The Special Apparatus (al-Niẓām al-Khāṣṣ): The Rise of Nationalist Militancy in the Ranks of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood

Existing scholarship has largely focused on the role of Sayyid Qutb’s ideas when analyzing the Muslim Brotherhood’s violent history. Perceiving Qutb’s ideas as paving the way for radical interpretations of jihad, many studies linked the Brotherhood’s violent history with this key ideologue. Yet, in so doing, many studies overlooked the importance of the Special Apparatus in shaping this violent history of the Brotherhood, long before Qutb joined the organization. Through an in-depth study of memoires and accounts penned by Brotherhood members and leaders, and a systematic study of British and American intelligence sources, I attempt to shed light on this understudied formation of the Brotherhood, the Special Apparatus. This paper looks at the development of anti-colonial militancy in Egypt, particularly the part played by the Brotherhood until 1954. It contends that political violence, in the context of British colonization, antedated the Brotherhood’s foundation, and was in some instances considered as a legitimate and even distinguished duty among anti-colonial factions. The application of violence was on no account a part of the Brotherhood’s core strategy, but the organization, nevertheless, established an armed and secret wing tasked with the fulfillment of what a segment of its members perceived as the duty of anti-colonial jihad.

Identity and memory as resilience: Applications of liberation psychology in a rural Maya Achi community

This study sought to understand interpretations of interconnections between historical trauma, contemporary violence, and resilience in a Maya Achi community currently engaged in promoting peace and social change through popular education. In particular, the ways in which participants drew upon identity and memory in articulating characteristics of community distress and resilience are discussed. The research is informed by liberation psychology and critical perspectives of mental health, particularly considering the challenges inherent in the promotion of collective memory of trauma and resistance in contexts of violence and humanitarian settings. Participant reflections on historical and contemporary violence highlight elements of collective distress, connecting identity and memory with acts of both oppression and resistance. Education and development are signaled as possible sites of resilience but also experienced as sites of power upholding the status quo. Diverse experiences and applications of identity and memory provide insight into the ways in which community organizations working in contexts of political violence might navigate polarizing and paradoxical discourses in order to subvert, co-opt, or adapt to hegemonic cultural, political, and economic power relations in the process of transformation for collective resilience.

Mapping Perceptions of Violence Across Asian Regions and Countries

Violence is increasing in Asia. However, limited research exists on the prevalence and types of violence across Asian regions and countries; a comprehensive study on a continental-scale in Asia has been understudied. Guided by the World Health Organization’s definition of violence, this study used World Values Survey Wave 7 ( n = 35,435) to map the perceptions of the justifiability of three categories of violence (self-inflicted, interpersonal, collective) with five subtypes (suicide, intimate partner violence against wife, child abuse, violence toward other people, political violence) in six regions and 24 countries in Asia. Findings indicate that perceptions of the justifiability of violence are significantly different across regions in Asia. Perceptions of the justifiability of various types of violence differed across Asian countries. Considering the complexity and diversity of violence across Asian regions and countries, this study may be a cornerstone for violence research in Asia.

Youth Bulge in a Pandemic-Stricken World

As the year 2020 dawned, the world underwent a paradigmatic shift that impacted all aspects of life. While it is axiomatic that the coronavirus pandemic left an indelible effect on all age groups, the author is especially interested in analysing the impressions that the pandemic can leave on the lives of youth. With history providing anecdotes of contagions having led to political violence and widespread massacres, this chapter will explore how the current pandemic can lead to youth radicalisation in an age of social media and in countries witnessing youth bulge. This study will be carried out at the intersection of international relations, international security, and political psychology and within the parameters of youth bulge, social-psychology, and radicalisation. In doing so, the author will propose a prognostic approach to provent youth radicalisation rather than prevent it in retrospect.

Autofiction and Film: Archival Practices in Post-millennial Documentary Cinema in Argentina and Spain

This chapter examines three recent autofictional documentaries produced in Argentina and Spain—Albertina Carri’s Cuatreros (Rustlers), Mercedes Álvarez’s Mercado de futuros (Futures Market), and Víctor Erice’s Vidros partidos (Broken Windows)—which share a distinctive “archival impulse.” These films propose a meaning in a specific political sense which we read in relation to the contexts of the Iberian financial crisis and the memories of political violence during the last dictatorship in Argentina. We address the autofictional strategies through which the filmmakers “re-stage” the archive by adopting an aesthetics of ambiguity that unsettles the modern paradigm of the archive as static evidence of a given reality, revolving instead around a conception of the archive as a self-reflective process that becomes the subject matter in its own right.

The Long-Term Effects of Living in a Shared and Continuous Traumatic Reality: The Case of Israeli Families on the Border With Gaza

This article presents a literature review of the concept of intergenerational transmission of traumatic stress among a specific population of Israeli parents and children living near the Israeli/Gaza border, an area that can essentially be viewed as a laboratory of shared, continuous, and stressful reality resulting from ongoing political violence. The Google Scholar database was used to search only for peer-reviewed articles written in English and published between 2002 and 2020, and the particular focus of the study was Israeli families living in the “Gaza envelope”: communities that have been on the receiving end of rockets and mortars from Gaza for the past 20 years. The review was based on 35 articles and sheds light on the existence of studies using a variety of perspectives (e.g., psychological, biopsychosocial, and behavioral). Findings demonstrate the effects of continuous stress situations on the family dynamic, even before birth, among this small population. In addition, they show that to understand the unique process of intergenerational trauma transmission in a shared continuous traumatic reality, it is important to adopt a comprehensive perspective so as to understand the reciprocal, long-lasting, and transgenerational effects of being exposed to traumatic stress. This perspective can be used as a basis for developing family intervention strategies that are appropriate for preventing stress outcomes that derive from living in the context of persistent violence.

Collective violence and the culture of peace: researching the social psychology of memory and social reconciliation

This monograph aims to disseminate the results of various research studies carried out in the field of social and community psychology. The studies focus on efforts to build a culture of peace in post-conflict contexts and societies that have suffered collective and socio-political violence, with multiple and persistent human rights violations. Six studies on the psychosocial effects of transitional justice rituals from Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, Basque country, Chile, and Ecuador compose this issue. This issue presents a series of results regarding the effects of reparation rituals and Truth Commissions, combining different methods and analysis strategies, including general population surveys, newspaper and social media content analysis, community intervention assessments and qualitative documentary analysis. Finally, two review books were included. First, a Peace Psychology Book that explores the implications and difficulties faced by societies that have experienced large-scale collective violence. Second, the problem of human rights violations and how to confront them, socio-political conflicts and the building of a culture of democracy and peace in Latin America are transversal axes of the chapters of this second book.