De nos jours, les partis politiques et les syndicats communiquent avant tout de jour, afin de se faire entendre du plus grand nombre. Il n’en a pas toujours été ainsi. En pleine Guerre froide, les militants devaient bien souvent agir la nuit pour promouvoir et défendre leurs idées – quitte à s’exposer physiquement à des représailles de leurs adversaires. La communication politique après-guerre privilégiait bien souvent les meetings nocturnes (non-)contradictoires, parfois émaillés d’incidents. Ce n’est que progressivement avec la technicisation de (...) la communication et la mise à distance des corps que la violence physique va reculer pour perdurer dans les marges politiques. Profondément liés à des organisations politiques, les syndicats répondaient en partie au même schéma, bien que le déclin de la violence physique nocturne se soit enclenché plus rapidement au profit d’une violence diurne maîtrisée. Cet article contribue à l’étude de l’évolution de la violence militante politique et... (shrink)

Militante et réflexive, l’histoire des femmes a aussi besoin d’exprimer ses doutes et ses inconforts. Rattrapée par l’actualité, la violence et nombre d’événements cruels et tragiques, par des incertitudes majeures vécues par l’ensemble du monde intellectuel, elle pose aujourd’hui en cet article collectif des interrogations et des inquiétudes. Ce travail à plusieurs (les participantes du Groupe d’histoire des femmes du CRH) cherche à mettre à plat ce qui actuellement se dérobe à notre connaissance, en partant de notions-clés souvent (...) utilisées comme consentement, sexualité, écriture, patriarcat, etc. Chacune de ces notions est discutée à la lumière des brouillages actuels, des temporalités nouvelles, de l’avènement triomphant du corps marchandise, de la pauvreté grandissante, etc. (shrink)

Militante et réflexive, l’histoire des femmes a aussi besoin d’exprimer ses doutes et ses inconforts. Rattrapée par l’actualité, la violence et nombre d’événements cruels et tragiques, par des incertitudes majeures vécues par l’ensemble du monde intellectuel, elle pose aujourd’hui en cet article collectif des interrogations et des inquiétudes. Ce travail à plusieurs (les participantes du Groupe d’histoire des femmes du CRH) cherche à mettre à plat ce qui actuellement se dérobe à notre connaissance, en partant de notions-clés souvent (...) utilisées, comme consentement, sexualité, écriture, patriarcat, etc. Chacune de ces notions est discutée à la lumière des brouillages actuels, des temporalités nouvelles, de l’avènement triomphant du corps marchandise, de la pauvreté grandissante, etc. (shrink)

Este artículo se focaliza en el Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) y la problemática de la violencia política, que fue central en su historia. Abarcaremos el período 1965-1970 y estudiaremos el discurso que tuvo el MIR sobre este punto, construido tanto en los escritos teóricos como en los discursos de sus dirigentes, el lugar y el rol que ocupó la violencia en la práctica política del MIR, y por último la articulación entre prácticas políticas y representaciones. El artículo está estructurado (...) en torno a los siguientes ejes: el contexto político, ideológico e intelectual que provee al MIR argumentos permitiéndole legitimar el recurso a la violencia (ante los militantes y la sociedad); el debate en torno a la violencia en tanto regulador de las tensiones y divisiones internas; y por último, la interacción entre el uso de la fuerza por el MIR y el espacio público (la violencia y su efecto mediático, las respuestas del Estado). (shrink)

Georges Labica offre, comme il le dit lui-même, à tous ceux qui refusent le " nouvel ordre mondial actuel " et luttent pour le changer radicalement, ce bilan d'une œuvre, à la fois théorique et militante, longuement mûrie. Qu'il s'agisse des mots, des concepts ou des choses, étroitement imbriqués, la pensée critique, dont Marx demeure la référence obligée, ne saurait rien laisser en l'état de ce qui constitue notre présent. La leçon en est limpide. Démocratie et révolution apparaissent plus (...) que jamais comme indissociables. La démocratie pour la révolution, la révolution pour la démocratie : il n'est pas d'autre programme dans la lutte des classes antilibérale et anti-impérialiste, où la violence dominante, parvenue à des formes extrêmes, appelle la violence révolutionnaire des dominés, comme sa seule réplique adéquate. (shrink)

