Mats Utas

Violent gangs, the role of assistants in research and a personal journey of discovery in Japan.

Mats Utas is a professor of cultural anthropology and has been head of the department for the past six years. He is now leaving the position to devote more time to his research on gang structures in West Africa. But first, a repatriation year in Japan awaits, where Mats will go back to the basics of anthropology.

Working with all the people and bringing everything together into one unit has been both the most challenging and the most fun part of being a prefect, Mats thinks.

-Now I feel like I've done my part and I know that it will be very good when Mats Hyvönen takes over. I saw the assignment as something you do for the colleagues. It is everyone's responsibility to take on administrative and teaching roles alongside researching. It is needed in order for the department to function. But it's a slightly tricky role to be the sole head of a fairly large organization for a limited period. You have to live with some unpopular decisions, even when you are no longer the boss. In addition, there is a parallel academic hierarchy with the professors at the top that creates some disorder. It's easy to become a weak leader in that situation. The positive thing is that we do it together and everyone knows about the situation.

Those who leave as head of department are given a repatriation year during which they can devote themselves full-time to their own research. This can be done from the home department or anywhere in the world.

-In October, I'm going to Japan for a year to really break with my role as head of department and do something completely different. I will be working on research projects that I have neglected in recent years. As head of department, there is not much time for research.

In Japan, Mats also hopes to explore the culture and society, which will hopefully lead to new projects.

-It will be a personal dream journey of discovery that hopefully may lead to something. I've been to Japan three times before and I'm very fascinated by cultural phenomena that I don't understand. Over the years of working in West Africa, I see more and more that Africa is like Europe, or vice versa. But Japan is culturally very different from my everyday life. That fascinates me. This will be a personal opportunity to explore something unknown. It's a basic anthropological idea to be interested in what you don't understand, even if the discipline has moved away from it, because the search for the exotic can easily become banal. This will be a unique chance to see if I find something exciting that I want to investigate further and maybe later apply for research money, instead of arriving with a ready-made concept. Otherwise, I will continue to write on my existing research.

The major project Mats is currently working on is about the role of research assistants in conflict research. It is a collaboration with political scientist Maria Eriksson Baaz (Swedish National Defense University) and professor of international relations Swati Parashar (University of Gothenburg). The team also includes research assistants James Vincent in Sierra Leone, Oscar Dunia in Congo and Anju Toppo in India.

-We have turned the perspectives around and started from the research assistants' relationship with us instead of our relationship with them. In the book we published last year, the research assistants are the authors and we researchers are the assistants. The aim is to draw attention to the conditions of their roles, which are often silenced or overlooked, despite the fact that they often collect a large part of the material and therefore do a significant part of the research. What does it mean for the research results that their perspectives are so important but at the same time invisible? We have been working to understand, from a research ethics perspective, what happens when we silence a group of people with whom we work so closely and intimately. James Vincent and I held a workshop in Sierra Leone with 14 research assistants about their experiences of working in and after the war. There were amazing stories and both laughter and tears about how stupidly, and sometimes immorally, we researchers behave in the field. It was a fantastic workshop whose first day did not end didn't end until closer to midnight because no one wanted to stop talking.

Mats first came to Sierra Leone as a undergraduate student in 1992, just as the civil war had started. Since then he has lived in the country on and off. But it was the war in Liberia that he wrote his doctoral thesis about.

-I started with refugees from Liberia in the Ivory Coast. Eventually I made my way into Liberia where the war had been on hold for a while. Just then, fighting broke out again and after a couple of days, I managed to get to the US Embassy, which flew me out by helicopter. What I saw in Liberia made me interested in working with child and youth soldiers. A year later the country was calmer, so I lived there for a year to study that. I finished my dissertation in 2003 and the following year I got money to do a two-year postdoc. Most people choose to go to Oxford or the Sorbonne, but I went to Fourah Bay College in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Apart from supervising master's students in sociology, I spent all my time in the streets of Freetown. I ended up on a street corner called Pentagon. Most of the people there were former rebel soldiers from all sorts of groups just trying to survive. For two years, I was on that same street corner almost every day and for many evenings and nights. I was with them on all sorts of pranks and also traveled around with them in the hinterland. I have been in contact with these people ever since, and have visited them continuously, most recently in the spring of 2023. Now they are older men. We have aged together and sit and talk about being old and having grown-up children. This has led me to write an article about what it is like to grow old in a gang structure.

