Abstract
Important sources of everyday security – variously labelled as customary, informal, traditional or autochthonous – are commonly associated with rural spaces and attributed to the lack of presence or traction of state institutions. However, these practices are not limited to peripheries; they can travel. Their structures, authority and legitimacy can be re-produced in new settings, often in response to the perturbations caused by conflict, while also changing in the course of travel. Consequently, in urban spaces – the supposed ‘centre’ of the modern state – people’s sense of security can be profoundly influenced and shaped by the ordering logics of such ‘travelling traditions’. This has ramifications for ‘emplaced security’ – both short-term responses to acute vulnerability of displaced communities and emergent longer-term forms of order. This article explores the utility of the ‘spatial turn’ in peacebuilding theory for better understanding this phenomenon. It uses the cases of Vanuatu and Liberia to demonstrate how more nuanced understandings of the (re)construction of authority between and across places and scales may help comprehend how people generate everyday emplaced security. A spatial approach provides analytical leverage that can help to highlight how a phenomenon such as travelling traditions contributes to the formation and substance of emplaced security.
Introduction
Urbanisation is affecting every part of the world. According to the United Nations, while 30 percent of the world’s population was urban in 1950, by 2050, 68 percent of the world’s population is projected to be urban (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA), 2018a). While this manifests differently in different regions, the overall trend is one of people relocating to the cities and towns, and the fastest-growing urban agglomerations are located in Asia and Africa (e.g. UN DESA, 2018b). Whether fleeing violent conflict, escaping insecurity or seeking economic opportunities, cities and towns have become a preferred destination for mobile populations. These urban settings have many ‘pull factors’, with basic goods and services and various sorts of assistance being more accessible, the possibility of anonymity, and expanded opportunities for employment. However, notwithstanding the appeal of urban environments, with mobility and dislocation comes separation and, often, great physical distance from the places that were hitherto part of people’s everyday support networks and safety nets.
In the hybrid socio-political orders ubiquitous in the majority world, people’s safety nets are made up of a range of actors beyond formal machinery of government and the state. 1 The array of entities involved – including those variously labelled as customary, cultural, autochthonous, informal, indigenous, non-state and so forth – are commonly associated with rural spaces. In this article we use the term ‘traditional’ to refer to this diverse set of actors. 2 Their existence is attributed to a vacuum or absence – they are supposed to occupy the spaces where the state’s institutions do not reach (physically). However, as will be shown with reference to the case of Liberia in West Africa and Vanuatu in the South Pacific, these ‘traditional actors’ – and the authority and legitimacy they enjoy – can also ‘travel’ or be re-produced in new settings, including the urban centres, partly as a result of the perturbations associated with displacement and relocation. As a result, governance and security in urban spaces – the supposed ‘centre’ and heartland of the modern state – can be profoundly shaped and influenced by traditional entities and processes. This manifests as a short-term response to mitigate ontological uncertainty and vulnerability but also has important ramifications for emergent forms of protection and order in the longer term. It therefore has implications for how everyday security 3 is constructed and maintained as emplaced security, and how peace formation 4 is likely to occur and what forms of peace and order it will generate.
This article explores the utility of the ‘spatial turn’ in peacebuilding theory for better understanding the ‘travelling traditions’ phenomenon. It draws on extensive fieldwork in Liberia in West Africa and Vanuatu in the South Pacific to illustrate how more nuanced understandings of the mobility/(re)construction of authority between and across spaces may help to understand everyday security in conflict-affected states. It argues that a spatial approach provides analytical leverage that can help to highlight the dynamics and significance of a phenomenon such as travelling traditions to the formation and substance of peace and everyday security in conflict-prone societies. The article explores how security, as fundamentally emplaced, can be maintained under conditions of displacement. The article proceeds in four main parts. In the first part, we examine the ‘spatial turn’ in peace and conflict studies, while the second part unpacks/describes the phenomenon of ‘travelling traditions’. The third part reflects on the utility of spatial approaches for explaining the nexus between travelling traditions and everyday security. The final part turns to two cases, using examples from diverse contexts in Liberia and Vanuatu to illustrate the importance of travelling traditions to the security of forcibly displaced and migratory populations. We argue that the significance of phenomena such as travelling traditions in the formation of peace demands the conceptual and analytical insights made possible by spatial approaches.
Spatial approaches to peace and conflict
‘Space’ has become a central interest for scholars of geography, anthropology, the humanities and social sciences (e.g. Soja, 1989; Warf and Arias, 2009), drawing on similar intellectual developments in social theory (Foucault, 1986 [1967]; Lefebvre et al., 1991). More recently it also found its way into political science and international relations. Spatial theory is concerned with unpacking the relationship between ‘place’ and ‘space’ (Low, 2000). Spatial analyses can take many forms and employ diverse methodology; however, they consistently foreground space as an analytic category and fundamentally locate/situate (Kobayashi, 2009). They situate place as a material locality vis-à-vis space as its ‘imaginary’ counterpart. That is to say, space is socially constructed – the ‘product of interrelations’ (Massey, 2005: 9). Space is profoundly linked to the relational, and not fixed but ‘in a constant state of reproduction’ (Grenfell, 2018: 242). Consequently, this helps us to reveal or grapple with spaces that have more layers of meaning or relationships to other places than immediately meet the eye – similar to what Foucault referred to as heterotopia (Foucault, 1986 [1967]).
