scholarly journals New Approaches to the Study of Violence

2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey C. Isaac
Keyword(s):  
Modern World ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Transnational Organized Crime ◽  
Lethal Violence ◽  
Organized Violence ◽  
Present Part ◽  
Armed Violence ◽  
Forms Of Violence

In his recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker draws upon a wealth of data to argue that the modern world, especially since 1945, has experienced a dramatic and probably irreversible decline in organized violence. The book has received much critical attention (which will indeed be the topic of future discussion in Perspectives). It is undeniably true that recent decades have seen a decrease in the incidence of, and casualties related to, classic forms of interstate violence, and that in recent years there has been a decline in organized civil war violence as well. At the same time, it is equally true that violence—its threat, its use, its many often-unpredictable consequences—remains an ever-present part of the political landscape throughout the world. The Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development's recent report, The Global Burden of Armed Violence 2011, estimates that since 2004 “more than 526,000 people are killed each year as a result of lethal violence.” The report estimates that only around one tenth of these killings—approximately 55,000 per year—are caused by “direct armed conflict,” i.e., in organized wars, whether interstate or civil. But it also estimates that hundreds of thousands more are related to gang violence, drug trafficking, transnational organized crime, and other activities that take place in a netherworld beyond law and order, and between “war” and “peace.” And it observes that while the categories typically used by governments, multilateral agencies, and NGOs to classify violence—organized vs. interpersonal, conflict-related vs. criminal—serve certain practical purposes, “these distinctions give the misleading impression that different forms and incidents of violence fit into neat and separate categories,” whereas in fact these forms of violence are not so neatly distinguished. And beyond the sphere of lethal violence lays a much broader domain of destruction, fear, insecurity, vulnerability, and harm.

Religion, war, and peace in premodern Islamicate polities and the Christian West

2021 ◽  
pp. 263300242098491
Author(s):  
Philippe Buc
Keyword(s):  
Strong Correlation ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Holy War ◽  
Boko Haram ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
Armed Violence

The plural Islams and the various Christianities deriving from late Antique Catholicism constitute two families of monotheisms whose relation to armed violence and to peace can be compared over the longue durée. In both, war and peace coexist as values, with the sense however that there can be a corrupting bad peace and a wicked bad war. Both—albeit through different media—produced norms governing warfare. For both, there is a strong correlation between holy war and societal reform. In both, the potential to sacralize a space that then has to be defended (New Jerusalems or second Hejaz) figures prominently. In both, radical warfare, reform, and purge of one’s own group can be triggered by apocalyptic or eschatological expectations (with figures such as a person anticipating typologically the return of the vengeful Christ, a last world emperor, a mujaddid, or a Mahdī). While this contribution focuses mainly on the pre-modern world, it ends on an attempt to relate the current war waged by Boko Haram to this past.

Riot After Riot

1988 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-287
Author(s):  
Akbar S. Ahmed
Keyword(s):  
Uttar Pradesh ◽  
Early Morning ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Indian Government ◽  
Communal Violence ◽  
Legislative Branch ◽  
Midnight's Children ◽  
English Speaking