Dieser Beitrag untersucht die Verteidigung von Öko-Sabotage durch den schwedischen Ökomarxisten Andreas Malm, einschließlich seiner expliziten und impliziten theoretischen Fundamente. Malm wirft Fragen für die Verteidigung mit bürgerlichen Mitteln durch nicht-gewalttätige Aktivisten im Allgemeinen auf und für zivilen Ungehorsam insbesondere. Leider erzeugen wesentliche Spannungen in Malms Verteidigungskonzeption einige Verwirrung in seiner Analyse. Er attackiert nicht-gewalttätigen Protest (einschließlich zivilen Ungehorsam) in greller, unfairer Farbigkeit. Da er zentrale Ideen seiner Analyse nicht erklärt – insbesondere den Zusammenhang zwischen politischer Gewalt (violence) und (...) nicht-Gewalttätigkeit (viol‍ence), maskiert sein theoretischer Rahmen den Umstand, dass einige seiner Vorschläge weniger neu oder subversiv sind, als er annimmt; dieser Fehler ist möglicherweise die Quelle für eine konkurrierende – und noch verstörendere – Tendenz, mögliche autoritäre Antworten auf die Klimakrise zu unterstützen. Malm entwertet schließlich zivilen Ungehorsam und überschätzt die „Tugenden“ militanter Öko-Sabotage. (shrink)

In the past two decades, scholars in China and beyond have vigorously demonstrated that the just war discourse is integral to classical Confucianism and that the classical Confucian idea of “punitive expedition” can be best understood in terms of humanitarian intervention. The sceptics, however, claim that in describing the ancient sage‐king's bloodless punitive expeditions, what classical Confucians really had in mind was not so much to endorse morally justified forms of aggressive war but to highlight the paramount importance of the (...) ruler's moral self‐cultivation and benevolent government. This paper examines closely the disagreement between the two positions and offers a more historically grounded justification for the just war interpretation of classical Confucianism. It pays special attention to the importance of ritual order in classical Confucian political theory and discusses how the Warring States political circumstances led thinkers such as Mencius and Xunzi to shift their attention from ritual order to the well‐being of the people. (shrink)

This paper lays the groundwork for developing a thorough-going phenomenological description of different phenomena of violence such as physical, psychic and structural violence. The overall aim is to provide subject-centered approaches to violence within the social sciences and the humanities with an integrative theoretical framework. To do so, I will draw primarily on the phenomenological accounts of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alfred Schutz, and thereby present guiding clues for a phenomenologically grounded theory of violence.

ABSTRACT Violence is a central idea for political theory but there is very little agreement about how it should be understood. This paper examines some fashionable approaches to the concept and argues against ‘wide’ definitions, particularly those of the ‘structuralist’ variety of which that offered by the sociologist, Johan Galtung, is taken as typical. A critique is also given of ‘legitimist’ definitions which incorporate some strong notion of illegitimacy into the very meaning of violence. Structuralist definitions are much (...) favoured by the political left whereas legitimist accounts are more common on the right but these connections, though psychologically understandable, are not logically tight. Both structuralist and legitimist analyses are criticised on conceptual and practical grounds and a defence of a more restricted definition is presented. The paper concludes with some remarks about the point of having a concept of violence of the type delineated. (shrink)

In recent years American legislatures and other governing bodies, public and private, have been considering, probably more frequently than ever before, problems associated with the idea of overthrow of government by force and violence. The question usually takes the form of whether Communists believe in and advocate this doctrine; and, if they do, whether they should therefore be penalized in various ways. This issue is and has been central to a series of legal actions which, whatever their ultimate outcome, (...) will constitute a landmark in the history of American jurisprudence. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt's friend/enemy principle is exposed to in-depth philosophical analysis and historical examination with the aim of showing that the political follows hostility, violence and terror as form follows matter. The book argues that the partisan is an umbrella concept that includes the national and global terrorist.

