Carolyn Nordstrom’s research while affiliated with University of Notre Dame and other places

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Publications (10)


Invisible Empires
  • Article

March 2004

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21 Reads

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8 Citations

Social Analysis

Carolyn Nordstrom

Carita's War

September 2001

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22 Reads

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5 Citations

Development

Carolyn Nordstrom argues that millions of girl-youths are affected by political violence taking place in the world today, yet less is known about what happens to girls in war zones than to any other segment of the population. This ‘invisibility’ is not an accident, but relates to the many ‘wars’ children encounter on the frontlines. Girls suffer the assaults of war, and in addition face the escalating levels of sexual and domestic violence, poverty and social dislocation that war brings. As well, they may be preyed on by international criminal rackets exploiting the invisibility of poor girls in war zones for illegal sexual, domestic and industrial labour – the tragic underbelly of development that generates billions of dollars annually. And in an enduring irony, young girls working in informal subsistence trade are able to survive, yet their work produces financial assets for adult ‘business people’. Solutions rest with making visible girls' realities, and the links between wartime and peacetime profiteering across legal and illegal development schemes.Development (2001) 44, 30–35. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1110258


Shadows and Sovereigns

August 2000

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378 Reads

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156 Citations

Theory Culture & Society

This is an ethnographic and theoretical exploration of the `shadows': vast transnational networks of goods, services, people and exchanges that flow outside formal and legal state channels and international laws. These networks involve millions of people and more than a trillion dollars yearly worldwide, and my research demonstrates these are more formalized, integrated and rule-bound than traditional studies have suggested. Thus, `shadow' networks broker political, economic and social power that can rival many of the world's states, and they are profoundly implicated in world markets. This article explores core characteristics and cultures defining extant extra-state systems, and the power and potentialities for social sovereignty they wield. Investigation into shadow realities prompts a reassessment of the basic theoretical ideas concerning the nexus of legality/illegality, state/non-state and formal/non-formal power relations defining the world today.


Wars and Invisible Girls, Shadow Industries, and the Politics of Not-Knowing

January 1999

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22 Reads

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48 Citations

International Feminist Journal of Politics

This article begins in the interior of Mozambique during the country's post-independence war with the stories of three girls variously affected by violence. It then follows girls' war experiences in general out from the frontlines to wider international locales where girls face domestic violence in their home communities and civil and labor violence at the hands of (shadow) transnational profiteers; who reap billions of dollars yearly on children's factory, domestic, and sexual labor. The article is set in an overall theoretical framework that explores how a politics of invisibility - literally of 'not-knowing' - has developed in which little public information is available on children's human rights violations or on the political tactics and economic gain that have attended to these violations.


Terror Warfare and the Medicine of Peace

March 1998

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40 Reads

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57 Citations

Medical Anthropology Quarterly

Terror warfare's goal is to defeat political opposition by controlling populations through the fear of brutality. Mozambique's 1976-92 war stands as a prime example of this military strategy: over one million people, the vast majority of whom were civilians, were killed. Half of these casualties were children. Fully one-half of the population was directly affected by the war, and one-quarter had to flee their homes. As devastating as terror warfare is, it is destined to fail. People ultimately resist, and they do so in complex and creative ways. Rebuilding war-destroyed worlds, healing the wounds of violence, and crafting concepts of self-identity based on resistance to aggression become powerful conflict-resolution strategies among the average citizenry. The creative resources that Mozambicans developed to survive and end a very brutal war are among the most sophisticated I have seen anywhere in the world. Their war was against violence itself.