The ‘spatial turn’ in peacebuilding theory begets research that investigates the interconnectedness between space, peace and conflict (Björkdahl and Kappler, 2017). It is the response to the question of how we understand peace/conflict in spatial terms and comprises attempts to consider and better understand the ‘affective’ quality of space regarding the dynamics and processes of peace and conflict (Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel, 2016; Björkdahl and Kappler, 2017). In other words, it asks what is going on in the sites where peace/conflict ‘take place’? Spatial approaches draw attention to the spatial features of peace/conflict that have major ramifications for the possibility of the peaceful transformation of conflicts – i.e. they situate phenomena that may be critical to peacebuilding. This can be in terms of ‘scale’ (i.e. at which levels of analysis are we looking at or talking about, and how do they relate) as well as ‘sites’ (i.e. what is happening at/around particular memorials, bars, in towns or cities and other key coordinates?). In this way, spatial approaches reinforce other attempts to de-centre or challenge orthodox territorial gazes, especially those based on the state.
Space is thus understood as critical to the emergence, recurrence and transformation of peace and conflict. The spatial lens provides the insight that the changing meaning of contested space in the context of conflict and peacebuilding processes points to how the quotidian behaviours and practices of those present is what leads to emergent forms of order and governance. It further allows us to focus on fluidity and co-evolutionary ideas where nothing is fixed and the meaning and significance of spaces are perpetually reproduced and socially constructed.
In this sense, spatial perspectives promise more diverse and nuanced consideration of the dimensions and geographies of peace/conflict. This can help in better understanding ‘dynamics of conflict’ and, on the reverse, processes of peace formation – recognising the agency in constituting space or when operating within space (i.e. the mutually constitutive duality of ‘space’ and ‘agency’) (Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel, 2016: 1). Through a spatial perspective, we can explore how places and sites are negotiated and how they shape people’s experiences. These experiences influence the way in which people act and participate in peace formation. As a result, spatial perspectives are perhaps of most value in the exploration of the everyday productions of peace and (dis)order.
Travelling traditions in conflict-affected societies
The phenomenon of ‘travelling traditions’ is an example of how the movement of people between and across spaces is an important feature in continuously reproduced forms of (dis)order. The perturbations caused by impromptu displacement or irregular migration of populations disrupts established patterns of behaviour and denies known social and physical security assurances to those moving. This, in turn, affects the configuration of societal relations and constructions of authority (Albrecht and Wiuff Moe, 2014). When internally displaced people (IDPs) or other migrants arrive in cities en masse they enter into the complex politics of the urban margins: 5 spaces characterized by a combination of informality, resilience, precarity, violence and insecurity for new arrivals and established residents alike (e.g. Bollens, 2012; Imbroscio and Davies, 2010; Magnus, 2011). These sites of urban precarity are usually comparatively large (sometimes vast) and anonymous places. This can have both positive and negative effects for the inhabitants. For example, anonymity can liberate people from the identity-based persecution they may have fled. On the other hand, the scale of large cities can be overwhelming and an impediment to self-protection. The swelling of urban populations places tremendous pressure on basic municipal services such as health and sanitation, waste disposal, and water and electricity supply and of course stresses affordable and available housing options (Graham, 2011; Hackl, 2016). New arrivals are further deprived due to lack of access/ownership of land, ongoing economic deprivation and pervasive violence (e.g. Landau, 2014; Ward, 2014). It is also important to note that the ability of relocated people to engage in everyday politics, the livelihoods available to them, and the vulnerabilities created by displacement and dislocation are highly gendered (Abusharaf, 2009).
Faced with these challenges, it is common for people to seek out and form solidarist communities that can be drawn on for support in times of need. For instance, members of the same ethno-linguistic ‘tribe’ or religious order may have arrived together or have been subsequently co-located in displacement camps or informal settlements. They may, in turn, coalesce to establish forms of social order. As populations move, they carry with them cultural practices, custom and traditions. Identity-based societal bodies are intrinsically emplaced and embedded in communities such that when populations shift so too do many of the mechanisms upon which they rely for everyday ordering and security. What emerges in the new space therefore is often profoundly connected to whence they came. ‘Traditional’ sources of peace, security and justice are often the first port of call when devising ad hoc self-protection strategies and eventually developing the more elaborate self-governance modalities that often materialise in spaces of urban displacement. These dynamics are at play in diverse settings around the world.
The following section explores how the analytical insights from the spatial turn in peacebuilding theory can help to understand and emphasise the importance of travelling traditions.