The growing literature on gender in armed conflict and the debates over post-conflict reparations for women, focus on the prevalence and harms of sexual violence. While this focus has recently been critiqued, there are few articulations of other types of gendered injuries. This article decentres the emphasis on sexual violence by examining the intersection between forced displacement and political insecurity. Based on extensive field research in Colombia, and using as an example a case study of an internally displaced (...) women’s grassroots organization in Cartagena, Colombia, this article examines political insecurity as a specifically gendered harm. It reflects on the concrete circumstances of insecurity, on the relevance of traditional gender roles in the constitution of insecurity, and on the challenges for court-ordered remedies. This widening of the scope of attention also invites complex reflection on the possibility of transformative reparations in post-conflict situations. (shrink)

Often a physician’s first introduction to a patient is not a physical encounter but a review of their chart. A glaring “violence risk” flag in an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) is often noticeable...

Citizens of affluent countries bear a far greater responsibility for world poverty than they typically realise. This is so because poverty is more severe, more widespread and more avoidable than officially acknowledged and also because it is substantially aggravated by supranational institutional arrangements that are designed and imposed by the governments and elites of the more powerful states. It may seem that this analysis of world poverty implies that citizens of affluent countries have forfeited their right not to be killed (...) in the course of a redistributive war and that such a war would be both just and permissible. In fact, however, it has none of these three implications. This finding should be welcomed insofar as violence and macho talk of violence are in our world highly counterproductive responses to the injustice of poverty. (shrink)

The article puts into question the idea that the nucleus of religion - the God-talk - is peaceful , whereas all aggression should be located on the side of humankind, through differentiating a conceptual model of relating war to the concept of God in the Jewish-Christian tradition. He urges a more complex model of connecting God to issues of war and peace.

This special issue of Human Nature presents selected works from the 2015 and 2017 “Warfare, Environment, Social Inequality, and Pro-Sociability” conferences held at the Center for Cross-Cultural Study in Seville, Spain. These investigations explore the manifestations of indigenous warfare and violence from a host of theoretical perspectives. Topics range from the origins of warfare to the psychological repercussions of combat, the relationship between warfare and status, as well as the documentation of peace processes among warring groups. This issue also (...) examines the effects of militarization and coercive conservation on indigenous peoples. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article suggests that Asian American rhetorics of sound destabilize representational politics by complicating the racialization of sonic difference. The author investigates the relationship between notions of Asian American citizenship and not-Blackness in vocal performance. By attending to sonic rhetorics through Awkwafina’s blaccent controversy, the article explores the condition of epistemic violence that position Asian American voices as “unhearable.”.

Based on the argument that violence has a parasitic quality rather than an essence of its own, this article seeks to bring to light the conversion processes through which violence crystallises out of, as well as into, various phenomena. Violence is first examined in terms of the relation between perpetrator and victim with, however, an emphasis on the fact that violence cannot be reduced to the intention or the act of the perpetrator. On the contrary, (...) class='Hi'>violence is shown to have the character of pathos and to open up a dimension of which the act itself is only a part. Further, the author argues that in being directed towards the other, violence harbours a performative contradiction: by turning the addressee into a thing to be destroyed, the addressing act cancels itself. The paper also sets out to identify the breeding grounds of violence, which, due to its capacity for conversion, can be detected in various phenomena that are not necessarily linked to violence. This means that violence can resort to various mechanisms and can emerge in multiple fields of activity: in bureaucracy, economics, medicine, politics, war, and most importantly, in everyday life, hidden under inconspicuous but sometimes pervasive forms. Finally, the metamorphoses of violence are shown to ultimately rest on the temporal character of violence, which implies that violence has a time of preparation and an aftermath. (shrink)

This essay explores the treatment of violence in Derrida's ethico-political work, stressing the underlying continuity of Derrida's thinking of politics, from his first reading of Levinas to one of the last notions he developed, autoimmunity. Haddad analyzes the use to which the idea of a “lesser violence” has been put, arguing that it is incompatible with Derrida's other claims.