Deadly myths of aggression

January 1998

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92 Reads

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29 Citations

Aggressive Behavior

Research at the frontlines of wars shows that the realities of war are quite different from the public presentations of war. The experiences of those surviving in the midst of war are frequently worlds apart from the “images” of political violence (mis)portrayed in public media, formal military texts, the literature, and war museums. This has allowed for a number of myths about war and human aggression to hold sway in both academic and popular culture that, as the basis for policies, can actually further harm those subjected to war. For example, although the vast majority of cultural and military treatises on war focus on soldiers, more children than soldiers are killed in wars in the world today. If this core reality of war is omitted from analyses, solutions become impossible. On the other hand, people often look at statistics like these and decry the inevitability of aggression in human nature and society. Yet, data from combat soldiers have shown that through much of modern history, the majority of combat soldiers on the front lines do not fire their weapons, at least not at other humans. They do not flee war, but they cannot bring themselves to kill others. When these facts are excluded from public discourse on political violence, we sacrifice our potential for understanding the human capacity for peacebuilding. Without actual war zone research—research conducted at the front lines of wars—it is impossible to distinguish between fact and fiction in these formal presentations of war. In exploring some of the common myths about war and comparing them with data collected at the front lines, this article examines the question of why these myths emerge with such force and chronicles the cultural construction of aggression. In conclusion, the article suggests that a new kind of empiricism is necessary for studying such difficult, dangerous, and complex phenomena as political aggression and peacebuilding. It is an empiricism that necessitates both sophisticated methodological tools attuned to wartime realities and theoretical insights capable of explaining them. Examples take the reader through key dilemmas and solutions in the search for a more representative, and responsible, understanding of political violence and peace. Aggr. Behav. 24:147–159, 1998. © 1998 Wiley-Liss, Inc.


Girls behind the (front) lines

September 1996

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30 Reads

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9 Citations

Peace Review

Behind the rhetoric of soldiers fighting soldiers that fuels military propaganda and popular accounts of war around the world, children are maimed, tortured, starved, forced to fight, and killed in numbers that rival adult civilian casualties, and outnumber those of soldiers who die. These youthful casualties—some one and a half million in recognized armed conflicts in the last decade alone—are largely invisible: most of the military texts, the political science analyses, and the media accounts of war ignore the tactical targeting of children. In over a decade of studying war, I have seen children victims of war lying maimed in hospitals or dead in bombed out villages, and living or dying of starvation in refugee camps and on the streets after their families and homes have been attacked. I have seen children sold into forced labor and sexual servitude by international networks of profiteers who exploit the tragedies of war and the powerlessness of children. This constitutes a multi‐billion dollar transnational “industry.” Despite seeing all this, I have witnessed only a very small percentage of all the children directly affected by war. When I try to find out what has happened to other children in war, what (very) little data exists concerns mainly boys. This prompts me to ask: Where are the girls?



The Dirty War: Civilian Experience of Conflict in Mozambique and Sri Lanka

January 1992

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16 Reads

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12 Citations

Wars are fought for a myriad of reasons, and employ a wide diversity of strategies. Yet it is the similarities of the war experience, rather than the differences, that are of interest in this analysis. In investigating the war phenomenon, I focus on two related arenas of conflict: dirty war strategies, and the impact of these on civilian populations. As roughly 90% of all war casualties today are civilians (Sivard annual; Bedjaoui, 1986), this will essentially entail a chronicle of the average person.


Citations (10)


... A maior parte das vezes, os membros do Al-Shabaab têm como alvo principal raparigas adolescentes, embora sequestrem também rapazes para fazer deles combatentes. É necessário investigar melhor a escala destes sequestros e violações que o Al-Shabaab tem cometido contra as crianças que tem capturado, incluindo violência sexual e potencial uso em hostilidades (Amnistia Internacional, 2021: 5 (Cunha, 2014;Cunha et al., 2019, ASF, 2019Nordstrom, 1992;Alexander, 1994;Chingono, 1994;Muianga, 1995). ...

Reference:

Cabo Delgado guerra fratricida (des)conhecida? Causas e implicações internas a partir de um olhar antropossociológico
The Dirty War: Civilian Experience of Conflict in Mozambique and Sri Lanka
  • Citing Chapter
  • January 1992

... Traditionally males have been perceived as the agents of war, while females have always been portrayed as victims or refugees (Nordstrom, 1997). However, the mass utilization of female combatants in Sri Lanka by the Tamil Tigers has presented a great challenge to traditionalist ideas about gender roles in political violence and peace-building (Alison, 2004). ...

Girls and Warzones: Troubling Questions
  • Citing Article

... Los grupos delictivos, más o menos organizados, no definen su poder únicamente por su capacidad económica sino también por su flexibilidad para circular entre la legalidad y la ilegalidad (Nordstrom, 2004). El trabajo de Luis Astorga (2007, 2016) sobre el tráfico de drogas, sus líderes y organizaciones en México, muestra las estrechas relaciones que entablan las autoridades gubernamentales, militares y policiacas con individuos y grupos del mercado de las drogas ilegales con el propósito de obtener una tajada de la renta criminal a cambio de laissez faire, laissez passer, "dejar hacer, dejar pasar". ...

