“The Post-Election Violence Has Brought Shame on This Place”: Narratives, Place, and Moral Violence in Western Kenya (original) (raw)
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2020
There has always been violence. There will always be violence. Although possibly true, these statements fail to grapple with the sheer number of people brutalised, terrorised and killed in the Great Lakes region. According to one source, around 38 000 people die each month in the eastern Congo due to war-related causes (Lemarchand 2009). If the killings in Rwanda and Burundi are included, approximately 5.5 million people have died in this region from war-related causes since 1994. The inevitability of violence also does not excuse the long history of muted response from the international community to the crimes against humanity and human rights abuses committed in the Great Lakes region. Popular judgements of the violence as 'incomprehensible', 'unimaginable', 'unspeakable' and 'evil' temper efforts to intervene or to recognise our moral responsibility for the victims. Along with such judgements are attitudes such as: The situation is complex. How do we help what we cannot comprehend? Anyway, how can anyone begin to 'fix' such atrocities? Less commonly, people mention shame for the violence of colonisation that complicates any heroic effort to rescue people in the region. How could any response be straightforwardly and selflessly humanitarian given the well-chronicled colonial exploitation of the Congo, or the potential for future exploitation and profit from the abundant natural resources? Wouldn't any gesture naturally be met with scepticism? Especially given the failure to respond to the Rwandan genocide of 1994, this shame is very real, complicated and not easily swept away. I would like to argue that the failure to protect victims of violence is not related solely to the history of the Great Lakes region, or to racism or colonialism, but reveals aspects of the deep psychology of Western modernity. The people of the Great Lakes region are learning first-hand how victimisation is often handled in modern, shame-avoiding, capitalist democracies. The shame of violence, as well as the feelings of vulnerability and self-loathing that shame characteristically calls forth, are often dissociated from the modern individual's awareness. Furthermore, the denial of shame not only keeps people from feeling their own suffering, but also acknowledging the suffering of others.
The Mosaic of Violence – An Introduction
Civil Wars, 2009
Violence leads to destruction and, especially in form of collective violence and war, unfolds enormous destructive capacities, bringing about distress, hardship, suffering and horror. Violence destroys social relations, economic opportunities and political institutions. Widespread violence furthermore hints at profound shortcomings of the states affected: their incapability to monopolise the means and use of violence and to provide security for their citizens. These aspects commonly associated with collective violence have contributed to the general assumption that violence belongs mainly into the realm of failure, lack of order and chaos.
The many faces of violence (FWF P 20300)
The Many Faces of Violence: Toward an Integrative Phenomenological Conception Events of extreme violence, such as suicide-attacks, 9/11, or the “return of a new archaic violence,” have recently renewed attention about physical violence. Interestingly, there has also been a reappearance of concern about social, cultural, and structural violence. However, while all these forms have been subject to special studies, interdisciplinary research is still hampered by the lack of a unifying approach. What is missing is a paradigm that allows us to think these forms of violence as aspects of a unified phenomenon. To resolve this deficit and elaborate an integrative conception of violence, this project will use the phenomenological method. Generally viewed, phenomenology studies how we make sense of the world. Our working hypothesis holds that violence is destructive of sense and, on a more foundational level, our bodily capacities of sense-making. We see embodiment as a multi-level phenomenon, beginning with the physical “I can” and proceeding through various levels of cultural, social, and political practices. Given this correlation, we will analyze how violence destroys the ways we make sense of the world and ourselves according to our traditions and institutions. Because such sense structures delineate our world by forming a series of dependencies, we can be exposed to indirect violence, i.e. symbolic, cultural, and structural. To unfold the implications of our research, we will examine specific examples of cultural and political collapse, so-called “cultures of violence,” “coercive environments,” as well as structures of multiple social exclusion. In this context, we will also address the poietic function of violence and analyze how it is used for the formation and expression of identity, involving both individuals and collectivities. As to the traditional equation of sovereignty and freedom, expressions of identity imply determinations of the other in terms of irrationality and threat that can be used to justify one’s own violence. In uncovering this circle of violence and counter-violence, we, finally, seek to rethink our political categories beyond the logic of confrontation that rests upon essentialist misconceptions of our communal being. To construct an integrative approach to violence, our research will present a non-subjectivist phenomenology that enables us to see how violence is destructive of sense. In testing this hypothesis on historic, sociological and anthropological materials, we will ground our research empirically. Thus, we will, in the last analysis, elaborate a methodology for interdisciplinary research that will foster a deeper understanding of the many interrelated faces of violence. Project underwritten by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF P 20300) (1.11.2007 - 30.06.2011)
The Eye of the Beholder: Violence as a Social Process (2011)
2012
A triangular reconstruction of the social dynamics of violence offers a means to bridge the gap between research on the micro- and meso-level dynamics of vi- olent interaction on the one hand, and theories of power and domination on the other. The origins of this approach are found in the phenomenological pro- gramme of social science violence research formulated by German sociologists in the 1990s (Sofsky, von Trotha, Nedelmann, and others). Reconsidering their arguments in the framework of social constructivism, this article reconstructs violence as a triangular process evolving between “performer”, “target” and “ob- server”. Disentangling the dimensions of the somatic and the social shows, however, that these are not the fixed roles of agents, but changeable modes of ex- periencing violence. Violent interaction uses the suffering body to stage a positional asymmetry, i.e. a distinction between strength and weakness, between above and below, which can be exploited for the production and reproduction of social order.
Introduction: On Conflict and Violence
Studia Phaenomenologica, 2019
The premise of the present issue of Studia Phænomenologica is that phenomenology, by virtue of its being anchored in the concrete experience of subjectivity, of its specific conceptual endeavour and descriptive approach, has a unique theoretical potential not only to understand how the various aspects of violence are articulated with fundamental existential structures, but also to bring to light the intertwined meanings of the phenomenon of violence. In particular, the present issue is engaged in the task of capturing the complexity of the experience of violence by criss-crossing phenomenological perspectives on intersubjectivity (e.g., the problem of the hostile other, understood as an adversarial alterity), affectivity (e.g., the emergence of irritation, anger, wrath, and rage as a condition for conflict), and embodiment (e.g., the problem of vulnerability and of the infliction of pain intended by those involved in the factical situation of violence, having murder, the ultimate violence, as a limit). Another major reflection at stake is to consider how these structures of the phenomenon of violence are modalized according to the essential possibilities of spatiality and temporality, either by coming to the fore, or by fading, or by changing their configuration. In this case, it is only the description of the variations of the phenomenon of violence as a whole that can indeed reveal the modifications of its fundamental structures.