Based on anthropological fieldwork in the Eastern Congo, this study investigate ‘hybrid political orders’ e.g. state and non-state groups, such as militias, police, military, local criminal gangs and local authorities such as village chiefs or warlords whose operations transcend the boundaries of what we normally know as state and nonstate and how such actors exercise power through alternative ways of governance and authority. To do so, I apply the concept of ‘violent exchange’ (Jensen 2013). This concept is fruitful in explaining how violence opens up a space in which people are forced to engage with armed networks. In this way, it enables an exploration of bottom-up relations and the how authority yields profits through violent interactions. The study has a strong comparative and interdisciplinary approach as it will contribute to critical inquires that questions the western assumption of state power. The study will be part of a wider research project located at the Danish Institute against torture in Copenhagen, Denmark, where a group of senior researchers are carrying out fieldwork and examining violent exchanges in the Global South. In this way, it will contribute to social science and anthropological theory, to develop the concept of ‘violent exchange’ through fieldwork and bring new empirical data. The results of this study will help to find new methods to monitor violence and to improve human rights work in fragile states.

CONFINED will develop and validate an innovative, comparative, and global research agenda of confined lives. Confinement is a ubiquitous and unequally distributed human condition. While confinement sometimes can be protective, for some groups, not least the displaced on dangerous roads, the marginalized in urban slums and the detained in prisons, it can be a damaging experience linked to violence and inequality. With an empirical point of departure in different contexts across the global north and south, known to produce a variety of confined lives, CONFINED explores, 1) how certain people’s lives are rendered confineable; 2) how confineable groups and networks navigate discursive, actual, and potential practices of confinement, and 3) how and to what extent the concept of confined lives can transform our understanding of the practices and experiences of confinement across global divides in ways that drive theoretical innovation and help build new agendas for social justice. Through three interdependent and sequentially organized work packages, CONFINED proposes to explore confined lives contextually and ethnographically across the global North and South (WP1); to compare what confines people, how they make sense of their confined lives, and how they navigate confinement (WP2), and to conceptually develop and validate the approach through engagement with academics and experts locally and globally (WP3). CONFINED will carry out comparative, ethnographic field work to follow precariously situated translocal family network across four contexts as a privileged lens to understanding confined lives at the intersection of dangerous journeys, urban slums and prisons and camps: Denmark and Lebanon; South Africa and Malawi; Thailand and Myanmar and the UK and Sierra Leone. This will allow CONFINED to reframe the empirical field of confined lives and to generate a new conceptual language to understand one of the most important drivers of inequality world-wide.