Elizabeth Wood

Elisabeth Wood, Yale University

Like all of us in this community of scholars who work on political violence, I am still reeling from the news of Lee Ann Fujii’s sudden death.

I meet Lee Ann about a decade ago when she first introduced herself at an academic conference and asked some penetrating questions about the challenges of ethnography in violent settings. I answered as best I could. Since then I have learned much more from her than she ever learned from me.

Lee Ann asked the most difficult of questions: Why do neighbors sometimes kill their neighbors, how they do so, and with what consequences? How do participants justify their turning on neighbors? What processes lead to escalation of such violence, which limit it? And why do some but not all killings or other acts of violence involve the public display of violence?

In her first book on the Rwandan genocide, Lee Ann showed that some residents participated in violence against some Tutsi neighbors, yet protected others, and traced variation in participation to the types and extent of local social networks. The book and related articles are exemplary in demonstrating how a skilled ethnographer develops and analyzes data from interviews, participant observation, and interactions with officials, local authorities and her own research team to build an original argument on a challenging topic.

Lee Ann was just about done with a book analyzing why neighbors sometimes engage in gratuitous and public violence against their neighbors. Such “extra-lethal violence” violence includes the mutilation of corpses, the public display of raped victims, lynching in public venues and public torture. She drew on extensive research on ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and lynching of African Americans in the US, in addition to the Rwandan genocide to develop a typology of extra-lethal violence and a theory of the conditions under which each type is likely to occur. Central to her argument is the insight that public violence occurs as part of the assertion of new political order, or the defense of the old. In focusing on the enactment of that order through public violence, she weaves together the participation of ordinary people in violence, the performing of identities central to the asserted political order (e.g. what it means to be a 'real' Serb), and the sequencing and timing of the actions that comprise the atrocious event.

We can only hope that the manuscript can be finished by colleagues. It will be as important a contribution to our understanding of political violence — particularly the lived experience of perpetrators — as her earlier work.