(Re)producing Ambiguity and Contradictions in Enduring and Looming Crisis in Burundi

ABSTRACT

This article explores how (young) people devise action in the context of ambiguity and uncertainty in the aftermath of war in Burundi. The focus is on purposeful action in different periods of crisis. In Burundi, enduring crisis has given way to a range of practices that are geared at embracing rather than ridding ambiguity and uncertainty – such as preparing for alternative trajectories simultaneously or acting in a provisional way. In situations where the threat of potential violence is immediate, in looming crisis, however, these practices cannot be sustained. People have to make explicit, exclusive choices within a matrix of contradictions. Therewith, recurrent crises in Burundi have given rise to patterns of practices that are experienced as problematic; desired (ought to be) moral maps for acting no longer correspond to the expected (more frequent) maps. This further adds to the experience of incoherence and ambiguity in the already uncertain society.

KEYWORDS:

• War
• crisis
• practices
• ambiguity
• Burundi

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Mirjam de Bruijn and Jonna Both for organising the 2010 ECAS panel ‘Political Insecurity and the Production of Displacement Cultures’ and the presenters for comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See for a discussion on the meaning of ethnicity in Burundi for instance Uvin (1999), Chrétien (2003) and Young (2006).

2 Besides the ethnic dimension, at least two other dimensions were important in shaping power balances in postcolonial Burundi: ‘regionalism', which refers to the geopolitics that divide the country, and a ‘politicised military’ which entailed a strong segregation between civilians and the military.

3 The political parties, in accord with the peace agreements, were not ethnically exclusive. Nonetheless, each party remained associated with a particular ethnic group. Note that most fighting took place between political parties seen as largely ‘Hutu’: CNDD-FDD and FNL.

4 Between May and September 2010, five elections were scheduled. The first polling day, at the municipal level (communal), was regarded by my interlocutors as one of the most important because they would have a ‘predictive’ value for the subsequent elections, the next of which were the presidential elections. Indeed, it was the moment people had to ‘show colour’.

5 In this regard, Vandeginste (2011) argues that the democratic elections appear to have led to a less democratic government in Burundi: a de facto mono party democracy.