Violence as a Subject of Social Science I The Specificity of Political Violence (original) (raw)
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The course aims at presenting various approaches to explain reasons for violent conflict. It focuses on social and political violence, and their short and long-term effects on social development. The topics covered address why and how people turn to violence. They provide a map to conflicts and wars nationally and internationally. The course examines diverse research traditions to comprehend violence in a critical way. It looks at ideologies, social groups and social organizations that nurture the participation of individuals in violent actions. There will be two primary traditions that will be focused on; the first focuses on the “conditions” under which conflicts are produced and the second emphasizes the “attitudes” motivating individuals to engage in conflict. As each tradition possesses its own vocabulary, theoretical distinctions will aim at providing students with a broad spectrum of tools to comprehend the complex, paradoxical relationship between humans and war and violence. For example, though most world nations have ratified the International Bill of Human Rights, intra-state conflicts are an enduring reality.
Violence as a Subject of Social Science II The Structure of Opportunities and Rational Expectations
2021
After cited several types of violence in part I, they do not have the same significance, neither the same meaning nor the same geopolitical scale. Maybe, specificity of political violence consists of its occurrence when relations are no longer conceivable or negotiable not even institutionalized or instituted, in other words, when symbolization fails and public spaces where violence could be debated don't exist or are fragmentary or unbalanced.
The Relationship between Politics and Violence
Throughout the history of organised political life, violence has played an enormous role in every society created by man. World history has shown itself as the history of violence, if we consider the number of wars, civil wars, mass killings and many other forms of cruelties through and through. The recent two centuries are testimony to the case at point. The two most atrocious world wars were fought in the last century even before the mid-century point was reached. The present twenty-first century has become, as Lenin predicted, a period of wars and revolutions, in truth, a century of violence. Apart from the question, which asks, whether violence has declined throughout the ages or not, violence also emerges to be a predicament of our era, because in this age we start to problematize the phenomenon. It is in this age we have come to consider violence as a malady, look for its causes and think about ways of preventing it. In many contemporary western societies, where political and social institutions have effectively restricted the private and public forms of violence, "our capacity for enduring violence has diminished" while "the intensity of violence in certain instances has increased". The violence of modern times, when employed, engenders an intensified level of fear on the part of the individuals for the relative elimination of violence in daily lives contributes to its unexpectedness. Hence, a growing interest in the phenomenon of violence.
Political Violence: Its Neglected Dimension
2011
In majority of cases, politicians, analysts and scholars talking and writing on the subject of political violence have concentrated attention on the victims and effects (outcomes) of violence and violent activities at the exclusion of the perpetrators of violence, their motives and their existential situations. This has led to an inadequate understanding and analysis of the meaning, forms and justification of violence. What is being suggested in the paper is that a better understanding of the issues relating to political violence requires a shift of emphasis from the victim/effect approach to the perpetrator/motive/existential approach. This approach takes into consideration the role of perpetrators of violence, their motivations, and the social and existential conditions under which they operate. This position will be illustrated by the violence identified with the Boko Haram religious sect in Northern Nigeria. Introduction Major concerns of philosophers writing about violence have...
Tuesday :30-17:30; SCS E218 Student Office Hours: Friday 14:30-16:30, or by special appointment Email: asandor@uottawa.ca; Subject Line: POL 3162 C
Introduction to the Special Issue on Political Violence
Qualitative Sociology, 2008
The cover photo for this special issue on political violence depicts a peaceful street demonstration, perhaps the most studied tactic in the modern "repertoire of contention" (Tilly 1978, 1986, 1995a, b). The scene is non-violent, but as Julie Stewart explains in her article in this issue "A Measure of Justice: The Rabinal Human Rights Movement in Postwar Guatemala," the demonstration was staged in response to a 30-year-long campaign of state-sponsored political violence that took the lives of more than a thousand members of the Rabinal Mayan community in the 1980s. This peaceful demonstration is thus embedded in a complex, decades-long cycle of political violence. Political violence is a broad term for deeply contested actions, events, and situations that have political aims and involve some degree of physical force. The same events may be called by many other names: terrorism, insurgency, guerrilla warfare, counter-insurgency, self-defense, retribution, security policing, national defense, national liberation, statesponsored terrorism, or even genocide, depending on the circumstances and who is doing the naming. Using the neutral term "political violence" allows us to take a sociological approach that focuses on the socio-political sequences of action and contexts in which violence is embedded, and makes the naming of acts and the interpretation of their meaning an essential part of the analysis. The methodological tools of qualitative sociology are particularly well-suited to study of the unfolding of dynamic social processes and interactive meaning-making that occurs in messy, contested real-world contexts. The five articles we have selected for this special issue reflect the breadth of research that this approach invites. We begin with an essay by Donatella della Porta, "Research on Social Movements and Terrorism: Some Reflections" that provides an overview of the study of political violence by social scientists since the 1960s and helps to locate the other four articles in relation to
The recent interest in the sociology of violence has arisen at the same time that western societies are being urged to consider the profound social crisis provoked by global financial turmoil. Social changes demand the evolution of sociological practices. The analysis herein proposed, based on the studies of M. Wieviorka, La Violence (2005), and of R. Collins, Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory (2008), concludes that violence is subject to sociological treatments centered on the aggressors, on the struggles for power and on male gender. There is a lack of connection between practical proposals for violence prevention and the sociology of violence. It is accepted that violence as a subject of study has the potential, as well as the theoretical and social centrality, to promote the debate necessary to bring social theory up to date. This process is more likely to occur in periods of social transformation, when sociology is open to considering subjects that are still taboo in its study of violence, such as the female gender and the state. The rise of the sociology of violence confronts us with a dilemma. We can either collaborate with the construction of a sub discipline that reproduces the limitations and taboos of current social theory, or we can use the fact that violence has become a “hot topic” as an opportunity to open sociology to themes that are taboo in social theory (such as the vital and harmonious character of the biological aspects of social mechanisms or the normative aspects of social settings).
Violence: An international Journal #1, 2020
What drives some people to "perpetrate violence"? Why do others, by contrast, not perpetrate violence, even under the same conditions? Do all violent acts involve a radicalization or a dehumanization and degradation of civil relations between subjects, sometimes even between neighbors or even within the same family or community, be it ethnic or national? This special theme gathers contributions from many different geographical areas (mainly Morocco, Syria, Germany, and Rwanda) and from several disciplines (literature, political science, sociology, history) in order to offer keys to understanding the factors that trigger or accelerate the perpetration of violence, but also those that curb or limit it. The reader will also find exhaustive states of the art and case studies on different types of violence (riot, political, paramilitary, genocidal), leading to transversal theorizations that go well beyond dichotomies and old debates. For example, the authors discuss the "old" opposition between a situational and a procedural approach, embodied-not without artifice-by Browning and Goldhagen, or the necessary dehumanization of the enemy generally associated with the study of genocides. Another methodological choice with a strong epistemological implication consisted in not contrasting the recent theories on radicalization with those on extreme violence, and rejecting any obvious determinism between both moments, in order to avoid explaining the perpetration of violence in too facile a way. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2633002420924963 https://doi.org/10.1177/2633002420924963