scholarly journals The Allegory of Political Violence in Sony Labou Tansi’s Life and a Half

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Manizha Sepas
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
State Violence

An embodied reading of Sony Labou Tansi's absurdism which functions as a tool for discoursing colonisation, state violence and the hypersexual masculinity of power as symbolised through the metaphor of cannibalism.

Radical Pessimism

2019 ◽  
pp. 109-136
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Extractive Industries ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Personal Interest ◽  
Political Imaginary ◽  
Extreme State

This chapter describes radical pessimism as a neoliberal democratic political affect that combines of radical worldviews with a belief that change is impossible. It begins with the question of how past and present forms of political violence have shaped Mayan conceptions about the limits of democracy and of their own political agency, leading many to “sell out” for personal interest. It documents how Sampedranos retain elements of radical political imaginary that predominated in the region in the 1970s, prior to the extreme state violence of the 1980s, but that routine acts of state violence targeted at social movements that informs engagements with hostile sovereign forces, including authoritarian political parties. The chapter also describes how these political imaginaries are being reconfigured through more recent forms of politics in defense of territory against extractive industries. The conclusion reflects on the possibility of a radical organization of pessimism.

scholarly journals Political geography II: Violence

2021 ◽  
pp. 030913252110621
Author(s):  
Jennifer Fluri
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Vulnerable Populations ◽  
Political Geography ◽  
Physical Violence ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Border Crossings ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Political Extremism ◽  
Right Wing Populism

This report focuses on the diverse and multiple manifestations of political, state, and counter-state violence. Many of the examinations of political violence in this report highlight the continued need for disparate methodological and analytic lenses towards robust understandings of political violence across scales. Displacements and mobilities associated with flight from conflict are discussed in relation to the institutionalization of harm, trauma and containment through various state and supranational mechanisms of control. These mobilities include border crossings and associated violence against vulnerable populations seeking refuge. This is buttressed by discursive binary logics, such as us/them categorizations, which remain endemic to both structural and physical violence and foundational to right wing populism, jingoism, and other forms of political extremism. This report concludes by arguing the peace is not the opposite of war but rather its temporal substitute and partner in an assemblage of political and economic co-dependence.

Terrorism and Ressentiment in Revolutionary Russia*

2019 ◽  
Vol 246 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-226
Author(s):  
Susan K Morrissey
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Small Groups ◽  
State Violence ◽  
The Body ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Messages ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Terrorist Acts

Abstract During the late nineteenth century, revolutionary terrorism emerged as a political tactic in Europe and across the world, where it formed one part of anti-colonial, anti-capitalist and national liberation movements. While its public spectacle took advantage of the new media landscape to communicate affective and political messages, terrorism was ultimately a ‘weapon of the weak’, a means for individuals and small groups to fight against the increasingly powerful modern state. The turn to insurgent violence was consequently imbricated with the experience of state violence. Focusing on a period of revolutionary unrest and heightened political violence in early twentieth-century Russia, this article takes a micro-historical approach to examine how individuals and radical parties came to explain, justify, and incite terrorist acts through narratives of vengeance and ressentiment. Drawing on recent scholarship by anthropologists and historians of emotion and bypassing psychological modes of explanation, it tracks specific articulations of political subjectivity that combine claims to (popular) sovereignty, universalism, dignity and rights with the language of honour and shame. The terrorist act was frequently justified as a sovereign right derived from the experience of state violence upon the body.

