Nonviolent youth activism and symbolic violence: Some problems in Bourdieu’s notion of victim complicity

2021 ◽  
pp. 001139212110501
Author(s):  
Ben Arnold Lohmeyer
Keyword(s):  
Direct Action ◽  
Youth Activism ◽  
Viable Alternative ◽  
Symbolic Violence ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Nonviolent Direct Action ◽  
Forms Of Violence

The coupling of victim complicity with violence is intuitively objectionable, yet it is an underexamined aspect of Bourdieu’s ‘symbolic violence’. Within sociology, the nature of violence continues to be debated and refined with contested boundaries particularly concerning non-physical forms of violence. Symbolic violence offers an avenue to investigate this realm; however, it has been both employed and rejected without close examination of the issue of complicity. Moreover, the varying interpretations of Bourdieu’s use of the term ‘violence’ present problems for sustaining sociological distinctions between power and violence. This article examines these issues through the experiences of youth activists employing Nonviolent Direct Action with a focus on their reflexive self-awareness of participation in systems of violence. The author argues that complicity in symbolic violence presents epistemological and ontological problems for the sociology of violence that can be avoided by adopting viable alternative interpretations that emphasise the subject’s reflexivity and the systemic origins of violence.

“In My Extremity I Turned to Gandhi”: American Pacifists, Christianity, and Gandhian Nonviolence, 1915–1941

2003 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 361-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leilah C. Danielson
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
World War ◽  
Reinhold Niebuhr ◽  
The Social ◽  
Nonviolent Direct Action ◽  
The Face ◽  
Nuclear Arms Race

American pacifists first heard of Mohandas Gandhi and his struggles in South Africa and India after World War I. Although they admired his opposition to violence, they were ambivalent about non-violent resistance as a method of social change. As heirs to the Social Gospel, they feared that boycotts and civil disobedience lacked the spirit of love and goodwill that made social redemption possible. Moreover, American pacifists viewed Gandhi through their own cultural lens, a view that was often distorted by Orientalist ideas about Asia and Asians. It was only in the 1930s, when Reinhold Niebuhr and other Christian realists charged that pacifism was impotent in the face of social injustice, that they began to reassess Gandhian nonviolence. By the 1940s, they were using nonviolent direct action to protest racial discrimination and segregation, violations of civil liberties, and the nuclear arms race.

scholarly journals From Symbolic Violence to Economic Violence: The Globalizing of the Scottish Banking Elite

2012 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ron Kerr ◽  
Sarah Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Financial Crisis ◽  
North America ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Symbolic Violence ◽  
Neoliberal Globalization ◽  
Economic Violence ◽  
Corporate Elites ◽  
Sociological Approaches ◽  
Forms Of Violence

The financial crisis has raised questions about the role of corporate elites in contemporary organizations. This article follows recent work on organizational elites that argues for critical sociological approaches to the study of such elites, using, for example, Bourdieu’s concept of field, and for studies of elites in contexts outside North America. Applying Bourdieusian concepts such as forms of violence, we look at the particular case of the Scottish banking elite, focusing on changing enactments of violence within that field, from symbolic violence to economic violence. We trace the movement of the Scottish banking elite from the national-traditional to the global and modernized and demonstrate how members of an elite field can operate in the field of power within their own organization and at the same time within a transorganizational field of peer competitors, thus illustrating how a specific national elite has been affected by neoliberal globalization and its crisis.

Youth as an artefact of governing violence: Violence to young people shapes violence by young people

2017 ◽  
Vol 66 (7) ◽  
pp. 1070-1086 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Arnold Lohmeyer
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
The State ◽  
Symbolic Violence ◽  
Adult Status ◽  
Labelling Theory ◽  
Forms Of Violence

Young people are routinely depicted as uniquely violent. Much work has been done, particularly within the sociology of youth, to dispel this misconception. However, these portrayals persist, as does the narrative of youth as a period of transition. This article argues that the transition in youth is a process of governing violence into sanctioned forms. To achieve adult status young people must conform to sanctioned forms of violence. Furthermore, the article argues that the physical, structural and symbolic violence done to young people, shapes the violence done by them. Youth is an intensely governed period. The young people in focus in this article are subject to additional governing by the state. They are hyper-governed. This article draws on labelling theory and the analytics of governmentality to analyse hyper-governed young people’s experiences of ubiquitous violence. Hyper-governed young people describe experiences of ‘neoliberal violence’ that produce docility and progressively increasing commitments to the norms of violence. The article concludes, therefore, that youth is an artefact of violence that governs, but also the product of governing young people’s violence. Youth as an artefact of governing violence describes violence done to young people shaping violence done by young people.

An Entire World in Motion

2021 ◽  
pp. 53-90
Author(s):  
Erin R. Pineda
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
South African ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Nonviolent Direct Action ◽  
Entire World

This chapter develops an alternative framework for understanding the civil disobedience of civil rights activists: as a decolonizing praxis that linked their dissent to that of anticolonial activists and tied the context of Jim Crow to global white supremacy. If the constitutional, democratic state formed the normative horizon for liberal understandings of civil disobedience, activists’ horizon was defined by processes of imaginative transit—the process of thinking and traveling across boundaries and disparate contexts, through which activists in motion constructed civil disobedience as a means of transforming worldwide structures of racist imperialism, colonial rule, apartheid, and Jim Crow. Between 1920 and 1960, African American, Indian, South African, and Ghanaian activists proposed, debated, and wielded nonviolent direct action as a means of self-liberation from white supremacy’s structures of fear and violence, and way of disrupting and transforming the practices that held those structures in place.

To Join in Hate

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. McIvor
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Intimate Connection ◽  
Nonviolent Direct Action ◽  
Extreme Violence ◽  
Work Of Mourning ◽  
Final Settlement

This chapter unpacks the intimate connection between mourning and activist politics of (violent and nonviolent) direct action, in part by examining recent appropriations of Antigone within agonist political theory. Insofar as mourning is approached under the image of resistant, Antigone-like voices, it fits snugly within an agonistic framework for political life. Although agonism is a diverse gathering of different voices, on the whole agonists advance a view of politics as a matter of endless contestation without the prospect of final settlement or consensus. Agonists do not necessarily romanticize conflict nor neglect the possibility of extreme violence, but their goal is not to resolve political antagonisms so much to shift them toward a less violent, if still contentious, agonism. However, it is also argued that the agonist appropriation of Antigone risks losing touch with the complexity of her mourning claims and the complexity of mourning itself. The chapter tries to restore some of this complexity by reading Antigone from the perspective of Melanie Klein's theory of mourning and what has been defined as the democratic work of mourning in Chapter 1.

Nonviolent Direct Action: American Cases: Social-Psychological Analyses.

1970 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 357
Author(s):  
Roland K. Hawkes ◽  
A. Paul Hare ◽  
Herbert H. Blumberg
Keyword(s):  
Direct Action ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Nonviolent Direct Action
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