Más o Menos Muerto: Bare Life in Roberto Bolaño's 2666

This article explores Chilean Roberto Bolaño's novel 2666 (2004) with a focus on the significance of what Giorgio Agamben describes as ‘bare life.’ In the novel, Bolaño employs Pedro Páramo as a metaphor to talk about feminicide and violence against women in Santa Teresa, the fictional Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The victims of violence in Santa Teresa in 2666 are described as ‘más o menos muerto,’ a condition that points to the way in which disappeared and misidentified bodies are forced into eternal anonymity and denied even the right of death. Whereas the dead in Pedro Páramo are denied the rights of citizenship in life, those in 2666 face a denial of rights that extends from life into death, leaving them with nothing, not even their names. In 2666, the physical violence is preceded by what Juárez photojournalist Julián Cardona describes as ‘economic violence.’     

Number‐One Enemy: Police,Violence and the Location of Adversaries in a Papua New Guinean Prison.

ABSTRACT In this essay, I aim to explore how prisoners at Bomana in PNG, in the period I was there between 1994–1995, figured the violence of police. This includes an examination of what they understand to be state power and what they take to be their response to it, including the possibility of critique. Do inmates at Bomana recognize a scale shift between state and citizen, between law and violence? If so, when? How do they relate the actions of the Constabulary to their own violent behaviour and to the forceful or violent behaviour of others? These questions will be approached through the notion of enmity. In particular, by a discussion of what inmates mean when they label the police their ‘number‐one enemy’.     

A zone of exception: gendered violences of family ‘Happiness’ in Vietnam

This article examines the ways in which women’s ‘family happiness’ in Vietnam paradoxically, and alarmingly, is rendered compatible with the endurance of what is diminished as ‘minor’ partner violence. Thus focusing on the gendering of ‘happiness’ and the discrepancies between ideals and practices, the article unfolds how intersections between a number of ‘power-geometries’ including violence preventive legislation, an official family discourse, and the patrilineally organized family facilitate the conditions that allow for male-to-female violence in the domestic sphere. The article highlights how Intimate Partner Violence transmutes the ‘happy family’ into a ‘zone of exception’ wherein which the laws prohibiting violence are suspended, the juridico-political status and rights of a woman blurred, and a state of chronic precariousness and crisis generated. Such tendencies are fortified by the ambiguous strategies of the Women’s Union. In maneuvering between violence preventive legislation and family ideals, the Union is criticizing patriarchal family hierarchies while also encouraging women to nurture family happiness by complying with an abusive partner.     

Josephine's Journey: Gender‐based Violence and Marian Devotion in Urban Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT This article deals with how, in the urban setting of Madang, Papua New Guinea, Marian devotion is deployed in response to domestic and gender‐based violence. While providing insight into the lived religious experiences of Catholic women living in Madang, this article shows how Mary empowers her followers to resist violence, yet, at the same time, paradoxically, is instrumental in sanctioning women to tolerate violence. Josephine's ‘journey of violence’ reveals not only Josephine's turning to Mary, but more so, her negotiations with values belonging to different cultural logics. Caught between ‘tradition’, Christianity and ‘modernity’, Josephine and other Catholic women engage in painful processes of self‐analysis and self‐transformation to adapt to and change their situation. In these processes, Mary is used as a role model.     

Towards a countertopography of intimate war: contouring violence and resistance in a South Sudanese diaspora

Recent feminist geographic scholarship insists we rethink domestic violence as ‘intimate war’. Using this concept I analyze narratives of violence and resistance articulated by U.S.-resettled South Sudanese women and collected in the wake of a fatal incidence of domestic violence in 2005. One of a spate of intimate partner murders that shook the community at this time, this tragic event spurred debates about shifting gender norms, the stresses and opportunities of life in the diaspora, and the irradicable legacies of war. Bringing Pain and Staeheli's ‘intimacy-geopolitics’ to bear on this particularly violent, momentary and publicized aggression, I situate it within a more complex, quotidian, and dynamic terrain of power. In line with feminist political geography, this analysis complicates scalar distinctions of body, home and nation-state, demonstrating the common foundations of ‘private’, domestic and ‘public’, state-sanctioned violences. Inspired by Katz’s countertopographical approach, I extend our understanding of intimate war by contouring moments of violence and resistance in a diasporic context, over the lifecourse of refugee women, and across their sites of flight, displacement and resettlement. Tracing the mobilities of intimate war in this way productively reveals the spatial and temporal, as well as scalar, folds that may form part of its foundation.     

