Liberia's Women Veterans

War, Roles and Reintegration

Leena Vastapuu, Emmi Nieminen

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786990853
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Liberian civil wars of the 1990s and 2000s became notorious for their atrocities, and for the widespread use of child soldiers. Girls and young women accounted for up to 40 per cent of these soldiers, but their unique perspective and experiences have largely been excluded from accounts of the conflict. In Liberia's Women Veterans, Leena Vastapuu uses an innovative auto-photographic methodology to tell the story of two of Africa's most brutal civil wars through the eyes of 133 female former soldiers. Incorporating their testimonies alongside a series of vivid illustrations by Emmi Nieminen, the book provides an in-depth account of these women's experiences of trauma, stigma, and the challenges of reintegration into post-war society, as well as their hopes and aspirations for the future. Vastapuu argues that these women, too often been perceived merely as passive victims of the conflict, can in fact play an important role in post-war reconciliation and peace-building. Overturning gendered perceptions of warfare and militarism, the book provides a unique take on humanitarian practices and post-conflict societies, making essential reading for policymakers as well as students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences.

1
Auto-photographing rivers of insecurities

More than a quarter of a century ago Gayatri Spivak (1988: 66) posed her famous question ‘Can the subaltern speak?’. After critically examining the works of Marx, Gramsci, Foucault and Deleuze, among others, Spivak’s answer was ‘no’ – at the end of the day, the subaltern cannot speak if academics and other intellectuals continue to scrutinize the ‘Other’ only through their own ‘universal’ paradigms. According to Spivak, these paradigms tend to have two implicit problems. On the one hand, the heterogeneity of the subaltern mass is not recognized. On the other hand, the intellectual is considered – falsely – as someone who can ‘speak for’ the subaltern. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault, she thus argues that intellectuals (herself included) inevitably practice epistemic violence when they force the subaltern to speak the language of the dominant elite or remain virtually unheard. Spivak’s essay has provoked a fair amount of criticism, due also to the author’s complicated use of language, yet has continued to be seen as one of the most influential texts in postcolonial studies (see, e.g., Didur and Heffernan 2003). One reason for this success may be that her main concern remains pertinent throughout the spectrum of social sciences: how can we investigate the ‘Other’, the ‘subaltern’, without imposing our implicit ontological and epistemological preconceptions on the subjects and topics we are trying to comprehend?

In this chapter, I explain and justify the main methodological choices of this book by suggesting that the auto-photographic research approach can provide a useful alternative for shifting agency from the researcher to the research participants, hence amplifying the voices of the ‘Others’. I am certainly not arguing that this research approach would somehow magically solve the problems of representation, nor that any research setting could ever be value-free. However, I do claim that when the auto-photographic method and the photo-elicitation technique are brought together as a methodological set in a curiously contrapuntal spirit, they carry the potential to reduce epistemic violence, especially in risky environments. Moreover, this methodological combination might prove useful in places where cultural biases and unequal power relations between the researcher and research participants may unintentionally distort research results.

Visualizing the ‘pain of others’

The ethical struggles related to observing and visualizing pain are anything but new. For example, in Book IV of Plato’s (2012) Republic, there is the story of Leontius, the son of Aglaion, who comes across dead people lying at the executioner’s feet. Leontius feels both a desire to stare at the corpses, but is also disgusted and abhorred by the sight. He covers his eyes and struggles for a time, but finally gives in to the desire to see and forces his eyes wide open. Leontius rushes towards the corpses, shouting: ‘Look, ye wretches, take your fill of the fair sight.’ It is apparent that Leontius is going through an emotional struggle. He has both the human desire to observe, to know what is really happening around him, but at the same time he realizes that not looking would most likely be more ethical and respectful towards the ‘Other’.

Whenever I present my research project to individuals and audiences from various educational and institutional backgrounds, the ghost of Leontius seems to somehow loom in the background. ‘Can I see the pictures?’; ‘Oh, it would be so interesting to explore the photographs’; ‘You just have to put at least some pictures in your book – how can we otherwise know that they exist?’ are just some of the various comments concerning the photographs taken by the research participants. Indeed, it seems that although visuals have recently been granted a considerable amount of attention – for example, in critical international relations theory¹ – the production of visuals as a research method still remains in the margins of the discipline. Therefore, I have decided to begin my methodological introduction by further explaining and justifying the often challenging and complicated visual choices made in the course of the project at hand.