Spatializing travelling traditions
There is an extensive body of urban studies literature that explores cities and the ‘politics of urbanism’ (e.g. Bollens, 2012; Brenner, 2004; Imbroscio and Davies, 2010; Warren, 2011). However, scholarship focused on the spatial dimensions of urban environments as they relate to peace and war has focused primarily on the potential for violence and conflict-generating conditions (e.g. Graham, 2011). This work tends to depict these cityscapes as ‘contested spaces’ that are more prone to identity-based conflict and less resilient due to the convergence of multiple identities (e.g. Fischer, 2016; Hackl, 2016; Komarova and O’Dowd, 2016). It is frequently argued that this is compounded by an inability of government institutions to mediate such heterogeneity – particularly where political constituencies are grounded in mutually exclusive identities that become ascribed into the urban locale (Bollens, 2012; Komarova and O’Dowd, 2016). Björkdahl and Gusic (2013), for instance, argue that this makes these sites resistant to peacebuilding efforts.
However, the travelling traditions phenomenon presents a challenge to this dominant narrative. Travelling traditions can become a source of conflict in themselves; for example, when different traditions clash in the new urban environment. But the phenomenon also illustrates how, despite this contestation, there can also be formations of peace and microcosms of socio-political order that emerge out of (and across to some extent) difference in these cityscapes. The conceptual approaches and analytical tools emphasised in the spatial turn in peace and conflict studies have some potential to further explicate this.
First and most straightforwardly, spatial perspectives allow for a more finely grained analysis of the relevant scale or level of analysis. As spatial approaches allow for disaggregating, differentiating and understanding different places, sites and scales they enable analysis to focus on the urban scale and the city (or quarters of city) rather than being transfixed by the national territorial gaze or similar (Brenner, 2004; see also Megoran, 2011; Swyngedouw, 1997; Tuathail, 2000). In the case of travelling traditions, spatial analysis allows for an even greater degree of granularity, revealing the unique characteristics of sites where migrating and displaced people settle to be the subject of analysis (Koopman, 2011; McConnell et al., 2014). By zooming in on these locales, we can identify the symbolic, political and social infrastructures that contribute to socio-political order and will be important to whatever peacebuilding efforts are attempted.
Second, the spatial lens allows for different spaces to be related and connected in analyses (Thrift, 2004). In doing so, spatial approaches take account of how different scales and places relate, irrespective of their location. In the case of travelling traditions, this means that spatial analysis gives us a way of talking about urban and rural locales as spaces that are constituted by social relations rather than places with fixed geographic coordinates. Spatial analysis can un-anchor analyses such that we are not beholden to an urban-rural binary or limited by the idea of a ‘nested hierarchy’. Instead, these places can be understood as related and co-evolving (Thrift, 2004: 59). A spatial analysis can therefore help us explain how urban and rural spaces are related, dialectical and mutually constituted.
Third, spatial approaches provide the analytical leverage to be more careful in the way we associate ideas of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’. Often in peacebuilding literature urban locales and cities are assumed to be the ‘centre’ – somehow monolithic and pure – while rural hinterlands are labelled as peripheries (Anderson and O’Dowd, 1999; see also Ron, 2003; Sibley, 1995). This derives from a state-centric gaze oriented to government institutions where the capital city is viewed as the ‘centre’ of formal authority, commercial activity and so forth. On the contrary, when ideas of legitimate authority are intertwined with connection to land, burial sites of ancestors, emplaced knowledge systems then it is the rural locales that are at the centre of people’s worldview and imaginary that constitutes political community (Pullan, 2011).
Fourth, spatial approaches help to make sense of the trans-scalar and multi-sited relevance of travelling traditions. More recent spatial turn scholarship has focused on moving beyond seeing space as a ‘container’ with a clear demarcation of inside and outside (Diener and Hagen, 2012; see also Massey, 1999). Instead, it is argued that space should be understood as constantly negotiated, with boundaries continually reshaped (Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel, 2016). This can help to explain the phenomenon of travelling traditions. For example, a spatial lens helps us make sense of seeming contradictions where traditional sources of authority that appear to derive legitimacy from particular locales in effect are not fixed in place but are instead able to reproduce meaning across and between spaces and take root elsewhere. As Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel (2016: 4) put it, ‘the spatial combination of social relations which constitute the uniqueness of any locality is not confined to this place but stretches beyond its (permeable) boundaries so that the inside defines part of the outside, and the outside part of the inside.’ In short, spatializing peace and conflict allows us to problematize ‘borders’ and ‘bordering practices’ – even those that are immaterial or mental/cognitive – and facilitates a more nuanced rendering of the logics and dynamics that underpin travelling traditions (Brunet-Jailly, 2005).
Fifth, the spatial lens helps explain the influence of travelling traditions on the transformation of space through the daily use of material place (Flint, 2004). A spatial analysis emphasizes that spaces are shaped by the social exchanges that take place within them – which are simultaneously shaped by space. 6 In other words, there is a co-evolutionary relationship between space and individual agency – imploring us to acknowledge that space is contingent, fluid and evolving – not fixed or static. Applied to travelling traditions, this sheds light on how mobility can be a catalyst for changing the nature and influence of ‘space’. Acknowledging the socially constructed nature of these spaces dictates that they must also be contested spaces where myriad traditions co-exist and must be negotiated (Lefebvre, 2009). By extension, a spatial approach allows us to point to the relational (re)construction of authority and how this is contributing to hybrid formations of peace in these urban spaces (Flint, 2011).