Violence and space: An introduction to the geographies of violence

Violence is a confounding concept. It frequently defies explanation and lacks an agreed upon definition. Yet geographers are well positioned to bring greater conceptual clarity to violence by thinking through its intersections with space. In setting the tone for this special issue on Violence and Space we highlight some of the key lines of flight that have shaped geographical thinking on violence. While there are a significant number of geographers interested in the question of violence, the field of ‘geographies of violence’ remains an emerging area of research that deserves greater attention and a more rigorous examination. By emphasizing the spatiality of violence, this special issue aims to contribute to a more sustained conversation on the violent geographies that shape our daily lives, our encounters with institutions, and the various structures that configure our social organization. This introduction is but an initial sketch of what we believe needs to be a much larger and unfolding research agenda dedicated to understanding violence from a geographical perspective.     

Decolonizing branded peacebuilding: abjected women talk back to the Finnish Women,Peace and Security agenda

This article interrogates the sexual ideology of Finnish peacebuilding, the country's foreign policy brand and the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda by examining the experiences of women ‘written out of history’. Using the method of ‘writing back’ I juxtapose the construction of a gender‐friendly global peacebuilder identity with experiences in Finland after the Lapland War (1944–45) and in post‐conflict Aceh, Indonesia (1976–2005). Although being divided temporarily and geographically, these two contexts form an intimate part of the abjected and invisible part of the Finnish WPS agenda, revealing a number of colonial and violent overtones of postwar reconstruction: economic and political postwar dystopia of Skolt Sámi and neglect of Acehnese women's experiences in branding the peace settlement and its implementation as a success. Jointly they critique and challenge both the gender/women‐friendly peacebuilder identity construction of Finland and locate the sexual ideology of WPS to that of political economy and post‐conflict political, legal and economic reforms. The article illustrates how the Finnish foreign policy brand has constructed the country as a global problem‐solver and peacemaker, drawing on the heteronormative myth of already achieved gender equality on the one hand and, on the other, tamed asexual female subjectivity: the ‘good woman’ as peacebuilder or victim of violence. By drawing attention to violent effects of the global WPS agenda demanding decolonialization, I suggest that the real success of the WPS agenda should be evaluated by those who have been ‘written out’.     

Embodied cosmopolitanisms: the subjective mobility of migrants working in the global sex industry

Anti-trafficking rhetoric and policies emphasise the extent of exploitation and coercion of female migrant sex workers and obfuscate the shared ambivalences and contradictions experienced by migrant female sex workers and their male agents and partners. By engaging in the global sex industry, both young men and women negotiate their aspiration to cosmopolitan late modern lifestyles against the prevalence of essentialist patriarchal gender values and sexual mores at home. In the process, established gender normativities, legitimising women's subjection to men, are both reproduced and challenged. The evidence informing this article shows that a minority of women are coerced into the sex industry. There is a direct link between the adherence to essentialist gender/sexual roles and the recourse to violence and exploitation, because migrants' prolonged involvement in the sex industry coincides with the adherence to more cosmopolitan gender/sexual roles, translating into less authoritarian and violent discourses and practices. Hegemonic understandings of migrants' involvement in the global sex industry in terms of ‘trafficking’ erase these important dynamics and dimensions, which underpin intricate feelings and experiences of advantage, disadvantage and exploitation. By failing to engage with the meanings that migrants working in the sex industry ascribe to their working and personal lives, the (anti)trafficking logic of ‘humanitarian intervention’ enforces forms of solidarity and support that appeal to the minority and harm the majority of the people they are supposed to ‘rescue’.     