Undoing disaster colonialism: a pilot map of the pandemic's first wave in the Mapuche territories of Southern Chile

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Carraro ◽  
Sarah Kelly ◽  
José Luis Vargas ◽  
Patricio Melillanca ◽  
José Miguel Valdés-Negroni
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Food Sovereignty ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Infection Rates ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Community Resistance ◽  
Traditional Health ◽  
Disaster Studies ◽  
Media Research ◽  
Territorial Control

PurposeThe authors use media research and crowdsourced mapping to document how the first wave of the pandemic (April–August 2020) affected the Mapuche, focussing on seven categories of events: territorial control, spiritual defence, food sovereignty, traditional health practices, political violence, territorial needs and solidarity, and extractivist expansion.Design/methodology/approachResearch on the effects of the pandemic on the Mapuche and their territories is lacking; the few existing studies focus on death and infection rates but overlook how the pandemic interacts with ongoing processes of extractivism, state violence and community resistance. The authors’ pilot study addresses this gap through a map developed collaboratively by disaster scholars and Mapuche journalists.FindingsThe map provides a spatial and chronological overview of this period, highlighting the interconnections between the pandemic and neocolonialism. As examples, the authors focus on two phenomena: the creation of “health barriers” to ensure local territorial control and the state-supported expansion of extractive industries during the first months of the lockdown.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors intersperse our account of the project with reflections on its limitations and, specifically, on how colonial formations shape the research. Decolonising disaster studies and disaster risk reduction practice, the authors argue, is an ongoing process, bound to be flawed and incomplete but nevertheless an urgent pursuit.Originality/valueIn making this argument, the paper responds to the Disaster Studies Manifesto that inspires this special issue, taking up its invitation to scholars to be more reflexive about their research practice and to frame their investigations through grounded perspectives.

scholarly journals EAST TIMOR: WHEN STATE REPRESSION MAKES SECESSION EASIER (1975-2002)

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 18-36
Author(s):  
Jacob FORTIER
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
State Violence ◽  
East Timor ◽  
External Support ◽  
State Repression ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Secessionist Movement

Why does state violence sometimes fail to crush a secessionist movement and instead facilitate international support for the separatist cause? Based on the literature on the international recognition of secessionist entities and on the impact of state repression against social movements, this paper develops an argument according to which the timing of certain repressive events make them more likely to generate an international backlash and thus facilitate external support for secessionists. To backfire internationally, state violence must occur at the right time—that is, when the secessionists have gained sufficient media attention, put in place an appropriate organizational structure, and have abandoned violent tactics for a nonviolent campaign. Using the secession process of East Timor as a case study, this paper shows how the international moral outrage that followed the Dili massacre (1991),combined with a changing geopolitical context, have boosted the foreign support of the secessionist movement in East Timor and allowed it to obtain important concessions from Jakarta. Keywords: State repression, Secession, East Timor, Political violence, International Relations

Guerrilla Movements and Armed Struggle in Cold War Mexico

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Aviña
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Guerrilla Warfare ◽  
Student Movements ◽  
Relative Level ◽  
Armed Struggle ◽  
Protest Movements ◽  
Popular Resistance ◽  
Partido Revolucionario Institucional ◽  
Guerrilla Movements

After decades of revolutionary upheaval and political violence that began early in the 20th century, Mexico had seemingly achieved stability and a relative level of social peace by the 1940s. The peasant revolution of 1910—beginning with its armed, insurrectionary phase (1910–1920) to the subsequent decades (1920–1940) that involved making “The Revolution” manifest in the everyday lives of Mexicans who (to borrow historian Jeffrey Pilcher’s metaphor) chose à la carte from the revolutionary menu—produced a durable political order characterized by an active level of popular participation and legitimacy. The peace was durable, yet potentially fragile since postrevolutionary rulers, contained within the confines of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) and its previous incarnations, could not take the peasant masses for granted. Revolution had taught these masses something about their power, both its limitations and potential, to shape the content and form of the Mexican state. After 1940, as the PRI gradually exhibited its preference for political authoritarianism and an economic project that rapidly industrialized and urbanized the country while pauperizing the countryside, a series of disparate popular protest movements continually emerged. Usually peaceful and basing their alternative modernizing visions on the 1917 Constitution and the radical policies of President Lázaro Cárdenas during the 1930s, these movements—peasant, organized labor, and student movements—often faced repression and violence at the hands of state agents and/or local-regional caciques when demanding political democracy and economic justice. The spectacular massacre of protestors in public spaces and the selective assassination of dissident movement leaders represent two of the tactics employed by the PRI to quell popular resistance in the post–1940 era. Yet, such instances of state violence also stimulated political and tactical radicalization as some protestors organized revolutionary expressions of armed struggle and guerrilla warfare. From 1940 to 1982, more than three dozen armed organizations emerged in almost every region, in both urban and rural settings, displaying a wide variety of revolutionary ideologies and practices. Beginning with Rubén Jaramillo’s 1943 armed resistance in Morelos and ending with the formal dissolution of the urban Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre in 1982, these armed struggles generally shared the goal of overthrowing the PRI regime, seizing state power, and articulating a socialist vision for a post-PRI Mexico.