Travelling traditions in Liberia and Vanuatu
Having discussed the phenomenon of travelling traditions in the general sense, the following section uses the comparative advantages proposed above as an analytical framework to look in more detail at specific cases drawing on field research in Liberia and Vanuatu. Although at first sight these two cases look far apart not only geographically – Liberia located in West Africa, and Vanuatu in the vast expanses of the Pacific ocean – but also with regard to the problematique of peace and security, with Liberia having been the theatre of a series of devastating internal wars and a prolonged, internationally supported post-conflict peacebuilding process, and Vanuatu having been spared violent conflict on a scale experienced by Liberia, these two cases nevertheless merit combination for the purposes of this study. Both exhibit the features of hybrid political orders and hybrid security governance, characterised by the interface, interaction and entanglement of a broad variety of peace and security actors – ‘state’ and ‘non-state’, ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’, ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ – who are engaged in the provision of security in an everyday local context.
As both countries are post-colonial states (with Liberia having a special history of a home-grown variety of colonialism, based on Americo-Liberian domination), statehood is imbued with the legacies of colonial and pre-colonial forms of governance. Customary institutions, which have their roots in the pre-colonial past, continue to matter in the everyday life of communities. They of course have changed in the course of the interaction with ‘outside’ forces. In particular, they were subjected to re-formation as they engaged with, responded to, and were influenced by and partially incorporated into state structures and processes. Governments in both countries deliberately incorporated traditional authorities into state structures and handed over state functions to them - ‘chiefs’ both in Liberia and Vanuatu are prominent examples. This makes the state/non-state boundaries blurred, actors and institutions are often embedded both in the state and the non-state context simultaneously. At the same time, certain actors and institutions present themselves, and are perceived as traditional or customary . This has significant consequences for the way security is emplaced, with travelling traditions playing a crucial role, as will be shown in the following by presenting the cases of the Poro secret society in Liberia and of kastom in Vanuatu.
The Poro Secret Society as travelling tradition in Liberia
The west African country of Liberia was established as a place for manumitted slaves by the American Colonization Society in 1822. Independence was gained in 1847, creating what some have called a ‘black colonialism’ (Gershoni, 1985) where an Americo-Liberian elite subordinated indigenous populations and denied them rights in the ‘hinterland’ (e.g. Moran, 2006). This apartheid system ruled uninterrupted until 1980 when low-ranking army officers overthrew the government promising a brighter future for all Liberians but in effect ushered in a decade of predatory governance that precipitated 14 years of civil war (1989–1997 and 1997–2003). During this period around 700,000 Liberians sought refuge abroad and more than a million (almost half the remaining war-time population) were internally displaced (Nmoma, 1997). Many fled to Monrovia, the country’s capital city, which by 2008 (5 years after the end of fighting) was home to almost a third of the Liberian population (Scott, 1998). These population movements increased pressure on urban services but also challenged established socio-political order in the places where migrants arrived. A range of customary and religious 7 actors played critical roles in providing everyday order (Jaye, 2018), but the so-called secret societies 8 were important providers of security and conflict resolution – particularly amongst urban gatherings of IDPs in major towns and cities such as Gbarnga and the capital Monrovia. This is not to say that secret societies are benign institutions everywhere and at all times – rather, they are characterised by profound ambiguity, with many strengths and comparative advantages, but also weaknesses and problematic features which can even constitute a threat to others.
The most prominent secret societies are the Poro and the Sande – respectively male and female societies – pan-ethnic social institutions that pre-date the spread of Islam or the establishment of European colonial control across the region. 9 Often portrayed as African Traditional Religion (ATR), the scope of responsibility and the influence of secret society leaders, the zoes, reaches well beyond the ‘religious’ sphere in a narrow sense. Drawing their legitimacy from the invisible world of the spirits (of the ancestors, the forest, the animals), they are a bridge between communities and the spiritual realm, in charge of the socio-cultural, mental and spiritual wellbeing of communities (Ellis, 2007: 201–204). In governing from the level of the village to higher levels of authority, zoes refer to customary law which regulates everyday community life (Sawyer, 2005: 4–5). Their role in governing the relationships between social groups makes them important actors in the maintenance of order in their communities. The decision-making power extends beyond the exclusive realm of the Society, meaning they exert some ‘political’ influence, albeit indirectly (Vinck et al., 2011: 45). 10 While the Poro and Sande have historically existed in around half of modern day Liberian territory, equivalent pan-ethnic social institutions do exist across much of Liberia. Their practices are embedded in an ontology and set of cultural beliefs shared by many Liberians, meaning that the leadership and the societies as a whole draw on a ‘deeper order of legitimacy’ than other sources of authority (Sawyer, 2005: 4–5; see also Meabe, 2018). As a result, against the backdrop of the collapse of other governance institutions, secret societies took over important governance functions during and following the war (Neumann, 2013: 205).
