Description
This paper seeks to show the value of a phenomenological lens in understanding conflict-affected societies. In particular, it uses a phenomenological lens to unpack how individuals and communities simultaneously inhabit a number of lifeworlds as part of navigating through various the conveniences, awkwardness, and possible dangers in conflict-affected contexts. A lifeworlds approach, and its emphasis on the micro dynamics of everyday life, sheds light on the apparent contradictions experienced and lived in conflict-affected contexts. Individuals can, for example, be simultaneously extremist and non-extremist or inhabit multiple temporalities in ways that illustrate the multiple forms of agency deployed in social navigation. The paper operationalises the lifeworlds concept by drawing on van Manen’s four-part framework of ‘fundamental lifeworld themes’ or ‘existentials’: lived space (spatiality), lived body (corporeality, lived time (temporality), and lived human relations (relationality or communality’). In its concluding discussion, the paper considers the implications of simultaneity or the ability of individuals or communities to simultaneously construct and occupy apparently contradictory socio-political spaces. In some respects simultaneity, such as dissembling in situations of inter-group encounter, perpetuates division. Yet in another way, it represents everyday diplomacy or a non-escalatory conflict management that allows society to function, even in a dysfunctional way.
