Migratory Coping in Wartime Mozambique: An Anthropology of Violence and Displacement in ‘Fragmented Wars’

Abstract

Current frameworks for analyzing conflict in developing nations usually focus on the agendas of national-level parties to conflicts. This article draws heavily on the author’s own ethnographic work in central Mozambique to demonstrate how political alignment during the Mozambican civil conflict (1977-92) was regarded by local actors as a tool for engaging in family- and community-level political struggles. Comparing findings from his own work in the district of Machaze to that of other ethnographic researchers who focused on wartime experiences elsewhere in Mozambique, he shows how the means of violence of national-level parties during the civil conflict were appropriated by local actors in service to local forms of social struggle. He proposes the concept of ‘fragmented war’ to describe such contexts in which national ‘civil wars’ take on a large degree of local character and in which there is considerable variation in that local character as a result of sociocultural and ethnic diversity within a country. The article then documents how wartime migration - as one of the most visible and consequential strategies for reacting to violence - was organized primarily as a response to such micro-level political struggles rather than merely to the state of hostilities between national-level political actors. Different local ‘logics of violence’ thus produced different patterns of wartime displacement throughout Mozambique. Some of the key historical conditions that made wartime violence in Mozambique susceptible to ‘fragmentation’ are reviewed, in order to reflect more broadly on what general conditions might produce ‘fragmentations of violence’ in other war contexts. The article concludes with a discussion of how anthropological approaches can contribute to the demographic analysis of forced migration in culturally diversified war zones.