How can one comprehend the dynamics that occur during long-term armed conflicts?
In this post, Camilo Tamayo Gomez reflects on his dialogue piece ‘Beyond Battlefields and Conventional Research Agendas: The Importance of Understanding Surveillance Activities and Practices During Long-Term Armed Conflicts’, which appeared in the 21(1) issue of Surveillance & Society.
When I began my studies for a bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Communication Studies in Colombia in 1997, I started asking myself how people in violent long-term armed conflicts and fragile social settings could overcome suffering, pain, and injustice and transform these negative feelings into collective socio-political actions.
Growing up in the 80s in Colombia, I witnessed these volatile years first-hand, which triggered my sociological curiosity. Why do victims of terrorist acts, kidnapping, or long-term armed conflict confrontations want to claim their rights in these difficult contexts? What kind of social and cultural conditions facilitate, or not, these types of collective actions? What is the role of surveillance, culture, security, and the mass media in long-term armed conflict, violence, and post-conflict contexts? How can emotions or rational thinking shape the actions of social movements and citizens in the public sphere? During my early academic years, I found that sociological and political research must seek to understand, describe, and transform the reality of one’s social context to be of benefit, an aspect that still remains in my work to this day.
In 2003, I began my first academic appointment with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), where I analysed the role of surveillance and mass media in contexts of violence, long-term armed conflict, and terrorism from a socio-political and cultural perspective. Since then, I have worked on social research projects in Central America, Latin America, and Europe for the last 20 years. My research agenda focuses on the relationship between transitional justice, restorative justice, victims, social movements, and multiplatform social justice from a socio-political and criminological perspective. It explores how victims of war, armed conflict, and violent contexts implement citizen-led strategies to claim human rights in public and virtual spheres, and how these methods affect the construction of collective memory, dimensions of social recognition, and degrees of solidarity and power in divided societies.
The piece I have written for Surveillance & Society summarises the learnings and findings that have shaped my scholarship. After years of academic reflection, I strongly believe that, as the nature of war has changed, surveillance studies scholars need to rethink and reimagine the meaning of surveillance activities and practices during long-term armed conflicts. My main concern is that never-ending wars, including those in Sudan, Yemen, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Syria, Ethiopia, Colombia, Lebanon, and Somalia, demonstrate that an increasingly prominent characteristic of contemporary conflicts is the prolonged duration of both violent and non-violent confrontations.
I believe that in the current era of long wars, numerous armed groups (including national armies) derive more benefit from the perpetuation of violence itself rather than from achieving victory, thus prolonging the expected duration of the conflicts. This is significant because it creates new sociocultural conditions for the emergence of surveillance activities and practices, where direct confrontations between armed groups are relatively rare and most acts of violence are directed towards civilians.
In my piece, I present three dimensions of an emerging research agenda aimed at understanding surveillance activities and practices during long-term armed conflicts. My intention is to initiate an open conversation that bridges our discipline with other epistemologies, specifically those related to the sociology of emotions, the demography of armed conflicts, and the militarization of civilians in war-torn contexts.
