Wartime Burial from Below: combatants’ responses to combants’ deaths in Ukraine and South Sudan

Excess deaths are synonymous with armed conflict, and combatants cannot avoid dealing with messy, emotive dead bodies. Therefore, a key window into understanding combatants’ behaviours, norms and values is to pay attention to how they deal with the dead, including the dead bodies and ghosts of their fellow combatants. Through their death work, combatants seek to reshape the social and political meaning of war, and the value and identity of the dead and living. This article draws on participant observation and qualitative interviews in Ukraine and South Sudan to understand how combatants themselves deal with death and its aftermath. For the combatants we observed and spoke to, war brought the potential for significant social and moral rupture, as well as new questions about their own identity, the value of humanity and the social meaning of war. We argue that combatants, through their care for the dead, sought to restore social order and human worth despite war, remaking social and moral continuity. Combatants’ death work was entangled with their armed groups’ norms, but also often tweaked the social meanings of war and their identity as combatants, materially enacting subtle new moral and social configurations that evoked older and broader debates.