One of the great paradoxes of the modern world is that India, the land that produced such major world religions as Buddhism Jainism is now torn apart by caste and communal violence. Pakistan and Sri Lanka, like India, face severe ethnic problems. Law and order are to be emphasized. Caste and community must be protected by the executive branch of the Indian Government. This bas been laid down in the rules framed by the legislative branch. When this is not done there is a breakdown. No one is safe and no group is secure. In India today this is clearly the case. This book by M. J. Akbar is a collection of 15 journalistic pieces, written for Akbar's newspaper and magazine, The Telegraph and Sunday over the last decade. Because it is journalism, the important "burning" issues are covered such as the Moradabad massacre in 1980, the slaughter of the Uttar Pradesh Harijans in 1981 and the ongoing Babri Masjid controversey. It is journalism, but the writing is of high quality and evocative: "It is early morning and a mist lies on the river, making the pre-dawn haze more blurred. A part of the Howrah Bridge looms through the gauze, like a picture deliberately created by a photographer in search of art. The fires are out." (p. 170) Akbar's material is hard, brittle, compelling stuff. He writes with the passion of the committed and his commitments are to secularism, to humanity, to the truth, as he sees it, on the ground. Here, a brief account of Dr. Akbar's cultural background seems appropriate: He was born in 1951 and has become the English-speaking voice of post-Midnight's Children of India. The significance of post 1947 independence as a dividing line is generally not fully appreciated. Missing is the literary, sentimental romanticism of the earlier Indian generation of writers. Don Moraes and Ved Mehta already appear as dated figures of the past. Their India is another country. In Akbar's background there is no punting on English rivers, laboring at Oxford intonations, getting drunk after the Oxford-Cambridge boat race nor leisurely reading of the English romantic poets on the banks of the Cam. Akbar lives in the urban nightmare of Calcutta and in his nostrils is the smell of burning flesh and rotting corpses. Missing, though he is aware of the loss, is the romantic vision of Nehru and the religious idealism of Gandhi. Akbar is an Indian writing with a white-hot pen for Indians of today's India ...

Law and order, war and peace

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald M. Baecker
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Biological Weapons ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Digital Information ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Current Case ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Government ◽  
Digital Disruption

Most computers during the Second World War, such as the British code-breaking Colussus machine, had been developed for military use. The effects on law and order and war and peace of computerization, worldwide telecommunications, social media, artificial intelligence (AI), and robotics is the topic of Chapter 6. As in Chapter 5, the most compelling visions of the potential opportunities and dangers have been in science fiction and in film; we begin the chapter by reviewing some memorable examples. We then discuss how technology is used by the police, such as the use of video evidence to sometimes exonerate the police against false accusations of needless brutality. We also examine how citizens are using social media to protect themselves and alert others to what they believe is unwarranted violence or unjust actions by law enforcement. We expand upon Section 5.7’s discussion of citizen mobilization by social media with the goal of regime change. In this context, we discuss how the government (especially police and security services) gains leverage via the surveillance of the digital information and communications of citizens. This surveillance has significantly increased due to security concerns post-9/11. We will examine these developments in the USA, Canada, and the UK, as well as in other parts of the world. We shall also discuss cases of organizations trying to subvert societies that repress and forbid access to the internet, with the goal of enabling its citizens to access the internet freely. Next, we consider ways in which tools of digital disruption are used by a country or government or a set of individuals against others. The timely and current case study explored is on governmental use of hacking and other aggressive digital means to interfere with the electoral processes of another country, or even to disrupt or destabilize the other country. At the extreme, governments engage in cyberterrorism or even cyberwar­fare. We shall discuss several recent examples of this and argue that weapons of cyberwar­fare could be as catastrophic as nuclear or biological weapons. The technology of warfare has also evolved.

SHORTER ARTICLES, COMMENTS, AND NOTES: TRAFFICKING OF HUMAN BEINGS AS A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY: SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR THE INTERNATIONAL LEGAL SYSTEM

2005 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 445-458 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Obokata
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
Organized Crime ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Trafficking In Persons ◽  
Transnational Organized Crime ◽  
The World ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
United Nations Convention ◽  
International Legal System

Trafficking of human beings is a widespread practice in the modern world. It has been estimated that up to 800,000 people, especially women and children, are trafficked all around the world each year.1Virtually all States are affected,2and traffickers are believed to make between $7 and $10 billion annually from the trafficking business.3In order to combat trafficking, the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (Trafficking Protocol) was adopted in December 2000, within the framework of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (Organized Crime Convention).4

Death Masks in Tolstoi

Slavic Review ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-305
Author(s):  
Kathleen Parthé
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
The One ◽  
Feminine Noun ◽  
Linguistic Means

