ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the significance of organized violence for contemporary Namibian statehood. It illuminates the ties between structural and experiential violence through an analysis of the lives of Pine and his ex-combatant friends who, after the war, were recruited into the paramilitary Special Field Force (SFF) unit of the Namibian Police.3 Although the chapter proceeds from micro-level observations of events in the life of Pine and his colleagues, it seeks to highlight the structural factors that lay behind such seemingly isolated events and the way they motivate the actors, as well as the consequences that they have on statehood, sovereignty and political subjectivity.