First, on arrival to Monrovia, many migrants took up residence in the capital city’s abandoned buildings. In the short term, vigilante self-defence militia were arranged to watch over vulnerable populations and property in these sites. These groups were composed of people from the displaced populations and often drew on structures and networks that had existed in their places of origin. 11 Unlike the traditional chiefs who had their reputations tarnished during the war, the Poro elders who endured throughout the wars commonly avoided this denigration and retained respect of the militia. 12 Consequently, elders of the secret society regularly had effective command and control of these community watch groups (Sawyer, 2005). In this sense, the Poro elders became the leaders of paramilitaries who contributed to physical security and order in people’s new urban homes. While this was a source of protection for the migrants, it also presented a challenge to the owners of the property and at times a direct threat to the state security forces.
Second, Poro leaders quickly constituted panels of elders in these new spaces in accordance with traditional practices. 13 These became recognised and trusted advisory councils and played a number of roles in everyday order, including through conflict resolution at the local level. 14 To the extent that they existed, formal regulatory frameworks and statutory ‘laws’ or ‘legal codes’ proved difficult to enforce and were not well understood by new arrivals. The conflict resolution practices and other traditional justice mechanisms overseen by the Poro not only substituted for the absence or corruption of the state rule of law apparatus but were also well-understood and often legitimated by those subjected to it. 15 This customary practice included a range of harmful practices including various forms of ‘trial by ordeal’ such as Sassywood. In a more spiritual sense, Poro authorities were also on hand to conduct culturally appropriate burials of the dead that compensated for the disconnect from ancestral lands – as well as other rituals such as reconciliation ceremonies. In the process of bringing these cultural practices to new settings, the Poro therefore also changed along the way – adapting to the different material constraints of a new environment. A spatial lens allows these communities that draw on customary practices to maintain order and harmony in the short term to be more clearly identified and understood.
Third, following the disturbances of displacement and reconfigurations of power in these sites of urban relocation, the Poro’s de facto governance roles allowed for inconspicuous parallel authority structures to be established. 16 In the early stages, these mechanisms provided a way to be creative and quietly organise resistance to deter the malfeasance of local strongmen, militias, and armed members of political parties. 17 It also provided a buffer against organised criminal groups and corrupt police officers and other officials, who set out to exploit migrant communities (Hunt, 2018). Beyond this, as people became more settled and sought informal employment as well as education for their children and other basic public services, these Poro authorities became a focal point and enabled representation of displaced groups, negotiating and striking bargains with key government and private sector actors who could provide goods and services. 18 In the process, the Poro have also changed. For instance, being displaced from their sacred sites, they were no longer able to conduct conventional initiation ceremonies and their ‘bush’ identity had to adapt. It is here that the spatial lens discussed above holds promise for making sense of this. The secret societies in Liberia are profoundly connected to sacred spaces – usually in key sites (e.g. trees, rivers, etc.) in bush locations where coming of age ceremonies occur. It is through these spaces that links to the ancestors are maintained – these sites are the main source of legitimacy for the high priests and elders of these societies. Yet, although they were no longer custodians of ancestral landscape, they continued to derive legitimacy from their claims to it allowing key actors to engage in governance far from the spaces from which their lore and authority is derived.
Fourth, the emergence of Poro authority in Monrovia also created tensions. While cooperation and symbiotic relations among state and ‘non-state’ providers of security are common (Hunt, 2017), the secret societies nevertheless challenged the authority of the state and its operatives. This became more pronounced over time as international statebuilding efforts strengthened the capacity of the national police and judicial system, creating situations where two parallel orders are in competition. The secret societies are officially recognised by the state – and to some extent regulated by the Assistant Minister for Cultural Affairs within the Ministry of the Interior. 19 Furthermore, a number of previous national Presidents have been initiated as the supreme leader of the Poro (Harris, 1999: 451). Yet, in practice, the relationship is less hierarchical and more nuanced. The Poro membership ranks, for example, include people from a cross-section of society from chiefs to police officers and politicians. This creates composite identities where individuals have at once multiple obligations (Hunt, 2017), generating potential conflicts of interest. On the other hand, this speaks to the intermingling of social authorities that can lead to a reconfiguration of hybrid governance in urban spaces with longer-term consequences. Secret societies are thus an expression of the hybridity of political order in contemporary Liberia.
In the ways described above, the Poro authority – deeply connected to sacred places in specific tracts of the west African rainforest – has been reproduced and transpired as an integral part of everyday life and coping with security challenges in distant locales. 20 These examples demonstrate the significance of societal sources of authority who (re-)emerge from within and draw on pre-existing and extra-territorial legitimacy. Although the Poro lacks universal membership, its pan-ethnic reach and wider recognition highlight its acceptance and salience. This recognition enabled emplaced security in ways that are geographically de-centred or unanchored. The secret society cases also provide a good example of where ‘travelling traditions’ can play a significant role in in the reconfigurations of governance at the local level rather than simply produce a ghettoised, enclaved or fragmented social order. In the process of gaining prominence in the urban centre, these traditions travelled and underwent a certain degree of change as they hybridized with elements of the modern state. Contrary to the idea of tradition being subsumed or ‘crowded out’ by the modern state, these examples illustrate how the secret societies have continually engaged in a process of hybridisation as part of on-going peace formation. 21 Secret societies have thus been an important player in peacebuilding in Liberia. Indeed, 15 years after the peace agreement was signed, the ability of central government to bring about major reform (particularly relating to social and economic policy) is often contingent on the tacit agreement/acquiescence of the secret societies (Flomoku and Reeves, 2012).