Tolstoi made the accurate and poetic description of death a literary problem to be solved: how does a writer use the resources of language to describe the actual sensation of dying, an experience which the living can never fully comprehend? Experimenting with various linguistic means to create and use ambiguity, Tolstoi worked on a solution to this problem over many years in Childhood, Sevastopol Tales, “Three Deaths,” War and Peace, “Notes of a Madman,” and The Death of Ivan ll'ich. There are critics who feel that his achievement in this area is virtually unsurpassed; a recent book on death in world literature devotes more attention and praise to Tolstoi than to any other writer.The most powerful of all death scenes in Tolstoi's fiction is the one that portrays Prince Andrei Bolkonskii in War and Peace. The specter of death that Andrei sees in a dream, a substantiation of his fear of dying, is designated simply by the neuter pronoun ono (it). Konstantin Leont'ev was struck by this ono which he felt was so terrifying and mysterious that it could be identified with death itself. What makes ono so immediately striking is that although it is a neuter form, it is used intentionally (by being underlined) to refer directly to the word smert' (death), which is a feminine noun.

scholarly journals War and Peace from Viewpoint of a Sociologist

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 515-519
Author(s):  
Yanitsky Oleg
Keyword(s):  
Functional Organization ◽  
Hybrid Structure ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Hybrid War ◽  
Mass Protest

Drawing on a review of global and risk studies as well as on studies in the history of modern western sociology, the author has organized his argument into the following theses. First, the modern world is highly interdepended, i.e. has a hybrid (multisided and multileveled) nature. Therefore, a war and peace are two sides of the same coin. The second, the global whole is actually a rather complex sociobiotechnical system (the SBT-system), and the '˜behavior' of its social and other actors are usually contradictory. Third, each subsystem of it has its own basic principles of structural-functional organization, a temporal order and mode of evolution, and a specific kind of relationships with other subsystems. Fourth, hence this hybrid is inherently contradictory and unstable.A high interdependence of the subsystems objectively raises a risk of a hybrid war emergence. Fifth, that is why the war-and-peace problem should be considered as hybrid as well. Sixth, the hybrid war may have a variety of social aims ranging from economic and political domination till total destruction of a probable adversary. Seventh, despite of technocratic orientation of the westernoriented capitalism the beliefs, values and social memories are still the mighty weapons in any hybrid war. Eighth, a very essence of hybrid war is multi-sided as well. It's a mix of fear and alienation with mass protest actions and military operations. In one cases such wars mobilized people while in the others demobilizes. Ninth, these hybrid structure and processes needs more close integration of social, natural and technical sciences, i.e. modern sociology should be capable to translate any SBT-transformations sociologically. Tenth, the media and social networks are the most powerful means for the shaping individual and mass consciousness. The media and social sciences use a social memory as a '˜peaceful' weapon. Eleventh, the role of civil society organizations and movements as well as of irregular military units is still an open question.

The Durability of Peace

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline A. Hartzell ◽  
Amy Yuen
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Active Listening ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Sustainable Peace ◽  
Single Process ◽  
Peace Duration ◽  
Durable Peace

With wars—not just global, but civil wars and other domestic infightings—still being rampant in the modern world, scholars have begun to develop interest in identifying the conditions that can help establish a durable peace. Peace is a lack of conflict and freedom from fear of violence between social groups. Commonly understood as the absence of war or violent hostility, peace often involves compromise, and therefore is initiated with thoughtful active listening and communication to enhance and create genuine mutual understanding. The study of the durability of peace has greatly evolved through the years, and one of its implications is that recent empirical work on this topic has focused on civil war. Most of this study has been tailored in response to the model of war, a theory of armed conflict which presents war and peace as stages of a single process. Furthermore, this analysis on peace duration revolves around for main themes: the characteristics of conflict and conflict actors, belligerent-centered dynamics, the role of third parties, and the developments in the measurement, estimation, and the study of peace duration. Under the conceptions of peace, sustainable peace must be regarded as an important factor for the future of prosperity. Throughout the world, nurturing, empowerment, and communications are considered to be the crucial factors in creating and sustaining a durable peace.

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