UBT_PolUnknown2021 - Politics of the Unknown: Conspiracism and Conflict

The Junior Research Group “Politics of the Unknown. Conspiracism and Conflict” revolves around the question of how political conflicts shape, and are shaped by, different perceptions of truth and reality. The project consists of several case studies zooming in on contexts of particular uncertainty. Saïkou Sagnane and Kingsley Jima, for instance, focus their PhD research on the Guinean coup d’état in 2021 and the ongoing Nigerian media debate on banditry (the so-called “unknown gunmen”) in the country’s Northwest, respectively. In Guinea, Joschka Philipps leads an interdisciplinary team of researchers and artists concerned with the broader history of Guinea, fraught with real and imagined neo-colonial conspiracies against Guinea’s First Republic under Sékou Touré. He is also co-writing the auto-biography of Nana Barry, a former political broker in Conakry who now lives in France. The overall research agenda is to study, depict, and capture everyday political situations in which people and political actors are confronted with political realities that are too inaccessible to be known and too significant to be ignored. Whether this concerns secrets, suspicions or rumors that circulate about a given event, the difficulty of distinguishing between true or false information on social media, or the ways in which power is imagined and situated in an increasingly uncertain and multipolar geopolitical context, the project highlights how questions of truth become a battleground in situations of conflict.