Gendered Visibilities and the Dream of Transparency: The Chinese‐Indonesian Rape Debate in Post‐Suharto Indonesia

How does the seen produce the unseen? And what happens when the unseen makes a bid to emerge from its occlusion? This paper examines the gendered visuality of the Reformasi crisis in Indonesia in 1998, juxtaposing the visibility of male‐on‐male violence at student demonstrations with the invisibility of violence against (feminised) Chinese‐Indonesians and, in particular, raped Chinese‐Indonesian women. The discussion focuses on activists’ attempts to establish ‘proof’ that these rapes did occur, government attempts to discredit their evidence, and the circulation of false photographs of the rapes on the internet. (An unremarked irony of this falsification of evidence was that it was made possible by the pre‐existence of an archive of sexually violent images on pornographic sites depicting ‘Asian schoolgirls’.) The paper argues that this particular debate over credibility, witnessing and proof needs to be seen within a wider popular Indonesian discourse on the status of evidence, the privileged place of the photograph within it, and the archive of images of (male) students and heroic male‐on‐male violence that helped shape what people could ‘see’ as meaningful political action and recognisable state violence. It also comments on the evidentiary status of witnessing and embodied experience in the age of mechanical and digital reproduction.     

British Muslims,multiculturalism and UK foreign policy: ‘integration’ and ‘cohesion’ in and beyond the state

After the 7 July and 21 July 2005 attacks on London the government‐sponsored effort to ‘prevent extremism together’ has repeatedly acknowledged the central role of anger at UK foreign policy in the radicalization of some British Muslims. This acknowledgement has been incorporated into a ‘comprehensive framework for action’ centring upon the need for increased ‘integration’ and an effort, critically, to re‐work British multiculturalism as a means to combat terrorism. Examining the history of multiculturalism in Britain and the tradition of living and acting ‘together’ that it suggests, however, raises a set of questions about the society into which integration is supposed to occur, what integration might involve and its real efficacy for combating terrorists. In addressing these issues, this article suggests that the debate over contemporary multiculturalism should be situated within a much wider social and political crisis over the meaning of ‘community’ in the UK, to which questions of global order and foreign policy are central. Comparing the ‘ethical’ basis of Al‐Qaeda's attacks with Tony Blair's invocation of ‘values’ as the foundation for military intervention reveals that both seek to realize models of community through violence and a shared process of ‘radicalization’ which in both cases precedes 9/11 and which might be traced back to the Gulf War of 1991. The article concludes that debate over the future of multiculturalism in the UK is being conducted alongside and is implicated within a second, violent global conflict over community: one which is central to, but essentially unarticulated within the domestic context.     

Violence,Social Differentiation and the Self

The article considers aspects of violence in everyday life among the Tiwi of Melville and Bathurst Islands. It briefly compares the role of violence in bureaucratically and juridically mediated forms with self-help and social regulation in Aboriginal societies, focussing on the expressive or performative aspects of violence in everyday interaction. Myers' discussion of violence among the Pintubi posits a dialectical polarity of relatedness and differentiation, corresponding with the affective poles of compassion and anger. This is compared with Sansom's account of semi-ritualized forms of violence in Aboriginal fringe-camp life, where a point of commonality in Myers' and Sansom's approaches is found: this consists of the attunement of action, of violence, self-violence and destructiveness to the witnessing public. In Tiwi life too, conflict is dynamically shaped by actors' attempts to impinge upon, to seek to arouse and in some cases to manipulate, compassion or concern in the witnessing group as defence or as a form of moral attack. Open, dramatic ‘appealing’ violence, often in the form of a more or less controlled loss of self-control, seeks to parry indirect interpersonal tension and antagonism, to reassert or restore social distance and protect or privilege important relationships from intrusive demands. However, these violent appeals in rhetorical threat, in self-violence, destructiveness or sometimes in dramatic suicidal gestures also invariably indicate extreme personal difficulty displaced into open forms of confrontation. The article proposes that the generative moment of violence for social differentiation be sought in an examination of dynamic interrelationships between individual life-history, inner group processes and their articulation with external social forms.     