The literary oeuvre of Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) has attracted a great deal of interest over the past 200 years, not only from writers, but also from numerous leading philosophers. Among them is Georges Bataille, who particularly emphasizes the apathetic character of the Sadean libertines, meaning that they feel nothing at all. More specifically, the French philosopher focuses on their apathetic enjoyment that goes hand in hand with the abuse of victims. The goal of this article is to clarify that (...) peculiar pleasure by comparing it, among other things, with stoicism and mysticism. It will be shown that in the Sadean universe not moral transgression is central, but rather the transgression of a metaphysical boundary, i.e. the boundary between the human and non-human. (shrink)

This article has two parts. On the one hand, it summarizes a lot of the work I have done over the last 10 years. The summary starts with three phenomenological insights: into temporalization, into intersubjectivity, and into foundations. It ends with a discussion of ethics based on Kant and Bergson. On the other hand, the article presents my responses to three commentators on my work: Emilia Angelova, Edward S. Casey, and Samir Haddad. All three raise important questions about my work. (...) All three bring me back to the main point of my work: strategies for letting others be free. Thus, to use a phrase that probably seems out of date, this article could have been called “strategies of deconstruction.”. (shrink)

This article provides an overview of current knowledge about the relationship between mental illness, violence, homicides, and suicides, with a view towards crafting sensible public policy options for reducing gun violence towards self or others. With this knowledge as a backdrop, the limitations of the federal National Instant Background Check System as both over-inclusive and under-inclusive in identifying people with mental illness who pose potential risks are discussed. Finally, the article describes emerging approaches for identifying and removing firearms (...) from persons who pose potential risks of gun violence towards self or others, including Extreme Risk Protection Orders and other options. (shrink)

Previous research on warfare in a worldwide sample of societies by Ember and Ember (Journal of Conflict Resolution, 36, 242–262, 1992a) found a strong relationship between resource unpredictability (particularly food scarcity caused by natural disasters) in nonstate, nonpacified societies and overall warfare frequency. Focusing on eastern Africa, a region frequently plagued with subsistence uncertainty as well as violence, this paper explores the relationships between resource problems, including resource unpredictability, chronic scarcity, and warfare frequencies. It also examines whether resource scarcity (...) predicts more resource-taking in land, movable property, and people, as well as the commission of atrocities. Results support previous worldwide results regarding the relationship between resource unpredictability and warfare frequency. Results regarding resource-taking and atrocities are more nuanced and complex. In almost all findings, relationships are generally in opposite directions in nonstate and state societies. In post-hoc analyses, atrocities are significantly more likely to be committed in states than in nonstates. (shrink)

At the end of the Second World War, the figure of Gandhi haunts political philosophy as it wrestles with the task of justifying violence in the name of history. The story begins with Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at noon in 1938. Gandhi’s name appears during a discussion between Roubachof and Ivanof. A few years later (1946), Koestler publishes in French a book entitled Le Yogi et le commissaire, analysed by Merleau-Ponty in Humanisme et terreur (1946–1947). Camus replies in L’Homme révolté (...) (1951). Ricœur’s thinking, examined in the present article, has its own place in this debate. At stake is our own knowledge of the conditions under which the rejection and condemnation of violence might, in fact, accommodate violence. (shrink)

