Lecture Week 5 Flashcards
(21 cards)
Warscapes
Landscapes characterised by brutal violence, political volatility, physical insecurity and the social, political and economic disruptions and instabilities. This focus can help to unravel dynamics of conflict and the larger impact of violence.
How to frame violence?
- Violence is slippery concept: nonlineair, productive, destructive, and reproductive;
- Violence is always contextualized – context shapes actors and victims but also those who represent them;
- Social and cultural dimensions of violence: gives its power and its meaning (‘text’);
- It defies easy categorization: it can be everything and nothing; it can be legitimate and illegitimate; visible or invisible; necessary or useluess; senseless and gratuitous or utterly rational and strategic.
- Violence as self-defense …
- vs violence as tool to produce social, economic, political change ?
- Everyday violence (slow starvation, disease, humilitation… - usually invisible) vs direct violence
- revolutionary violence vs state repression (often transparent, painfully graphic);
- violence is everywhere – family as violent social institution;
- Violence is communicative and needs an audience to render an effect;
- Violence is always and everywhere historically contingent: it can never be morally or politically neutral
Violent as a product or process
As product: assumption that violence is sporadic, singular episode or set of such episodes. When episode occurs, it does so as the exception to the norm (erupts at specific time and in particular place, and is marked by its temporal and spatial occurence – violence as specific act
As process: violence never simple product with seamless narrative or fixed meaning; it is cumulative and always spills over; it creates and recreates new norms of collective self-understanding.
What do Sartre and Camus have in common?
There both existentialists:
- loose movement that considers the nature of the human condition as a key philosophical problem
- articulating how the new world might look like (post-war)
- Building on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger etc.
- Movement beyond authors: Picasso, Cezanne, Hopper, …
- Emphasis on freedom and struggle for self-creation nformed emancipatory politics of Luther King, Du Bois…
- Key concepts: freedom, authenticity (breaking with tradition and convention), engagement (giving sense of and giveing meaning to our own existence)
What is the Sartre-Camus debate about?
Its about the question: is violence needed?
What is the thought of Camus?
- A revolution inevitably leads to authoritarian dictatorship and a reinforcement of power of the state
- he calls for non-violence in the face of terrorism
- Systemic violence ideology committed in the name of revolution is completely unjustifiable
- violence might be used in extreme circumstances but the use of revolutionary violence is utopian, absolutist and a betrayal of yourself
- call for peaceful socialism
What is the thought of Sartre?
- Violence is a necessary part of putting the world to rights
- The ends justify the means
- Colonial subjects can only regain their humanity and emancipate through acts of revolutionaty violence
How do violence and power relate following Hannah Arendt?
- Power is the human ability to act in concert
- Consensus and reaching to an agreement through debate is the essential characteristic of power
- Violence is destructive to power
- To sum up: politically speaking, it is insufficient to say that power and violence are not the same. Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent… Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it
- violence van be justifiable but it never will be legitimate
How do violence and colonialism relate following Fanon?
- Structural violence is the defining characteristics of empire: For centuries the capitalists have behaved in the under-developed world like nothing more than war criminals
- Colonialism is therefore violent: . It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence
- Violence is therefore a strategy: Torture is an expression and a means of the occupant-occupied relationship
How can violence be used following Fanon? For what means?
- Violence as sole strategy to succesful liberation: Armed conflict alone can really drive out these falsehoods (colonial civil administration, by the military occupation, and by economic exploitation) created in man which force into inferiority the most lively minds among us and which, literally, mutilates us
- Violence to restore humanity and agency: At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force
How can violence be used for true liberation in a colonial context (Fanon)?
- Violence is a part of a struggle to reach a true decolonisation. Liberation is the total destruction of the colonial system.
- Violence needs a clear purpose
How is violence not good following butler?
Violence produces social inequality
The practive of nonviolence is a sustained commitment
He critiques the instrumentalist view on violence, as a mean to achieve goals
He critics individualism and self-defense: violence is an attakc on interdependency of life.
What two dimensions of violence are there (Kalyvas)?
- perpetrator of violence is a state or a non-state actor
- the target of violence is a state or a non-state actor
What types of political violence are there (Kalyvas)
interstate war,
state repression,
genocide,
ethnic cleansing,
inter-communal violence,
organised crime/cartel violence,
military coup,
mass protest/rebellion/riots,
political assassination
terrorism
civil wars
For violence to start, it had to imaginable. What is the four-stage model from conflict to war? (Schroder and Schmidt)
- Conflict: existing contradiction as basis of inter-group competition
- Confrontation: parties see the contradiction as something relevant, leading to antagonistic relationship
- Legitimation: violence officially sanctioned as legitimate course of action through imagination of violent scenarios
- Organised violence and war
How is memory and history used as an important code of war?
- Narratives and performances make people accept the violent course of action proposed by leaders as legitimate and justified
- It is used to make up conflict parties by numerous sub-groups pursuing their own agendas
How is social interpretation of violence very important?
Violence without a public will still leave people dead, but is socially meaningless. Violent acts are efficient because of their staging of power and legitimacy, probably even more so than due their physical result.
How is violence experienced (Nordstrom)?
- Wars are lost and won because people fear death: because they havea horror of dismemberment, because theyfeel the burdens of oppression so strongly they are willing to risk life andlimb. People don’t fight orflee war because of the sheer factof violence.They fight or flee war because of what violence “feels” like;’
- Violence feels like existential crisis: violence nor war is limited to the physical carnage of the battlefield’.
What are the effects of violence?
-Violence is not limited to physical carnage: Violence reconfigures its victims andthe social milieu that hosts them.
- Violence has lasting effects on whole of society: effects that will shape postwar aswellaswartimelife,thenwemustrethinkthewhole issue of who are winners and losers, and even whatthe termswinners andlosers mean.’
What happens when violence is seen as central feature and analytical framework of war?
- Analysts focus mostly on two problems when looking at war-torn societies: how is violence organised? and how do warscape inhabitants handle it?
- it is all about what coping with violence does involve?
- Mainly looking at the ‘destructive capacity’ of violence, at how social tissue of the community is damaged;
- Warscapes as ‘socially unstable places’, with the spread violence being considered in terms of viral contagion. Historically constituted social relations and cultural meanings undone by violence;
- The outcome: violence as alternative socialising context, coping with violence considered as the only social role and task for warscape inhabitants.
How to move beyond the focus on only violence?
- What about the other potential sources of motive force that shape social behavior ? What about the other roles, positions, exchanges, social processes giving meaning to society ?
- How do processes other than violence shape war-time social processes and experiences ?
