Political geography II: Violence

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.

Guns, violence, politics: the gyre widens

Inter-related sustained upward trends in firearm purchasing, violence, and political extremism are converging to put the USA at risk for disaster and threaten our future as a democracy. This narrative review provides a critical assessment and call to action. It explores each trend separately, considers the effects of their likely and imminent convergence, and suggests possibilities for collective and individual action to prevent or at least reduce those effects.