This article tries to show the irreducible connection between vulnerability and violence. This connection leads us back to the ethical level of experience. If vulnerability makes violence irreducible, then at least two reactions to violence are possible. On the one hand, a reaction is possible in which one attempts to negate vulnerability in order to close down the very thing within us that allows violence to enter. This negative reaction is actually the worst violence. On (...) the other hand, a reaction is possible in which one attempts to affirm vulnerability, even though its affirmation opens us to the violence that will happen. Affirming vulnerability is the least-violent reaction. If the formula for the worst violence is apocalypse without remainder, then the least violence is the maintenance of the remainder. The maintenance would happen only by not possessing the remainders, which places us in a new situation of poverty. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the deployment and interdependence of different expressions of gendered and classed violence in shaping the choices, trajectories and subjectivities of young women on vocational beauty therapy courses. It takes as its premise the understanding that, far from simply being an aberrant expression of interpersonal or intergroup aggression, violence is embedded in social life in multiple and complex ways, reverberating through women's lives to reproduce disadvantage and subordination. The paper draws on theoretical and empirical investigations (...) of the interrelationships between structural, direct and symbolic expressions of violence and asks what this literature can offer in challenging normative, often individualised, conceptions of violence. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) beauty therapy courses and the young women undertaking them, I explore the accounts of students and their tutors on becoming and being ‘beauty girls’. I consider what these accounts might tell us about how forms of symbolic and interpersonal violence intersect with, reproduce and legitimise the violence involved in unequal and unjust socio-economic structures. I argue that the ways in which different forms of violence mutually reinforce each other at a micro-level produce an embodied ‘sense of limits’ that ultimately reproduces the structural violence of gendered and classed inequalities. The examples given illustrate both a ‘chronology of violence’ in young women's lives, and the way in which those lives can be understood, at least in part, as embedded in and shaped by networks of violence. Finally, I briefly consider examples of dissent and resistance, the conditions under which they might be possible and the ways in which, through the interplay of different forms of violence, they might also be curtailed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Limit Formations:Violence, Philosophy, RhetoricOmedi Ochieng For Megha Sharma SehdevNow days are dragon-ridden, the nightmareRides upon sleep: a drunken soldieryCan leave the mother, murdered at her door,To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;The night can sweat with terror as beforeWe pieced our thoughts into philosophy,And planned to bring the world under a rule,Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.—W. B. Yeats, "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen"Violence (...) is a limit formation. It is neither reducible to a brute fact nor is it ineffably ethereal. To write about violence, then, is to confront—if only as disavowed remainder—critical limits, no less of the writer than of the writing itself. Fewer subjects have proven as confounding for philosophy and rhetoric, this journal's primary charge. In both its general particulars and its specific manifolds, violence nonpluses philosophical commonplaces, upends rhetorical tropologies.Philosophy imagines itself mediator to reality's arche, the bedrock of being. Ancient Greek philosophy sought to distinguish necessity from contingency, essence from accident, dialectic from rhetoric, logic from fallacy. Those who took up this intellectual tradition came to conceptualize violence as first and foremost a question of "nature"—more specifically, those marked out by nature to rule (propertied male citizens) and those marked [End Page 330] out by nature for subjection (the enslaved, women, nonhuman animals). In the early modern context of European philosophy, still, despite its pretensions, deeply indebted to this Mediterranean legacy, the canonical lexicon of sensemaking centered on legitimacy and its conceptual appurtenances of sovereignty, will, and rights.Strikingly, it is in the opposed registers of analytic and continental philosophy that violence's cataphilosophic figuration appears most salient. Consider, for example, one such famous symposium convened in the analytic journal Philosophy and Public Affairs, as narrated by political philosopher Michael Walzer:In an earlier issue of Philosophy & Public Affairs there appeared a symposium on the rules of war which was actually (or at least more importantly) a symposium on another topic. The actual topic was whether or not a man can ever face, or ever has to face, a moral dilemma, a situation where he must choose between two courses of action both of which it would be wrong for him to undertake. Thomas Nagel worriedly suggested that this could happen and that it did happen whenever someone was forced to choose between upholding an important moral principle and avoiding some looming disaster. R. B. Brandt argued that it could not possibly happen, for there were guidelines we might follow and calculations we might go through which would necessarily yield the conclusion that one or the other course of action was the right one to undertake in the circumstances (or that it did not matter which we undertook). R. M. Hare explained how it was that someone might wrongly suppose that he was faced with a moral dilemma: sometimes, he suggested, the precepts and principles of an ordinary man, the products of his moral education, come into conflict with injunctions developed at a higher level of moral discourse. But this conflict is, or ought to be, resolved at the higher level; there is no real dilemma.(1973, 160–61)Analytic political philosophy's resolute disavowals could not be here better splayed. Morality is construed as all-encompassing. The political is not so much effaced as it is rendered derivative to a foundational drama of will, obligation, choice. Analytic philosophy's oft-preened claim to clear, transparent, terse style proves constitutive of its desire to contain, if it cannot altogether moralize away violence. [End Page 331]Where analytic philosophy conceives of violence as an object, its limits defined by morality's handmaiden, the "well-ordered society" (Rawls 2001, 8), continental philosophy conjures a sublime violence that shatters and transfigures normative violence. Walter Benjamin posits a binary opposition between mythical and divine violence: "If mythical violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates, if the former threatens, the latter strikes, if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling... (shrink)