Anatomy of a Regional Civil War: Guangxi, China, 1967–1968

During the violent early years of China’s Cultural Revolution, the province of Guangxi experienced by far the largest death toll of any comparable region. One explanation for the extreme violence emphasizes a process of collective killings focused on households in rural communities that were long categorized as class enemies by the regime. From this perspective, the high death tolls were generated by a form of collective behavior reminiscent of genocidal intergroup violence in Bosnia, Rwanda, and similar settings. Evidence from investigations conducted in China in the 1980s reveals the extent to which the killings were part of a province-wide suppression of rebel insurgents, carried out by village militia, who also targeted large numbers of noncombatants. Guangxi’s death tolls were the product of a counterinsurgency campaign that more closely resembled the massacres of communists and suspected sympathizers coordinated by Indonesia’s army in wake of the coup that deposed Sukarno in 1965.

The Domination of the Kurds

We do two things in this article: develop a novel conception of domination and show how the Kurdish people are dominated in this novel sense. Conceptions of domination are usually distinguished in terms of paradigm cases and whether they are moralised and/or normdependent accounts, or neither. By contrast, we argue there is a way of understanding domination in terms of distinct social kinds. Among kinds of domination, like economic or racial or sexual domination, there must be a specifically political kind of domination. Borrowing from Carl Schmitt’s framework of differing degrees of political enmity, we argue political domination is best understood as an existential form of domination whereby one people aim to prevent the independent existence of another people mainly through the uncontrolled power and extreme violence involved in absolute enmity. This conception of existential domination is offered as an example of a non-moralised, normindependent account of domination. We then argue that the Kurdish people, who are the largest stateless people in the world, suffer existential domination from the absolute enmity expressed towards them by the four nation-states they find themselves dominated within: Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

The Emptiness of Hardcore: Consuming Violence in Hotline: Miami

The article explores the challenges to (media) consumerism posed in the indie action game Hotline: Miami (Dennaton Games, 2012). Hotline deconstructs not only indulgence associated with violent gaming but also its main nostalgic interest–the cultural era of the 1980s–through a ludification of excess. I will aim to demonstrate this through an analysis of the game’s “procedural rhetoric” (Bogost) and narrative structure. Overwhelming the player’s senses with intense audiovisuals, and explicitly confronting her motivations for participating in extreme violence, the game balances the game experience between a trance-like state of indulgent overexposure and metaleptic commentary. The sensory overload is also sharply contrasted with the level of precision necessary to complete the levels, bending the adrenaline-pumping core of the gameplay towards mechanics more common in stealth-based games. The system of in-game rewards and the overall narrative structure further complicate the purposefulness of player acts, questioning the teleology of gore in gaming and subverting the conventional notion of video game violence as entertainment. As I will argue, the metaludic commentary destabilizes the game through irony, relativizing the player’s commitment to it. In so doing, it makes Hotline: Miami a prime example of “dissonant development” (Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter), a game that manages to both sweep the market and challenge its basic premises as an entertainment medium.

Macabre ceremonies: How Los Zetas produces extreme violence to promote organizational cohesion

Why do some organized crime groups (OCGs) carry out face-to-face killings where perpetrators debase their victims and defile their bodies? Leading criminologists contend that OCGs carry out extreme killings deliberately to attain specific performance objectives. Conversely, psycho-sociological scholars argue that extreme killings only occur in situations that affect perpetrators’ reasoning and emotions. In their view, these situations are largely beyond OCGs’ control. I argue that analyzing extreme killings as organizational rituals can contribute to reconciling these seemingly conflicting views. More specifically, I contend that the OCG known as Los Zetas ritualizes executions to generate the conditions that make extreme violence possible. Through ritualization, Los Zetas influences executioners’ perceptions of extreme behavior from something abhorrent into something valued, desirable, and enjoyable. Once the conditions conducive to extreme violence emerge, Los Zetas exploits it to attain utilitarian objectives.

Ethnic ‘Ferociousness’ in Colonial Wars

This article explores the myths and evidence surrounding extreme violence and the framing of ‘ethnic soldiers’ as loyal and indispensable Moluccan soldiers in the Dutch army in the Indonesian War of Independence, 1945–1949. In this article, we first interrogate the origins of this framing in the Dutch–Indonesian case and the type of sources underlying this perspective. Next, we present the results of our research, which combines a study of Dutch veterans’ ego documents and oral-history projects. Based on this analysis, we reconsider both the framing and the evidence, after which we conclude with some comparative observations on ‘ethnic soldiers’ and the sources and perspectives underlying the ambivalent, but increasingly critical, framing of these men. Our methodology includes the use of digital-humanities techniques.

Greek Combat Sport and the Borders of Athletics, Violence, and Civilization

The Greek combat sports, boxing, wrestling, and pankration include elements of extreme violence. Wrestling and boxing bouts in Greek mythology not infrequently end in death. Contrary to the widely held view that the Greeks kept their boxing free of the dangerous spiked gloves that characterized Roman boxing, the Greek festivals at times did admit this murderous equipment. Why did the archaic culture of single combat described so vividly in Homer’s Iliad not find expression in the type of duelling seen throughout European history? The answer appears to lie in the Greek ability to engage and resolve through competitive athletics issues of honour and status that otherwise easily slide into far more destructive manifestations. This appears to be the reason there is a vibrant legacy of Greek combat sport, while the Hellenic world remained an antitype, not a precedent, for the carnage of sword and pistol duels in latter day Europe.

Dehumanization, Violence, and Genocide

The question of why people act violently is perhaps one of the most enduring and meaningful in social psychology. Among the various ways humans have mistreated one another over the millennia, intergroup violence and genocide stand as terrible monuments to our capacity for violence. It is sensible and important, then, that the psychological underpinnings of this mistreatment are examined as well as the factors that lead people to enact, sustain, and excuse violence. The major psychological theories of dehumanization are outlined, from its roots in genocide studies to a focus on everyday aggression and violence, and modern approaches are presented, which seek to explain extreme violence. The ways in which dehumanization can contribute to violence at the interpersonal level are mapped, examining evidence also from the closely related field of objectification. Finally, dehumanization and violence perpetrated at the level of groups is discussed, covering the small but growing literature focused directly on genocides. Throughout the examination of interpersonal and intergroup violence, it is worth noting that dehumanization plays many roles; it is the cause, catalyst, and consequence of violence.

Assorted Bastards of Australian History

Cook looms as large in Australian statuary as he does in nomenclature and, perhaps especially, psyche. To those who still deify him as the explorer at the vanguard of white-hatted colonial Enlightenment he remains the Neil Armstrong of his day – he who sailed where dragons be to bring English light and civility to the oldest continuous civilisation on the planet. To others of this continent, he is a sinister bogey man and a monster, the doorman who ushered in later colonisation with all its extreme violence, dispossession and ills with his east coast arrival in 1770 – in which his first act was to personally shoot two Gweagal men at Kamai.