From the first minutes of the interview, Romain Huët removes any ambiguity: even if he has often been interested in themes linked to violence, he is not fascinated by war. On the contrary, the sociology teacher at the University of Rennes, in France, loathes it from the bottom of his heart. If his new work, War in mind. On the front from Syria to Ukraineenters directly into these two conflicts of our time, it is to better reveal their devastation and wounds.
“It is not career soldiers who interest me in my research, but rather anonymous people whose job is not to wage war, but who suddenly find themselves having to react to the violence of the world.” he declares on the phone. “I wanted to capture the intimate motivations that push someone to take up arms to kill or to die for political reasons. »
There is no ready-made answer, admits the academic. It’s not about reason, but more about emotion. From the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it tells the story of a man who flees Kharkiv with his family to reach the city of Lviv in the west of the country. “After a while, he returned by train to the east because he couldn’t bear to have left his friends and his city behind. »
Unlike many researchers who develop their investigative work following a methodical plan, Romain Huët says he works differently, more guided by a desire to “live reality” with strong involvement in the field, leaving a lot of room for chance and instinct. “As an ethnographer, my goal is to be present among these volunteer volunteers. I try to describe what they feel and what they experience. »
This desire to be at human level, the author had already applied it in these first two works, dealing with urban demonstrations, notably the Yellow Vest movement, in The dizziness of the riot (2019) then exhausted by life in Such violent fatigue (2021). With his latest opus, he closes a sort of triptych on contemporary forms of suffering.
“Yes, it’s true, we can see a certain consistency. What also resonates between his three books is a disavowal of the world as it is. As far as war is concerned, it is an experience of great intensity, undoubtedly the greatest, since it sends us back to radical choices, life or death. »
The sources of his most recent proposal are the Arab revolutions which broke out in 2010. Fascinated by this popular movement, which he describes as “exceptional” in recent history, the author tried in 2012 to organize a listening cell on war trauma in a refugee camp in Kilis, Turkey. But the authorities refuse him any access.
“I found myself a year after the first uprisings against the regime of Bashar al-Assad in this region located only a few kilometers from the Syrian border,” he says. I was waiting, I didn’t really know what to do with my days. »
About to pack his bags to return to France, he then met fighters from the Free Syrian Army (FSA) brigade. “They told me that if I wanted to see suffering, I just had to come with them to Syria. »
The teacher-researcher – who did his post-doctoral work at the University of Ottawa – then decided to follow the FSA fighters to Azaz, a ruined city 400 kilometers north of Damascus, which the opponents to the regime had just been released. For three weeks, he collected testimonies from volunteers.
“At first, I witnessed a form of exaltation linked to chaos, but the longer the conflict persisted, the more I observed a withdrawal into a destructive closed world filled with despair. »
Whether in Ukraine, between 2022 and 2023, or in Syria, between 2012 and 2018, the ethnographer is betting on better understanding this violence by going into the field, to interview combatants and volunteers. He will accompany, in the trenches of Donbass or under the concrete shelters in the suburbs of Aleppo, around ten interlocutors for weeks, even several months, with the objective of going beyond the geopolitical issues.
“Everyone told me their personal story, their hopes and their fears,” underlines the academic. But I also focused on their daily life inside the war and I discovered another time, in which boredom and excitement, waiting and forgetting collide. »
The author ignores the chronology of events, preferring to mix the situations, according to the moments experienced. Thus, the reader moves from Ukraine to Syria and vice versa. Comparing the two contexts would not make sense, he explains, since, on the one hand, we are faced with a revolutionary project linked to the Arab Spring, while, on the other, it is a question of the defense of ‘a territory facing an invasion.
What ultimately interests the ethnographer are the common points. He raises a certain number of them, which he considers revealing the effects of a conflict in the destinies of the men and women he meets. The Arab revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt have had repercussions on the people of Syria, who dream of regime change. When the Russians crossed the border, it became absolutely obvious for a large part of the population to mobilize, he emphasizes.
“Before their engagement, most of these people had a lack of interest in politics. They didn’t talk about it, and then the war suddenly came to catch up with them. There is the feeling of making history and also the possibility of a victorious future. »