Whatever the good and ill of this, it is a reality that is often poorly understood or omitted from the formal scripts of international peacebuilding. A spatial lens allows for important aspects of these phenomena – from traditional heartland or territorial domain, salience for migrants between and across places, as well as the tendency to reconstruct social-political order in new conflict-prone spaces – to be revealed and their role in generating emplaced security in urban spaces more clearly understood.
Kastom as travelling tradition in Vanuatu
The Pacific Island Country of Vanuatu is a so-called microstate, consisting of 82 islands, 65 of which are inhabited, with a landmass of just about 4,700 square kilometers and a population of approximately 280,000. Since gaining independence in 1980, Vanuatu has experienced occasional outbreaks of violent conflict. So far, however, conflict prevention and order maintenance have been relatively successful. This is due not least to the utilisation of local customary forms of dealing with conflict. Kastom conflict resolution makes an important contribution to internal peace across various societal scales – not only in the everyday life of people in the villages where the majority of Ni-Vanuatu still reside, but also in urban environments which increasingly have become the destination of internal migration. This migration to the two main urban centres of the country, Luganville on the island of Santo (Espiritu Santo) and Port Vila, the capital city on the island of Efate, is caused by a variety of push and pull factors. Forced displacement due to local violent conflicts does play a role, but this does not occur on the massive scale seen in Liberia. Natural disasters (earthquakes, outbreaks of volcanoes, cyclones) and the effects of climate change (sea level rise, coastal erosion, etc.) drive people from outer islands and rural areas to the urban centres. Expectations of better employment opportunities, better services, and the excitement of life in the city (in particular for the younger generation) play a role too. Urbanisation is a key feature of social change in Vanuatu today.
In the urban centres, rural migrants often are forced to live in informal squatter settlements at the fringes of the cities with limited access to basic services, including state-based security. Migrants carry their traditions with them. People huddle together in the settlements amongst ‘their’ people – that is, people from the same island, the same language group, the same clan; in other words: people with the same kastom. 22 And it is kastom, transferred from the rural space of origin to the new urban environment, that is the source of everyday security and the mechanisms for conflict resolution and maintenance of peace. The significance of kastom as travelling tradition in the contemporary societal context of Vanuatu cannot be overestimated.
Kastom has developed since the times of first contact, colonisation and missionisation, incorporating exogenous influences into pre-colonial customs and adapting them to those influences. Kastom has evolved in interaction with outside powers, both distancing local ways of doing things from ‘modern’ introduced ways and absorbing certain elements of the introduced ways, in particular Christianity. Hence kastom emerged (and constantly emerges) as a hybrid in the course of inter-cultural interaction.
In the context of kastom it is the chiefs who bear the prime responsibility for the governance and wellbeing of their communities. 23 They play an important role in the maintenance of peace, the resolution of conflicts and the development of communities. At the same time, chiefs are the intermediaries between kastom and the communities on the one hand and the institutions of the state on the other. They ‘operate both inside and outside the state’ (Lindstrom, 1997: 228). Post-independence chiefs were incorporated into the state system. This is why the former CEO of the Malvatumauri, the National Council of Chiefs, Selwyn Garu, compares chiefs to turtles: chiefs are like turtles; turtles have to live in two worlds, in the water and on land. They have to swim in the water and to crawl on land. They cannot swim on land or crawl in water. They have to adapt to the environment. 24 The turtle-chiefs cross the water/land-state/non-state divide all the time. Hence chiefs ‘are not gradually replaced or displaced but rather reconfigured in the process of state formation. The chiefs are circumscribed and domesticated, confined but strengthened’ (Tieleman and Uitermark, 2019).
Kastom is grounded in space, and the chiefs’ authority is intrinsically linked to space. In rural Vanuatu, the spatial dimension is crucial for understanding people’s approach to building and maintaining peace and everyday security. Their security is grounded in the connection to the place of birth/of origin (of their forefathers). This place becomes space constructed through genealogical and kinship connections and connections to the land (‘graun’, ‘ples’). Identity is grounded in kinship and place, with kinship and place inextricably interwoven as the place is the space of the spirits of the ancestors; place and people are (perceived as being) one. This is why in many local languages in the Pacific, the terms for ‘people’ and ‘land’ are the same (vanua, fenua, fanua, ‘aina, whenua, enua, fonua, te aba, . . .).
Accordingly, security is fundamentally emplaced. Hence, leaving one’s ples is deeply challenging. Migration from the village to the city is not only dangerous; it is also laden with anxiety because it necessitates the re-establishment of security in the new environment. In this context, travelling traditions are an important way to maintain emplaced security. They provide links to the place of origin, and allowing people to secure their existence in the new urban environment.
