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conflict and violence

Tags: classes

Lecture 1

  • What is violence?
    • are surgons violent?
    • what about natural disasters?
    • what responsbilities do people hve to violence?
  • structural violence?
  • is violence only physical?
    • state effects, social/racial/ethnic lines?
  • war & violence are defined only as physical violence
  • “The coming anomoly” - Kaplan - 1995
  • francis fukuyama - 1992
  • Did these two people look at different processes?
    • did the nature of wars change?
    • the african civil wars lead to the “new wars theory”
      • resources instead of identity
  • how do we define conflict?
  • how do people research a conflict? Body counts?
  • Modern warfare tends to harm women/children

Lecture 2

What drives violence? Why do people become violent?

Shame: Emotions of Morality and Violence

papers

  • Shame as a motivator
    • Desire to seek basic forms of dignity
  • Compares violence to a contagious diease (undetected)
    • Not very convincing tbh, the metaphor somewhat falls flat
    • However, Bonnasse-Gahot et. al in 2005 had a study on how French riots followed a similar “contagion” model
  • Talks about how prisons have a cycle of punishment, harsh behaviors lead to harsh punishments
  • Proposes 3 conditions of violence
    1. Feel deeply ashamed of something
    2. Feel like they have no non-violent alternatives
    3. Lacks emotional capabilities at the time that inhibit the violent impulses
  • Fact note: before large scale woman’s shelters, the homicide rate between men/women were about the same. After shelters, the homicide rate of husbands killing wives doubled
  • “It is difficult for many of us to abandon our moral and legal way of thinking about violence” - pg 134
    • Does this also mean we tend to interpret state violence through an inherent legalistic kind of view?

Glick and Paluck: The Aftermath of Genocide

Lecture

  • Fukuyama’s end of history
  • Kaplan’s “The Coming Anarchy”
  • DId both of these look at different processes?
  • Did the nature of war mangle the definitions?
  • “new wars theory” - wars are fought over ideaology, not resources
  • Categorizing War
    • Scale
    • Type
    • Actors

Connecting Points

  • Remeberence as a victimization

Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Conflict

  • Richard Semour - Disaster nationalism
  • ethnic groups as culture bearing units - Bareh: 1965
  • ethnic groups do not have strict political orientaitons
  • what are the forms of collective belonging?
  • modernist (nationalism) vs marxist (nationalism)
  • instrumentalism
    • since ethnicty and nationalism are results of other circumstances
      • can be co-oped by elites
      • do elites bring out these identities?
  • in reality it is very hard to dismiss the actual actors
  • Mamdani - Trans-African Slaveries Thinking Historically
    • political violence in africa is a continuation of colonial rule
  • ethnically delinated regimes tend to be created by colonial rule

Migration & Violence

  • people/territory/state -> trinitarian state idea

Violence and its victims

  • humanitarian challenges
  • victim centered discourse
  • battle of solfernio
  • ww1 and ww2 were international humantiarian conflicts
  • challenges violence by creating victim and victimized
    • this discourse tends to be too simplistic
  • problems of the victimhood
    • victim/villan dichotemy
      • forced vs non-forced violence
    • force solutions upon refugees
      • we see them as passive
      • harret-bone 1989 imposing aid
      • jennifer hinnman work in kenya of somali refugees
    • excludes
      • the “wrong types” of victims
        • Fassin 2005, ticktin 2005 - Humantiarian borders
          • Ticktin, Miriam. “Where Ethics and Politics Meet: The Violence of Humanitarianism in France.” American Ethnologist 33, no. 1 (2006): 33–49.
  • how do communities resist violence?
    • peace communities in colombia
    • migration as resistance
      • involves agency
      • choosing to take their lives into their own hands
  • resisting camps & detention centers
    • protests and riots in camps
    • often times these places are detention like
  • what is resistance?
    • is resistance collective or individual?
      • protests/riots/strikes
    • contentious politics?
      • contention, collective action
    • score -> weapons of the weak
  • theorizing migrant resistance
    • acts of citizenship
      • enactment of citizenship from below
        • migration gets people to get their righs and claiming of risks
      • acts of citizenship, what changes citizenship
      • dynamic and accounts for rights of migrants
        • but also ignores citizenship’s ills
  • automomy of migration movement
  • border securitization

Refugges & Nationalism & Violence

  • structure & agency in sociology terms
  • agency - ability for people to take on rules
    • is agency the ability to resist a label imposed by an outsider?
  • context of individual resistance vs collective resistance
    • relationships between resistance and violence?
      • resistance is key to struggling against violence
      • violence breeds resistance

Security Climate

  • Cold war security
    • whose security was threatened?
      • primarily state security
  • post cold war shift
    • changes the way security was concieved
    • shift from security studies to constrictivism
    • power struggles between states
    • how are threats constituted?
  • what does a “human security” consist of?
    • states are:
      • armies
      • states
      • terrotires
    • humans are:
      • food
      • health
      • education
      • poverty
  • is this a peculiar masking as a universal?
  • how are things concieved of as security threats?
    • what happens when things become a “other” security threat?

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