To begin with, the reader might find it surprising that only illustrations, but no photographs, are presented in a book that champions the auto-photographic research approach. This is in essence an ethical choice since being a woman war veteran in Liberia typically entails a very strong stigma. To give an example, one late evening in November 2012 I received a phone call from Monrovia. It was from Juliet, a former frontline fighter who now sounded anxious and asked me to ‘tell the BBC’² to take her picture off the Internet. Juliet had just found out that a close-up photograph of her holding an AK-47 was online. According to Juliet, the picture was taken during the second Liberian civil war from a helicopter that had suddenly appeared above her. The helicopter disappeared as quickly as it had arrived, and Juliet had already forgotten the whole incident. But now, when she found her face in a picture in the international news, she remembered the incident again. Juliet was extremely worried that this ‘BBC effect’ might prevent her from traveling abroad. Moreover, she was concerned about the stigma the photo might still cause for her and her children, some nine years after the war had ceased. I thus promised Juliet that I would see what I could do and call her back at the first possible opportunity. Soon, however, it became evident that my abilities were very limited in this matter. The picture was already on countless personal websites, news sites and blogs. Because of this and a few similar incidents, I have therefore decided to be extremely cautious in publishing any photographs of the interviewed women.

In addition to research ethics, utilizing visuals that entail the ‘pain of others’ (Sontag 2003) in a respectful but truthful manner is always a very problematic question (e.g. Butler 2010; Möller 2009, 2013). In addition to various types of media actors, the ‘security–development nexus’ (Duffield 2001) also relies on images of pain to gain the general public’s attention for generating funding for humanitarian projects in the Global South (e.g. Wilson and Brown 2009; Calain 2013; Kotilainen 2016). Thus, like Leontius some two thousand years ago, the everyday observer of today also constantly encounters horrifying images without really considering the ethical implications of choosing to look at the suffering bodies or turn one’s head away. When the current visuals of suffering are examined through the lens of curious contrapuntalism, however, it quickly becomes apparent that pain is made visible in the global North under a strict double standard. As David Campbell (2004: 64) remarks: ‘When dead bodies do feature in the media, they are more often than not bodies of dead foreigners. And more often than not, images of dead foreigners are little more than a vehicle for the inscription of domestic spaces as superior.’ In other words, the ethical standards of presenting suffering entail complex moral choices that might, on the one hand, cause empathy and therefore spark social responsibility and action, but, on the other hand, might also further deepen the enduring postcolonial and gendered divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Kleinman and Kleinman 1996).

The auto-photographic research approach

Considering all the ethical challenges that images of pain contain, the logical question is: why bother with visual methods at all? Why not undertake more conventional social science research instead, the kind that relies mainly on research data produced with methods such as interviews, participant observation, censuses and surveys?

As is briefly mentioned in the Introduction, my interest in photographic methods did not emerge in academia, but in another West African country, Senegal. When I had returned to Dakar for the first time after having lived for six months in one of the city’s neighborhoods, I decided to ask my local friend Sire to take over my camera and photograph his daily activities. I did not expect much from the photos, especially since this was the first time Sire had used a digital SLR camera. In addition, I had already taken thousands of pictures of my small home district, called Santhiaba, and was quite convinced that he would bring back pictures similar to those that I already had in my possession. Later that same evening, Sire came back with well over a hundred pictures on the camera. The photographs revealed that I had been right in assuming that the surroundings were already familiar to me. However, at the same time it was evident that I had been completely wrong about the insights of the pictures; in front of my eyes I saw the everyday lives of Santhiabans in a way I had not understood them before. I was able to see Sire’s whereabouts during an ordinary day and witness the ways in which he navigated Santhiaba and its surroundings. In addition, the themes and details he considered fascinating and worth photographing were in many instances totally different from my own set of pictures. I was also astounded at the way individuals looked at Sire through the lens of the camera; somehow, it seemed that I was able to see through Sire’s eyes.

This incident came to mind a few years later when I tried to find a suitable way to collect data for my future dissertation. While flipping through old photographs in Finland, it occurred to me: maybe through auto-photographic research data I would be able to ‘see’ as the ‘Other’, as had been the case in Senegal. In addition, by giving cameras to the interviewees and asking them to take pictures of their daily realities and aspirations, it would be the research participants rather than myself who would set the agenda for the interviews. Finally, I also figured that the method might provide a visual access and therefore some form of understanding of insecure places and environments that I could not frequent for security reasons.