In Vanuatu, migrants (try to) maintain intense connections to their ples. There is regular communication with those people who stayed behind in the village. For example, there is exchange of urban consumer goods sent back and garden produce received, or people from the village come to visit for shorter or longer periods of time. Furthermore, urban migrants go back home on various occasions (for weddings, funerals, holidays, and so forth). In other words, there is a lot of back and forth mobility between the city and the village.
In the course of migration from the village to the city, identity construction changes to a certain extent: a person’s identity expands from being predominantly constructed as a member of an extended family/lineage/clan in the rural context to a more comprehensive island or ‘tribal’ identity in the urban environment. 25 In Port Vila a villager becomes a ‘man Tanna’ or ‘man Pentecost’ (Tanna and Pentecost are bigger islands in Vanuatu). In an overwhelmingly ‘foreign’ environment with a majority of people who are ‘foreigners’ (not from one’s own place), there is the need to align with those who are deemed closest to you (even if on Tanna or Pentecost they lived in a ‘far away’ village). Accordingly, the traditional institutions that travel with the migrants, shift scales. Such change lets new institutions emerge: ‘island chief’ and ‘town chief’. In Port Vila these chiefs work together in the Island Community Councils of Chiefs (of which there are 20 in Port Vila), and the ‘Port Vila Town Council of Chiefs’, comprising of the Chairmen of the Island Community Councils. Although now embedded in urban institutions, these jifs nevertheless source their legitimate authority from their place of origin and its kastom. Links are sustained between chiefs on the islands back home and chiefs of the respective island community in Port Vila. The phenomenon of town chief demonstrates how the urban environment is penetrated by the non-urban, and the non-urban adjusts to the new urban environment and gets ‘urbanised’.
Town chiefs apply kastom conflict resolution in the same way as the chief in the village would do. In fact, ‘the vast majority of disputes in every rural and urban community [emphasis added]’ in Vanuatu are dealt with according to kastom (Forsyth, 2011: 176). Even in the cities, people preferably refer to kastom and chiefs for conflict resolution. State actors and institutions are without doubt more present in an urban environment than in rural regions, but often they only have limited access to certain urban areas (slums, squatter settlements). State agencies lack capacities, effectiveness and legitimacy, and more often than not they are dependent on collaboration with the chiefs, who, in comparison, are perceived as being more capable, effective, legitimate and trustworthy.
However, kastom conflict resolution and provision of security are confronted with new problems which were non-existent in the village back home (e.g. drug- and alcohol-related violence, crimes related to the temptations of the urban consumer society, overcrowding and the forced cohabitation of ‘strangers’). Moreover, different kastoms co-exist in the same place, and the construction of space is contested. Whenever there are conflicts between (members of) different communities who share the same urban environment, there is the possibility that different kastoms clash. Then questions of whose kastom to apply, and who defines the space, arise. Common ground has to be found, otherwise the clash of different kastoms in itself can become a cause of conflict.
Travelling traditions are of major significance for dimensions of everyday security that otherwise cannot be addressed. The belief in sorcery, for example, is widespread throughout Vanuatu (and Melanesia in general, and many other regions of the Global South, including Liberia), and accidents, misfortune, sickness and death are often blamed on individuals identified as being sorcerers or witches. Accusations of sorcery – nakaimas – frequently lead to violence and violent conflicts. Sorcery as cause of insecurity demonstrates that ‘. . . security, far from being a stable or universally homogenous concept, is contextually and historically linked to shifting ontologies of uncertainty’ (Bubandt, 2005: 291). The kind of ontological uncertainty caused by sorcery and its violence-generating effects necessitates the intervention of kastom so as to re-establish ontological security. Sorcery also travels, it is not only a phenomenon of remote and ‘backward’ rural areas, but also a modern urban phenomenon and cause of ‘modern’ urban conflicts, and sorcery in urban contexts poses new challenges to kastom as travelling tradition. In fact, kastom is in danger of losing control over the use of sorcery due to changing social circumstances in the course of urbanisation. Nakaimas becomes commercialised in urban environments and used outside of kastom. The chiefs are expected to address the issue of sorcery and prevent its use for destructive purposes. But often chiefs today are not up to the task. The Malvatumauri issued a decree that disallows the use of nakaimas for malign purposes, but the effect of this move is in doubt. Hence sorcery exemplifies both the potential of travelling traditions (kastom provides entry points to deal with the issue) and the challenges deriving from new – uncustomary – circumstances at the destinations of travel (the issue has partially changed after having travelled and reached the new destination).
More generally, the spiritual dimension of everyday security is also present and highly significant in urban environments. The invisible world (of the dead, of the spirits, of the ancestors) is not confined to the ‘bush’, but also travels to the cities, together with the living members of communities. The obligations towards the dead remain present, and relations to the spirits of the ancestors are maintained to secure the lives of the living.