Invisible Empires
  • Citing Article
  • March 2004

Social Analysis

... Hence, the absence of legally binding relationships does not automatically imply that rassiychilar's debt-based trade is unregulated and relies on the goodwill of parties involved in these practices. As Nordstrom (2000) argues, informal/shadow economic activities and networks are not a haphazard collection of people in ad hoc groupings. Rather, they are a complex chain of transactions that are highly coordinated and routinized, with hierarchies of deference of power, and are governed by rules of exchanges and codes of conduct. ...

Shadows and Sovereigns
  • Citing Article
  • August 2000

Theory Culture & Society

... Nesse contexto, tanto separatistas quanto os governos centrais se beneficiavam da produção e do comércio que não era taxado dentro desses países não reconhecidos. Nordstrom (2001) mostrou como a violência política afeta meninas, argumentando que, por serem "invisíveis" -segundo a autora, pouco se sabe sobre o que acontece com jovens mulheres nas zonas de guerra -, são utilizadas em redes de lucro aproveitadoras dessa condição, gerando renda através da exploração sexual e do trabalho infantil, tanto doméstico como industrial. Mehlum et al. (2002) trataram sobre os violent entrepreneurs em Estados falidos, que, por não serem capazes de garantir segurança pública e proteção da propriedade privada, permitem que os violent entrepreneurs enxerguem duas possibilidades de lucro: os roubos e furtos e a proteção contra os assaltantes. ...

Carita's War
  • Citing Article
  • September 2001

Development

... Battery and assault on women are common phenomena in many societies even in peacetime; a variety of accounts suggest that the intensity and prevalence of domestic VAW rise in transitional periods after war. Nordstrom (1998) argues that physical and sexual VAW as well as children may escalate as a result of war, with few legal recourses to such violence available in war-affected regions. In making the link between mass violence and domestic violence, Sharoni (1994: 111) notes that the practice of violence may become so ingrained in everyday behavior in contexts of violent social conflict that perpetrators 'bring the violence home' and perpetuate the 'unchallenged sexism, violence and oppression which women face daily'. ...

Girls behind the (front) lines
  • Citing Article
  • September 1996

Peace Review

... This chapter and its primary research are based on a permanent discussion on the politics of not-knowing, those politics of knowledge that intentionally make invisible some issues for public or academic interest even if there is data about them (Nordstrom 1999). Politics of not-knowing afect the ways in which issues of gender and sexuality, in particular queer topics, are managed in peacebuilding and transitional justice policies and politics. ...

Wars and Invisible Girls, Shadow Industries, and the Politics of Not-Knowing
  • Citing Article
  • January 1999

International Feminist Journal of Politics

... 98 They argue that the 'terror warfare' of collective sexual violence is only the frankest expression of the politics of gender aimed at the depersonalisation of women. 99 Men may fight on different sides and for different reasons, but in one sense they are all warriors on behalf of their gender and the enemy is woman. 100 This standard dichotomist view, which is identified largely with American feminist debates on the workings of gender, sex, race and power, 101 is seen as a sufficient reason for the existence of the phenomenon and the development of rape ideologies that valorise misogynistic masculinity. ...

Rape: Politics and Theory in War and Peace
  • Citing Article
  • April 1996

Australian Feminist Studies

... That said, both data types produce similar types of measurements: incidents of inter-personal violence divided by population estimates. In addition, lethal and sub-lethal violence tend to co-occur, as does intra-and inter-group violence [49][50][51][52] and should offer comparable measures of relative rates of violence in each society, thus informing us about the functional relationship between that relativized rate and the environment. ...

Deadly myths of aggression
  • Citing Article
  • January 1998

Aggressive Behavior

... Resilience is vulnerability's paradigmatic parallel, focusing on the positive adaptation and well-being of individuals, families, and communities despite adversity (Masten & Powell, 2003). Restructuring one's life to create order and meaning in the wake of significant trauma requires the creativity and perseverance of what Nordstrom (1998) has termed world building. World building refers to the act of constructing livable lives, and may range from reestablishing social support, healing past traumas, and promoting well-being through the "unmaking" of violence (Nordstrom, 1998). ...

Terror Warfare and the Medicine of Peace
  • Citing Article
  • March 1998

Medical Anthropology Quarterly