Hence, from the autumn of 2012 to the summer of 2014, I spent a combined period of five months in Liberia during three separate field research trips. With the help of my research assistants, I conducted some 160 exploratory interviews and distributed thirty-five cameras to chosen key interviewees in the towns of Monrovia, Kakata, Gbarnga and Ganta. Many cameras were broken in the process and a few were stolen. Furthermore, I decided to discard some material either because the profiles of the interviewees did not match the research setting (e.g. age of the interviewee) or the data seemed unreliable (e.g. contradictory information about their own movements within the warring factions). In the end, I had accumulated 133 exploratory interviews and twenty-five photo-interviews. For the purpose of this chapter, I have chosen three cases from these data to focus upon.

Research interviews entailing a photographic component have been used in academia for decades. The method was first described by John Collier Jr (1957), a documentary photographer who had been involved in a multidisciplinary research project investigating the relationship between the environment and mental health in Canada in the mid-1950s. As part of this project, Collier photographed the living surroundings of a number of chosen research participants. The resulting pictures were placed in interview situations that Collier (ibid.) labelled in his article as photo-interviews. When this initial experiment seemed to produce deeper information than ‘ordinary’ interviews previously had, the practice of photo elicitation spread, and Collier’s later works (Collier 1967; Collier and Collier 1986) became standardized introductions to visual anthropology and sociology (Harper 2002: 14).

Building on the methods and ideas of John Collier, some anthropologists began to question their own subject positions within their research settings in the 1960s and 1970s. It was understood in a very intersectional manner that, among other things, the researcher’s race, gender and social position had a deep impact on what was studied and which methods were chosen (Thomas 2009: 2). A revealing example of the impact of subject positions can be found in my own experiences in Santhiaba. The photographs I had taken sometimes differed radically from the pictures taken by Sire, since we had an utterly dissimilar understanding of what was interesting in that particular social environment.

After the findings of John Collier Jr, the next significant developmental step in participatory visual research came about in 1966, when film and communications scholar Sol Worth and anthropologist John Adair launched an experimental collaborative research project in North America. Worth and Adair gave 16mm film cameras to Navajo Native Americans, taught the research participants to utilize the cameras and edit film, and asked them to film their living surroundings. The scholars maintained that their method was able the capture the ‘Navajo’ ways of experiencing the world. Although some critics argued that Worth and Adair’s work was placing too much emphasis on ethnic and racial differences at the cost of other social identities, their research was nevertheless an important benchmark in the development of auto-photography as a visual method (Thomas 2009: 2).

There are numerous variations within the field of participatory photography (see, e.g., Balomenou and Garrod 2015), such as photovoice (e.g. Ruby 1992); photo essay (e.g. Grusky 2004); photo-interview (e.g. Vila 2013); photo-communication (e.g. Dinklage and Ziller 1989) and pluralist photography (Bleiker and Kay 2007). Therefore, for the sake of clarity, I have decided to utilize the term ‘auto-photographic research practice’ to describe the methodological combination of participant-generated auto-photographs and photo-elicitation interviews. Thus, I use the term ‘auto-photography’ to refer to the process in which the research participants of this project have taken photographs of their everyday realities and their aspirations. By ‘photo-elicitation’ I mean the step in the interview processes in which I have placed the participant-generated photographs one by one in front of the interviewee/photographer, who has provided me with detailed insights into each picture. Together, these two steps form the auto-photographic research approach.

Within the various strands of participatory photography, it is typical to include selected participant-generated photographs in the final publications. For the ethical reasons described above, including photographs in this book was not an option. In a somewhat opposite manner, some writers, such as the celebrated photographer/essayist Susan Sontag (1977, 2003), have addressed the challenge of visualizing the ‘pain of others’ by choosing not to include any visuals whatsoever in their oeuvres. Nonetheless, I find the alternative of not including any visual material in this book unsuitable for various reasons.

First and foremost, in a project that relies so heavily on data gathered with visual methods, it would somehow seem devious to report research results only in written format. In addition, providing yet another output that treats and favours words as the only ‘proper mode of explanation, as the tool of thought’, as Nick Sou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface : Liberia at war
• Introduction: Hell is the absolute lack of being heard
• 1. Auto-photographing rivers of insecurities
• 2. Girl and women soldiers in Liberia’s civil wars
• 3. DDR: Disarmament, Disillusionment and Remarginalization
• 4. Social rafting in post-war Liberia
• 5. Let my children’s future be alright
• Conclusion
• Epilogue: ‘When I sing, I can forget about my problems’
• Notes
• References
• Index