The Effects of Violence on Communities: The Violence Matrix as a Tool for Advancing More Just Policies

In this essay, I illustrate how discussions of the effects of violence on communities are enhanced by the use of a critical framework that links various microvariables with macro-institutional processes. Drawing upon my work on the issue of violent victimization toward African American women and how conventional justice policies have failed to bring effective remedy in situations of extreme danger and degradation, I argue that a broader conceptual framework is required to fully understand the profound and persistent impact that violence has on individuals embedded in communities that are experiencing the most adverse social injustices. I use my work as a case in point to illustrate how complex community dynamics, ineffective institutional responses, and broader societal forces of systemic violence intersect to further the impact of individual victimization. In the end, I argue that understanding the impact of all forms of violence would be better served by a more intersectional and critical interdisciplinary framework.

‘A pair of buttocks’ that everybody hates

This article explores radical rudeness, a resistance strategy of deliberate rudeness to disrupt normative structures. Using the Uganda activist Dr Stella Nyanzi as a case study, I examine how women experiencing extreme structural marginalisation and systemic violence use radical rudeness in a nonlinguistic form (defiant disrobing) to speak back to power. Drawing from Black feminist theories of rage, I argue that radical rudeness is an instance of rage, not as a pernicious emotion, but as a legitimate strategy against patriarchy and dictatorial authoritarianism. I argue that Dr Stella Nyanzi’s naked protest utilises three intersecting forms of power – biopower, symbolic power and cosmological power – to resist the authoritarian Ugandan regime, turning her naked body into a powerful weapon of resistance.

Frontline Response to High Impact Domestic Violence in Bulgaria

According to the NGO Women Against Violence Europe, an estimated 30 per cent of women in Bulgaria suffer from domestic abuse every year. Thirty-five women were murdered in the context of domestic violence in 2018. The mistrust of law enforcement and the justice system inherited from the communist regime discourages victims from seeking assistance from the police and the judiciary. The issue of violence against women surfaced in the government's agenda due to the debates around the ratification of the Istanbul Convention, which was ultimately rejected. The country policies are characterised by a lack of change in the legal frameworks, a lack of official data, a lack of sufficient financing from the state budget, and a lack of established procedures for handling domestic violence cases. Ineffective coordination between institutions, the failure to make official statistics publicly available, the lack of a national register of acts of domestic violence, the requirement of proof of systemic violence to initiate criminal proceedings, and the lack of resources to support NGOs are all obstacles that result in a high number of acts of domestic violence that goes unaddressed by the courts. NGOs are at the forefront of the fight against domestic violence.

Resisting a postcolonial construction of historical trauma and healing: Critical discourse analysis of public apologies in Canada

The contemporary discourse around historical trauma and healing is site for debate and resistance in public spheres. Guided by critical scholars in language and power as well as post-and settler colonialism, this study analyzes texts and contexts of two public apologies in Canada – Chinese head tax, and residential schools for Indigenous children – to examine how historical trauma and healing were understood, and by doing so how the subject and object were re/constructed to maintain or resist social (dis)orders – postcolonial racial orders – in the past and the present of Canada. Findings included: (1) a split and temporal distance between the wrong past and the benevolent present with governments constructing themselves as the good subject reifying a sincere fiction of a liberal, benevolent, and just white-nation; (2) no acknowledgement of the cause of historical trauma, namely colonial governing; (3) ongoing construction of the other racialized population as victims/burdens/lesser citizens to current Canada; and (4) the explicit demand to collective forgetting of the past/historical trauma as current healing and inclusion. We discuss social responsibilities when historical wounds continue to leave injuries and the risk of perpetuating systemic violence to people with whom we currently share the nation all of us call home.

Alter-transitional justice; transforming unjust relations with the more-than-human

Drawing on the emerging field of multispecies justice, this article seeks to understand how the idea of transitional justice, capaciously understood, might be put to work to transform unjust relations between humans and the more-than-human. Reflecting on concerns in the literatures on animals and the environment concerning the cogency of addressing past wrongs against the more-than-human by using a justice framework, the article sets out a foundational agenda for transitional justice and a conceptual framework responsive to the ontological diversity of beings and communities other than humans. Focusing on soil specifically, the article explores the problem of developing transitional justice approaches for transforming relations that involve systemic violence where such violence is not acknowledged because the harmed being – soil – is not recognized as the type of community to which justice might be owed. To illustrate proto-transitional justice, the article considers both the work of regenerative farmers and emergent collaborations between farmers and visual artists to explore how engagements with the arts of relating to the more-than-human might move the as yet private transformations of relations with soil into a more public, albeit incipient, process of justice.