Reflecting on the case of kastom as a travelling tradition, the advantages of the spatial approach for the understanding and explanation of the provision of security are obvious. The spatial perspective allows for zooming in on specific sub-national locales – rural and urban – and their interconnections: the spatial lens reveals the relations between ‘the village’ and the ‘city’ in Vanuatu, at the same time challenging conventional understandings of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’. For Ni-Vanuatu, the place of origin, the ples, is without any doubt the ‘centre’ – a specific space imbued with social relations, cultural and spiritual meaning with the place not only the space of the living, but also of the dead and the unborn, of the spirits of the ancestors – a spiritual landscape. Identity and security are inextricably linked to this particular ancestral ples. The material environment of the ples is imbued with spiritual meaning and thus becomes an ‘ontic space’ (Ejdus, 2017) – and security for Ni-Vanuatu is fundamentally embedded security, inconceivable without connection with relationally constructed ples. Nevertheless, as in the Poro/Liberia case, the traditions are not fixed in place but are instead able to reproduce meaning across and between spaces and take root elsewhere. The spatial approach allows us to grasp this movement across and between spaces, challenging the compartmentalising view of space as a container and problematising ‘bordering’ along binaries – in the Vanuatu context, it is not borders and binaries that matter, but relations and relationality; kastom as travelling tradition that moves across spaces and scales is a striking expression of such relationality. The fact that kastom travels demonstrates that space is not fixed or static, but fluid and emerging; the spatial lens provides a new perspective to actually see relations, movement, change, emergence.
Conclusion
Spatial theory provides conceptual and analytical tools that are only beginning to be deployed in analyses of emplaced security and peacebuilding. Spatial approaches can shed new light on issues of peace and conflict, complementing and augmenting extant theoretical and analytical perspectives. The central aim of better situating matters of peace and conflict make spatial analyses well-suited for addressing the phenomenon of travelling traditions. In particular, spatial concepts enable analysis of changing spaces as a result of mobility that generates new sets of interactions and contributes to emergent forms of socio-political (dis)order. Behaviours and practices that from one vantage point, scale or particular site appear to be tension, conflict and competition may alternatively be understood as an example of peace under formation and the re-emplacement of security if we look from a different perspective or change scale (Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel, 2016: 19). Furthermore, spatializing the analysis provides a way of understanding why and how forms of socio-political order are not only evolving in one space but are moving across and between spaces. As a result, spatial approaches allow us to see urban locales/cityscapes, following Foucault (1986 [1967]), as heterotopia – spaces that are layered with meaning and have multiple relationships to other places. The spatial lens allows us to see how space is constructed through the exchanges and social interactions of people and that mobility can be fundamental to emplaced security/peacebuilding in those heterotopian cities. In this way, spatial analyses can add value to our understanding of how peace formation occurs, why peace may take particular (hybrid) forms and how peacebuilding can support and engage with processes of peace formation.
This article has demonstrated that so-called traditional forms of socio-political order travel. While they trace heritage, draw legitimacy and maintain connections to rural locales where the post-colonial state has never really had sustained direct institutional presence, they are also mobile, prevalent and important in urban sites. As evidenced by the differing phenomena in Liberia and Vanuatu, this holds true in times of peace as well as war and as a consequence of peacetime migration as well as conflict-related forced displacement. It can be seen quite clearly in the complex politics of the urban margins where IDP camps and migration hubs emerge. These travelling traditions are part of a hybrid tapestry in multiple sites and across different scales. A spatial analysis assists in revealing their significance for everyday security, conflict resolution and peacebuilding.
For example, the foregoing explorations of security provision by traveling traditions in Liberia and Vanuatu demonstrate that vernacular understandings of security transcend the rational, secular realm of conventional security provision, also reaching out into spiritual, other-worldly dimensions. While the overall influence of these phenomenon may be ambivalent, engaging with those dimensions is indispensable for peacebuilding and the maintenance of everyday security. In both Liberia and Vanuatu, ‘traditional’ sources of peace, security and justice commonly associated with specific sites in rural locales of origin are in fact mobile. Moreover, the Liberian and Vanuatu examples highlight that spatial dimensions – including traditional area of operation, the relevance across and between places for mobile populations, and the potential to socially reconstruct order in new conflict-prone spaces – are important for understanding how emplaced security is produced and sustained in urban centres.
Questions about the political legitimacy of travelling institutions – e.g. regarding their accountability and limited representation – warrant further attention and would be fertile ground for further research. However, working with ‘traditional authorities’ as a living and travelling system instead of automatically rejecting them as an anachronistic residue of ‘pre-modern’ times takes account of the local and emergent practices that are actually underway. In turn, this should provide the foundation to better engage with them and open space for the emergence of emplaced hybrid forms of peace and political community that may provide the framework for the non-violent conduct of conflicts and sustainable emplaced security across spaces and scales. With an expected additional 2.5 billion urban dwellers across the world by 2050, and almost 90 percent of this growth happening in Asia and Africa, this is only likely to become more pressing (UN DESA, 2018b).
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: Some of the research for this work was supported by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Australian Government [ADRAS 66442].