scholarly journals Inclusive conflict? Competitive clientelism and the rise of political violence

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Clionadh Raleigh ◽  
Hyun Jin Choi ◽  
Daniel Wigmore-Shepherd
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Power Distribution ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Political Inclusion

Abstract Conflict across African states has often been linked to ethnic-based biases in government, and exclusive policies. However, the domestic politics of developing states, and the elites who contest for power therein, have often been overlooked when explaining the patterns and risk of disorder and violence. We consider how African leaders practice politics in whom to represent, and at what level. These choices have consequences as how regimes accommodate political elites creates different competitive conditions which, in turn, create incentives and opportunities for political violence. Using a dataset on cabinet appointments over twenty years, we find that high levels of elite political inclusion and mal-apportionment in positions is consistently associated with increases in non-state violence. Power distribution levels among those groups included in senior positions account for more political violence than that which stems from exclusive politics.

scholarly journals Grievances and Fears in Islamist Movements: Revisiting the Link between Exclusion, Insecurity, and Political Violence

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-62
Author(s):  
Ioana Emy Matesan
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Violent Behavior ◽  
State Violence ◽  
The Public ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Quantitative Examination ◽  
Exclusionary Policies ◽  
The Muslim Brotherhood ◽  
Close Investigation

Abstract This article examines how exclusionary policies and repressive measures affect the propensity of Islamist groups in nondemocratic settings to engage in violence. The central argument is that exclusion from electoral politics, from civil society, and from public discourse can increase political grievances, whereas symbolic threats to religious values spark sociocultural grievances; state violence and repression foster a sense of insecurity. The article proposes that Islamist groups are both principled and strategic actors, who may adopt violent rhetoric in response to political or sociocultural grievances, but who resort to violent tactics primarily out of a sense of insecurity. The quantitative examination of twenty-two Islamist groups from the Middle East confirms that exclusionary policies can spark violent rhetoric, whereas repression and threats to the physical integrity of a group increase the propensity toward violent behavior. However, when insecurity turns into disillusionment, groups can also move away from violence if they feel alienated from the public. The close investigation of the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya in Egypt shows that the response to repression depends on the length of the conflict, the level of fragmentation within an organization, and public opinion.

scholarly journals Media Freedom and the Escalation of State Violence

2021 ◽  
pp. 003232172110202
Author(s):  
Sabine C Carey ◽  
Belén González ◽  
Neil J Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Media Freedom ◽  
Media Environment ◽  
Political Costs ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Media ◽  
Information Advantage ◽  
The Government

When governments face severe political violence, they regularly respond with violence. Yet not all governments escalate repression under such circumstances. We argue that to understand the escalation of state violence, we need to pay attention to the potential costs leaders might face in doing so. We expect that the decision to escalate state violence is conditional on being faced with heightened threats and on possessing an information advantage that mitigates the expected cost of increasing state violence. In an environment where media freedom is constrained, leaders can deny or reframe an escalation of violations and so expect to reduce potential domestic and international costs attached to that decision. Using a global dataset from 1981 to 2006, we show that state violence is likely to escalate in response to increasing violent threats to the state when media freedom is curtailed – but not when the media are free from state intervention. A media environment that the government knows is free to sound the alarm is associated with higher political costs of repression and effectively reduces the risk of escalating state violence, even in the face of mounting armed threats.

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