Childbirth in Transit

This chapter ethnographically explores childbirth practices at Taljai, a large urban slum on the southern outskirts of Pune city in India. Based on women’s recounting of their personal experiences and social relationships surrounding birth-giving at home, this chapter describes childbirth at Taljai as unstable, mirroring the migrant lives of women. Women’s migrant lives at Taljai are precarious and subject to material paucity and systemic violence, defined by strong internal negotiation and sociability surrounding their birth-giving practices at home. While homebirths are predicated on friendship networks among women, clinical births either indicate individual exclusion from women’s groups at Taljai or women’s active choice to avoid being controlled by other women. This chapter explores the tight gendered sociability surrounding homebirth at Taljai, demonstrating how women amalgamate experiences of self-birthing at home with home-birthing at the slum, instrumentalizing childbirth rituals as a means of social bonding.

EXPRESS: Identity Management as a Coping Strategy for Stigmatization: The Case of Indian Sex Workers in a Libidinal Market

Poor women can face stigmas about indolence, moral turpitude, and substance abuse. This stigmatized condition includes female sex workers, who live and work in situations that exacerbate impoverishment and bring societal exclusion and shame. We situate our arguments at the nexus of poverty and stigma and examine the value of identity formation and reformation in the context of female sex workers in India. These women face restrictions to meet basic needs and remain in the profession despite significant challenges. Our study reveals five identity pathways in their collective consciousness: protector, sacred, commoditized, provider, and eudaimonic/self-acceptance. They come together as themes that reflect these women's lived experiences who were forced to endure systemic violence in relative silence. We use and advance arguments provided by Hill, Ozanne, and Viswanathan and their various colleagues to frame our current understanding of their plight. We contribute to theory by revealing that these identities have positive consequences for personal reconfiguration under conditions of vulnerability. Finally, our results indicate that public policy should recognize the value of self-identities that support resistance in a marginalized marketplace. Sensitizing stakeholders, including policy makers, to destigmatization may also help sex workers gain the courage of their convictions to leave the profession.

Slavery and the “American Way of War,” 1607–1861

Slavery and warfare were inextricably intertwined in the history of Britain’s North American colonies and, subsequently, the early republic. Yet this deep connection has not been acknowledged in the historiography. In particular, the debate about an “American way of war” has neglected the profound significance of slavery as a formative factor in America’s “first way of war.” Here, these two forms of organized, systemic violence are considered not merely within a comparative framework but as phenomena whose relationship is so deeply enmeshed that they cannot be meaningfully understood in isolation. Slavery is thus placed centrally in an examination of American war making, from the colonial to the antebellum period. Three main areas are highlighted: slave raiding against Native Americans, slavery as a factor in imperial and national strategy-making and diplomacy, and slavery as an “internal war.”

The Revisionist Western and the Mythic Past

The role of myth in the Western has frequently been understood as that of cultural mystification, naturalizing the systemic violence that accompanied America’s westward expansion. Within this understanding, the sub-genre of the revisionist Western is understood to intervene with “counter-mythic” discourse. In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, however, myth emerges not merely as revisionist cultural narrative, but as a spatiotemporal aesthetic of experience, a sensibility conveying an imagined time-outside-of-time. In distinct ways, both films encourage us to imagine a mythic experience of the past through the soundtrack. Burt Bacharach’s pop score for Butch Cassidy and the use of Leonard Cohen’s songs in McCabe and Mrs. Miller distinctly position each film within a mythic space of timelessness in which the immediate present of a contemporary experience and the distancing effects of historicity might be imagined as blurring and freely flowing into one another.

Violence, crime dystopia and the dialectics of (dis)order in The Purge films

Crime dystopia is the cultural site where some of the most gripping fears around the failure to order, civilise and make life secure are expressed. In The Purge film franchise, crime becomes legal in America for a night each year, when violence and destructive impulses are freely discharged and actively encouraged by the US government. This article proposes a critical discussion of some of the criminological themes in the films, reading the institutionalised carnage of Purge night as a metaphor for the systemic violence of the market and further on for liberal governance as a philosophy of war, scarred by the horror of hidden monsters. It then argues that dystopian aesthetics can obscure the failures and antagonisms of the social order in the present, as well as punctuate anti-utopian fears of the future.