Proximate Strangers and Familiar Antagonists: Violence on an Intimate Frontier

A generation of scholarship on the experiences of the frontier—spanning models of violent conflict to various kinds of intimacy—has been highly influential in building a nuanced picture of Australia's colonial race relations. Regionally-focused histories provide a valuable avenue for bringing these models of frontier historiography together within the same frame, because it is at the localised level of social relations that the cross-hatched intersections between violence and intimacy can emerge into clearest view. This article traces the threads of cross-cultural encounter on one Australian frontier to assess how violent conflict could arise as much from conditions of inter-connectedness and familiarity as from conditions of strangeness and fear, and to ask, under such conditions, what kinds of frontier violence drew the intervention of the law.     

The Indian nation and selective amnesia: representing conflicts and violence in Indian history textbooks

‘Unity is always obtained by means of brutality’ wrote Ernest Renan. Following this idea, this article investigates how social conflicts and violence are included or muted in national history. This is done by comparing the successive series of history textbooks used in India in the postindependence period. The historical narratives contained in the textbooks were influenced by different conceptions of the Indian nation, and these variations allow us to observe and better understand what is remembered or forgotten in the national narrative. We will see that conflicts and violence are referred to when they involve the nation against its ‘other’ but depictions of conflicts within the nation as it is imagined are avoided. Thus, certain violent episodes of the past find a place in the national historical narrative, yet violence in itself is never described.     

Violence against women in Ethiopia

Investigating the experience of violence against women and exploring women's coping strategies is a crucial component of re-tailoring the provision of services for victims/survivors. This article explores violence against women in the context of culture, theory of fear of violence and literature on spaces perceived to be ‘safe’ or ‘dangerous’ by women victims/survivors of violence in Ethiopia. To collect the relevant data, we conducted 14 semi-structured interviews with Ethiopian women who are victims/survivors of violence and three interviews with gender experts in Ethiopia. Our group of women suffer in ‘silence’ and confide only in friends and relatives. They did not resort to institutional support due to lack of awareness and general societal disapproval of such measures. This contrasts with claims by experts that the needs of these women are addressed using an institutional approach. Culture, migration status and lack of negotiating power in places of work are key factors when considering violence. The majority of the respondents in this study occupy both public and private spaces such as bars and homes and have experienced violence in those spaces. The social relations and subsequent offences they endured do not make spaces such as these safe. Education of both sexes, creation of awareness, sustainable resource allocation to support victims/survivors, ratification of the Maputo protocol and effective law enforcement institutions are some of the practical strategies we propose to mitigate the incidence of violence in Ethiopia.     

Tender grounds: Intimate visceral violence and British Columbia's colonial geographies

Ongoing colonial violence, I argue in this paper, operates through geographies of Indigenous homes, families, and bodies that are too often overlooked in standard geographical accounts of colonialism. Contiguous with residential school violence and other micro-scale efforts to eliminate Indigenous peoples, colonial power continues to assert itself profoundly through intervention into and disruption of intimate, ‘tender’ (Stoler, 2006), embodied, ‘visceral’ (Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy 2008; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2010), and biopolitical (Morgensen, 2011a) geographies of Indigenous women and children. Drawing on feminist and decolonizing theories, along with the concept of ‘slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011), I offer in this paper a grounded account of spatial forms of governmentality in ongoing colonial relations in British Columbia, Canada. I critique dominant geographic inquires into colonialism as being primarily about land, natural resources, and territory. These inquiries, I suggest, risk perpetuating colonial violence in their erasure of Indigenous women and children's ontologies, positing this violence as something ‘out there’ as opposed to an ever-present presence that all settler colonists are implicated in.     

