Mats Utas

Short presentation

Mats Utas is a professor in cultural anthropology specialising in conflict and urban studies. He is currently working on two projects: the first focuses on research brokers in conflict studies, and the second on safety and security in Japan. The Swedish Research Council and Japanstiftelsen fund the projects. Previous projects hosted by the department are listed below.

Utas joined the department in 2015 and has, amongst others, served as director of the master's program and head of the department

Keywords

• Civil wars
• violence
• ex-combatants
• child-soldiers
• post war socities
• reintegration
• urban poverty
• social marginalisation
• radicalisation
• West Africa
• Liberia
• Sierra Leone
• security
• depopulation
• aging
• Japan

Biography

Mats Utas has primarily researched the civil wars and the post-war societies in Liberia and Sierra Leone. He has conducted fieldwork in Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Kenya and Dubai. He has resided in Liberia and Sierra Leone for several years.

Utas has predominantly focused on people on the margins of society, the young and poor men (more often boys) picking up arms, the girlfriends of the fighters, and the street dwellers of poor and dysfunctional post-war cities. Still, he has also researched the economy and politics of Big Men in both West Africa and Somalia.

The most recent research focuses on growing old in gangs, research methodologies in conflict research, and safety and security issues.

After about 30 years of research on conflicts, with predominant fieldwork in West Africa, Utas has begun working on questions about security, ageing and shrinking populations in urban Japan, conducting fieldwork in Nagasaki during the spring of 2025 and 2026.

Utas teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in anthropology, as well as special courses in visual anthropology, anthropology of the senses, and public anthropology. He is keen to involve students in planning courses and finding new avenues for teaching and examination. He especially encourages the use of visual and graphic forms of work for academic examination and distinction.

Research

Externally funded research projects placed at the department

Beyond the state? Safety (安心) and security (安全) in urban Japan

Project funded by the Swedish Japan Foundation 2025-2026

Statistics show how remarkably safe Japan is. For example, in 2023, 12,372 serious crimes were reported in a population of 124 million. In 2020, Japan had 35 burglaries per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to Sweden's 783. This research project aims to contribute to understanding safety and security in urban Japan through an ethnographic field study in Nagasaki. With the overarching question: To what extent and how do local structures of belonging and cooperation contribute to a community's ability to create security and directly or indirectly counter criminal activities? this project focuses on how people relate to safety and security beyond the state and how security between people is formed, maintained, and changed over time.

Silencing and Marginalization of Facilitating Researchers from the Global South: Analyzing the role of Academic Institutions and Norms

Project funded by the Swedish Research Council 2023-2026

Mats Utas, Maria Eriksson Baaz and Swati Parashar

There has been an upsurge of interest in questions around research ethics in field-research in recent years, some of which touch upon the role and situation of what we in this project term “facilitating researchers”, otherwise referred to as “local research assistants” in the Global South. Yet, this literature is mainly descriptive, written by contracting researchers of the Global North, with limited analysis of the wider institutional structures reproducing a continued silencing and poor working conditions of facilitating researchers. Building upon insights from a recently completed project, which included facilitating researchers in three settings (DR Congo, Sierra Leone and Jharkhand, India), this project aims to contribute to further knowledge about the role that academic institutions, mainly but not only, in the Global North play in the silencing and poor working conditions of facilitating researchers. It includes an analysis of research funding bodies, ethics committees, universities and publishers in Sweden, the UK, France and India, focusing on the role of knowledge, prejudice, academic conventions and administrative rules and regulations. The project draws on insights both from the broader literature on inequalities in North-South knowledge production as well as literature addressing organization, incentives and conventions in academia more generally. It will be conducted through a combination of a correspondence experiment, in-depth interviews and text analysis.

Thugging it out: growing old in a gangland

Project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020, 2019-2024

This project is a follow-up to my previous work on gang-like groups in postwar Sierra Leone. In the aftermath of the Sierra Leonean civil war, groups of ex-combatants and other youths gathered in the city. Making do in the city without proper work and often with frail social ties was something close to an art form. Joint forms of informal organization were often pivotal for economic survival and protection. In many ways, this organization was gang-like. 20 years have passed since the end of the civil war. The young people I followed during two years in Freetown are today middle-aged men. In this follow-up study, I focus on the possibilities and problems of growing old in a gangland.

