Peace as Everyday Counterconducts: Resisting Hyper-Masculine Biopolitics of Peace through Transforming Combatant Self to Sufi Healer

How does gendered, experienced and embodied first decade of peace look like? What forms of social inequalities and silenced histories do those narratives illuminate? In what ways the everyday lives experienced through ethnographic encounters in the city of Banda Aceh challenge the biopolitics of unfolding peace, notions of transformation for “better”, expectations of recovery, resilience and return to normalcy? This paper (and 6 minutes video screening) focuses on the life story of an ex-combatant & Sufi healer in his sixties. This micro-ethnographic journey – collected through participant observation, informal interviews and filming sessions - connects life history narrative with the analysis of biopolitics and everyday as counter conducts. Descriptions and reflective analysis of his everyday life makes visible his struggles as a low-rank male combatant who struggles in poverty during the first decade of peace having been side-lined by his former commanders and resisted the predatory patron-clientelism network formed by the ex-combatant. Yet as a Sufi healer, he transforms and distances himself from violent masculinity and quasi-criminal predatory economics of ex-combatants (Aspinall 2009), but also such religious-political reforms that institutionalize Islamic law jurisdiction into the state apparatus. The paper has two aims: firstly, it aims to give a methodological contribution to the study of biopolitics by challenging the notion of loci of biopolitical theorizing through urban ethnography and film documentarism; and secondly, draw attention to the question of masculinities and non-violent transformation outside the scope of formal transitional justice/truth and reconciliation processes.