm fundamentally curious to understand who these people are who work in these constellations and how they talk about their potentially morally dubious work. When I was researching former Renamo guerrillas in Mozambique, that meant digging into what war participation means in people’s life trajectories. Disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration programs frame post-war reintegration as a rupture — people were in society, then left it to go to war, and are now returning to their pre-war relationship to society through reintegration — but that isn’t how many combatants experience it. Instead, former fighters tend to understand the workings of their lives as one continuum, a series of relationships that change over time.

Part of it is ethnography 101 — study the stories people tell about themselves and their lives. In hours-long interviews, I'd go through all the stages in peoples' lives. But it’s also important to be part of peoples' lives and see how their lived experiences compare with the stories they tell. For example, with these Renamo former combatants, they can tell you about how they found their wife in the war and how they connect to their fellow former combatants, but it's another thing to see how every week they would drink together, how they have economic relationships with each other in terms of trade and patronage dynamics. It's a process of talking to and watching, and getting the widest possible picture of peoples' experiences. On the one hand the narratives, and on the other what people do.

In Maringué, an area of central Mozambique where I did fieldwork and where many ex-combatants from the Mozambican civil war life, people would tend to say everything is good, the war is over, we are all brothers now. Both Frelimo and Renamo people would say this. But just by being there and going to church gatherings and masses, at a certain point I realized that, "Oh yeah, that church is a Renamo church, that church is a Frelimo church” and people would go out of their way not to cross political lines. Similarly, it took a long time for me to understand that when people would describe someone as being from a certain town, they meant it as a political identifier more than a geographical one — some towns meant they were Renamo, others Frelimo. The way people talk about things is different from the way things are — there are many layers of meaning behind what people say. I was in Maringué for 14 months, and I still maybe did not get half of it. That's the real value of doing participant observation next to the interviews.