This research is part of a larger project headed by Dennis Rogers called Gangs, Gangsters, and Ganglands: Towards a Global Comparative Ethnography. The five-year project, which started in January 2019, has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (grant agreement No. 787935).

Exploring the Research Backstage: Methodological, Theoretical and Ethical Issues Surrounding the Role of Local Research Brokers in Insecure Zones

Project funded by the Swedish Research Council 2019-2021.

Mats Utas, Maria Eriksson Baaz and Swati Parashar

This research will provide novel and much-needed insights into the dynamics that shape the triangular relationships between researchers, research brokers and research data in insecure zones by attending to the experiences of both brokers and researchers. Better knowledge about the role and situation of local research brokers appears particularly urgent at this point in time as many research institutions in Europe and the US are increasingly regulating and restricting the fieldwork access of their staff due to security concerns, in turn potentially leading to more outsourcing to local research assistants. Such developments form part of a general concern over the increasing risks posed to various humanitarian actors, journalists and NGOs in precarious and violent settings.

While local brokers, such as research assistants, interlocutors and a variety of fixers, play a crucial role in most research contexts, they tend to be particularly important in violent theatres and concerning highly sensitive topics (e.g. corruption, human rights abuses in authoritarian states). Not only do they have the in-depth knowledge that enables them to gather data on sensitive issues, but they are also crucial in allowing the researcher to navigate safely through “dangerous fields”. From dealing with reluctant state agents to fostering sufficient trust to gain access to isolated groups, from the management of researcher perceptions to obtaining updated information on the security situation, local brokers are key resources, gatekeepers, and crisis managers. Yet, the role of certain brokers - such as research assistants - goes beyond merely facilitating research or gathering specific data. They often become the eyes and ears of researchers, thus exercising a significant influence on the latters’ intelligibility grids, shaping how they make sense of certain phenomena and what they see in the first place. Hence, local assistants could be considered as full-blown ‘co- authors’ of research even when not writing a single word.

This multidisciplinary project cooperates with the Department of Government at Uppsala University and Global Studies at Gothenburg University. It is co-researched with local research brokers and conducted in several countries in Asia and Africa.

Circular Nomadism: Youth and labor in Sierra Leone and Ghana

Funded by: Swedish Research Council 2015-2018

Researchers: Mats Utas and Emy Lindberg

This project partly picks up where many current studies on African youth have left off: at war's end. Where demographic studies use abstract statistics to identify youth bulges and give woeful predictions of renewed conflicts driven by armies of disenfranchised youth, this study concretely investigates how young people make a living in one of the poorest countries in the world: Sierra Leone. Youth in Sierra Leone fought ten years of civil war. Socio-economy remains much the same after the war - poor remain poor. But does this mean that history will repeat itself, or will we see change?

At the same time, another image of young Africa is projected: that of the new African growth, where young entrepreneurship is regarded as the key to the future. This picture is frequently painted when Ghana, the second country of this study, is presented to an international audience. Yet, even there, social and economic injustices are ubiquitous, and most importantly, there are not enough jobs.

Through in-depth studies and long-term engagement in these two countries, this project answers questions such as: How are labour structures manifested, and how do they change? How do young people find work, and what does this mean for the societies in which they are part? In particular, what impact do labour market experiences and the mechanisms for finding employment have on longitudinal, post-colonial structures/relationships of dependence? This project aims to explore youths´ navigation of employment trajectories and, more particularly, the role of young labour migration in the functioning of labour markets in Sierra Leone and Ghana. By adding a gender perspective and a special focus on the experiences of young women, we will also give space to a social group that has often been ignored in contemporary studies on African youth.

The research project aims to make several critical contributions. First, it will contribute to theories on youth labour and labour migration by developing a theoretical framework for exploring how labour structures manifest and change. Second, it will add crucial empirical material on youth and labour in Sierra Leone and Ghana, which will broaden our understanding of (African) youth searching for work in post-conflict and postcolonial structures of dependencies with large young populations. Third, methodologically, it will show the usefulness of adding a qualitative and ethnographical perspective to an area dominated by a statistical focus on unemployment. Finally, this project will contribute to current policy debates and help to improve development projects focusing on issues of youth and labour.

Media

matsutas.com

personal hompage

http://matsutas.com/