What is it like to share life between Sweden and Sierra Leone?

-In Sweden, everything is so extremely organized. We are not only organized by, but also fighting against, bureaucracy all the time. In Sierra Leone, very little is organized from the top, at all levels you have to organize yourself. That makes relationships so much more important, they really make the difference between life and death. That leads to a lot of action and I miss that very much here. You feel closer to life. But you should not idealize it. It's a privileged position to go from here and 'live their life', always being able to get out of it. For me personally, it's not about life and death, it's just extra life.

Mats says that working in conflict areas and with people with a lot of violence capital is something he just slipped into without really being aware of. He has had to deal with this in several ways.

-One thing is that I've gradually had to learn violent techniques to defend myself and avoid being subjected. The other part is working with people who you know have murdered, raped, mutilated people or burned down entire villages. It is difficult to handle. When I sit among them, I don't think about it. Then there are moments of solitude when I think: How can I like them so much and be so impressed in many ways, despite knowing that they have done things you really shouldn't? But we all have so many parts to us, no one is just one thing. Many of the people I have worked with have also shown enormous compassion, perhaps more than anyone here at home. When you live such a vulnerable life, the conditions are completely different.

Mats can see several parallels between the gang environment he is studying in Sierra Leone and the Swedish criminal gangs that has attracted attention in the past year.

-I have worked with groups of former rebel and militia soldiers in Liberia and Sierra Leone who often ended up in urban gang structures when they tried to reintegrate after the war. The structures are actually very similar in West Africa, the US and Sweden. The gangs are based in vulnerable areas where young people live in poverty and with very few prospects for the future. The gangs promise respect and have a violent capital that gives them power. For those who have been around for a long time, it is often enough to capitalize on their violent reputation. But when new gang structures emerge, they have to prove their violence, which increases the level of brutality. It is often a symbolic use of violence to achieve power. And we can see that it actually takes very little violence to destabilize. The use of drugs is another similarity with Sweden. When you have gangs controlling the drug trade, internal hierarchies are created and they have to relate to what other gangs are doing to maintain their place in the hierarchy. In Sweden, there is not much talk about the fact that drug use has gone down in age. It's a very sad development. If you compare it to the US and the extreme opioid disaster they are in the middle of, it is very worrying.

The big difference with Sierra Leone is that Sweden has the resources needed to reverse the trend.

-In Sweden we can afford to take care of the problem. In Sierra Leone there is hardly any money in the state. Police and politicians are also more involved in gangs and the drug trade there, although of course it also occurs in Sweden. The solution is not really new, all researchers agree that it is important to curb recruitment at a younger age. To do that, we must ensure that schools and leisure time work for children in all areas. That's where the resources should allocated. But right now, we have a government that believes in more control and more punishment. In Sierra Leone, as well as here, we can see that it is not working. We need to give the next generation the opportunity to become something else than gangsters.

Being able to engage in social debates with his research has always been important to Mats and part of why he became an anthropologist.

-I started with anthropology because it is a socially oriented subject with extreme relevance to our everyday life and how we live. The issues I've worked on: child and youth soldiers, urban poverty, what it's like to grow old in a gang, can all be put into practice quite easily. That's part of what I want to do as a researcher. A certain amount of basic research is also important, but for me personally, it's important to work on what can change the world and what can create a better society. I see this as an obligation, even if it is not always easy, Mats concludes.