Mothers/Fighters/Citizens: Violence and Disillusionment in Post‐War El Salvador

This article explores post‐war El Salvador as characterised by disillusionment in the nation's neoliberal rebuilding project. A key part of my argument is that this disillusion‐ment is gendered. Specifically, I focus on a spectrum of gendered experiences and responses to social and inter‐personal violence in El Salvador's recent history. Is there a relationship between wartime political violence, continued processes of exclusion (i.e. education, healthcare, housing), and post‐war waves of domestic violence, youth violence and ‘random’ violence? While some scholars posit questions regarding Salvadoran toler‐ance to violence through time, I tackle this question by focusing on emerging criticisms of El Salvador's post‐war reconciliation. I privilege a focus on the everyday and people's ambiguities as they deal with political change and a neoliberal economy that marginalises the rural sector. In particular, I argue for placing many rural women's stories of gender‐based violence, their assertions of an embodied vulnerability and daily insecurity, within a political economic understanding of the contradictions of El Salvador's peace and nation‐building project. Through a series of ethnographic examples based on seventeen months of research in a former warzone, I suggest that a daily and gendered violence is rendered invisible. My aim is to theorise a range of women's and men's losses and to impart the urgency of their narratives that problematise assumptions of what constitutes pain, sorrow and the challenges of war‐torn life. This is an attempt to write outside privileged texts that ask subaltern women to speak in a collective voice and articulate their past loss and future hopes. In doing so, I discuss methodology and historicise my own fraught positioning as an international witness/researcher at a very particular moment of El Salvador's transition to democracy.     

Functions of sovereign violence: Contesting and establishing order in Darjeeling,India

This paper explores the relationship between de facto sovereign violence and order in spaces of contested authority. Here, so-called “informal sovereigns” imbued with the power to kill and punish with impunity can act either as rebels against, or as chosen mediators for, a weak government. This paper takes this ambivalent relationship between informal sovereigns and the state as a starting point to explore the different functions of sovereign violence drawing on a case study from Darjeeling, India. Here, informal sovereigns appear in the form of regional leaders of an autonomy movement that has, at times, violently challenged the government's authority over the region. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's distinction between law-making and law-preserving violence, the paper argues that sovereign violence performed by such informal sovereigns has different functions. It can either stabilize or challenge existing power relations and legal orders. To differentiate these functions and to account for the ambivalent relations between informal sovereigns and the state, the category of informal sovereigns needs to be disentangled. To do so, this paper establishes a distinction between ‘petty sovereigns‘, whose sovereignty is outsourced from the state, and ‘autonomous sovereigns’, whose authority is mainly grounded in actors' capacity to perform excessive violent acts. While petty sovereigns' violence is law-preserving and strengthens existing power relations, autonomous sovereigns engage in law-making activities and aspire to affect changed orders and to benefit from that change. The case study concludes that a sovereign's efficacy in effecting order is not only grounded in violence. Rather, its authority emerges from the grey zone of the negotiated boundaries between itself and the state, and its recognition by its respective constituents.     

From terrorism to ‘radicalization’ to ‘extremism’: counterterrorism imperative or loss of focus?

This article argues that there has been an increasing convergence of the discourses of terrorism, radicalization and, more lately, extremism in the UK and that this has caused counterterrorism to lose its focus. This is particularly evident in the counterterrorism emphasis on non‐violent but extremist ideology that is said to be ‘conducive’ to terrorism. Yet, terrorism is ineluctably about violence or the threat of violence; hence, if a non‐violent ideology is in and of itself culpable for terrorism in some way then it ceases to be non‐violent. The article argues that there should be a clearer distinction made between (non‐violent) extremism of thought and extremism of method because it is surely violence and the threat of violence (integral to terrorism) that should be the focus of counterterrorism. The concern is that counterterrorism has gone beyond its remit of countering terrorism and has ventured into the broader realm of tackling ideological threats to the state.     

Climate Change and Socio-Political Crises: Some Cases from Neolithic Central Europe

Abstract

In recent years, data on an increasing number of violent conflicts within and between Central European Neolithic societies has come to light through both archaeological and physical anthropological studies. The spectrum of such evidence ranges from occasional incidents of healed trauma in otherwise 'ordinary' burial situations to mass burials of possibly tortured and certainly massacred villagers. There appears to be a temporal correlation between periods of increased violence/warfare and climatically unstable periods. Evidence is presented for three periods beginning with the so-called Initial Neolithic up to the earlier Eneolithic.