Understanding complicity: memory, hope and the imagination

Abstract

This paper addresses the thorny issue of complicity with wrongdoing under conditions of systemic political violence, such as authoritarianism, totalitarianism or military occupation. The challenge of dealing with collaborators-those who colluded with the apparatus of repression or who benefitted from its existence-is central to subsequent processes of justice and memorymaking. This paper proposes several arguments. Firstly, it claims we need to think about complicity and resistance not dichotomically, but as a continuum of locations individuals can occupy. Secondly, these locations are influenced by the agents' positionality within the social world, each agent being situated at the intersection of several axes of distinction: class, gender, racialisation, and religion, among others. Thirdly, to understand complicity we also need to draw a connection between individual's experience of time and their actions: temporality is experienced from within a social position, through the interplay between memory, imagination and hope. Positionality thus affects one's memories and self-understanding, the scope of one's imagination, as well as the type and intensity of one's hopes. Therefore, individuals' capacity to build on the past to imagine a future, to invest emotionally in the future and act accordingly are interrelated aspects of their experience, which will influence how they navigate the muddy waters of systemic wrongdoing, more or less complicitly. To give concreteness to these three theoretical arguments, the paper discusses several forms of complicity with violence during the Vichy Regime in France.

The Hero’s Silences: Vulnerability, Complicity, Ambivalence

“…8 It is important to highlight that everyone is on that spectrum: nobody escapes it, not even the heroic resister. For my conceptualisation of this issue please see (Mihai, 2019). 9 Keeping silence during the interrogations would have been suicidal: Müller uses the time between the interrogations to think of what to say and what to keep quiet about, in order to pacify her tormentor, while simultaneously protecting herself and her friends.…”

Settler Colonial Socialization in Public Sector Work: Moving from Privilege to Complicity

“…Turning to complicity is particularly salient in a bureaucratic context that positions itself as apolitical. Mihai (2019) describes this as "routinised, often unreflective, patterns of complicity or series of complicitous acts in temporally stable, structural violence" (p. 506). A non-binary participant of colour in business development names this bluntly: "the public service and 9 In our interviews the gendering of "good intentions" and benevolence, and the role of white women as exalted national subjects is a strong theme.…”

A critical realist contribution to debates on complicity in systemic injustice and violence

“…This makes the framework insensitive to the ways that a context of pervasive injustice and violence, in which complicity becomes a seemingly inescapable fact of human existence, impacts on people's judgements and actions (cf. Mihai, 2019).…”