The polis and the res publica: two Arendtian models of violence

The influence of the ancient Greek world on Hannah Arendt’s thought is well documented, yet her interest in the politics of the Roman Republic is often considered less central to her work. This paper explores Arendt’s analysis of both these political worlds, with a particular emphasis on what this comparison can tells us about her understanding of the role of violence in politics. Arendt has generally been understood to structurally exclude violence from the political, in part due to the claims she makes in her later essay ‘On Violence.’ Yet in her portrayal of Roman politics, and her preference for this political system above the Greeks’ (in certain respects), a genuinely political engagement with violence can be discerned. The paper claims that this particular case study indicates the framework of the vita activa, set out by Arendt in The Human Condition, should be reinterpreted, particularly insofar as ‘fabrication’ or ‘work’ here appears as something that is legitimately part of the political, and incorporates within it some forms of violence. The claims that violence is structurally anti-political, this paper concludes, are temporally specific to a twentieth-century context, rather than constituting a foundational ‘rule’ of political practice for Arendt.     

Children caring for their worlds: The politics of care and childhood

This paper builds on political geographies of children and youth by looking at the ways children express their political agency through acts of caring. Ethnographic research was conducted with a group of 19 children aged 9–11 years old in a rural town in New Zealand. This paper discusses the results of a photojournal project in which the children were given disposable cameras to use as a way to explain their cares and concerns in their daily lives and in the larger world around them. Drawing on Tronto's care ethic framework in which subjects are active in maintaining, continuing and repairing their worlds, the children's photojournals illuminated their abilities and efforts to care for their worlds. As a political concept, care brings attention to interdependences, connections and relationships that are essential to our individual and collective survival and often overlooked in liberal political theory. This paper demonstrates that the framework of care and exploring children's everyday caring practices help us better understand the often unacknowledged political agency of children.     

Senseless Violence: Liminality and Intertwining

The claim of this article is that the perpetrators of violence are “liminal” figures, being inside and yet outside of the world in which they act. It is this liminality, this existing on the border, that makes their violence senseless. Because of it, their actions can be understood in terms neither of the actual reality of their victims nor of the imagined reality that the perpetrators placed them in. Sense, here, fails, for the lack of a common frame. Liminality exists in a number of forms: economic, religious, and political—each with its potential for violence. What distinguishes political liminality is the scale of its violence. As Carl Schmitt shows, the liminal sovereign or ruler is both inside and outside the state, employing its means for violence even as he is unconstrained by its laws. I contend that this sovereign exists in a continuum with the practitioners of terrorist violence, who are also liminal figures. To analyze this liminality, I explore the intertwining between the self and the world that sets up the common frame that gives sense to actions. I then examine the causes of its breakdown.     

Unsettling feminist geopolitics: forging feminist political geographies of violence and displacement

Feminist geopolitics has analyzed violence across scales and critiqued the dominant epistemology of political geography for almost two decades. What theoretical and political purchase does it have today, given the potpourri of perspectives and reimaginings of the idea? Current research on violence, human displacement and the security of people out of place is used to explore answers to this question, finding that feminist political geography – a bigger tent than just feminist geopolitics – is indispensable to geographical thinking. Recent non-human feminist geopolitics of ‘earthliness’ offer an original theoretical departure from what has come before, though truncate political possibilities by refusing to engage the individuated subjects of ‘conventional’ feminist geopolitics. Feminist geopolitics and its consonant concepts remain relevant to addressing the fast violence of war, displacement, detention and the attendant waiting, or slow violence, that these power relations imply. Feminist geopolitics can and has been enriched by critical work on subaltern geopolitics and post-secular geographies and is shown to be vital to understanding human displacement for those living in the postcolonies of the global South. A case study of private refugee sponsorship to Canada is critically analyzed as one pathway out of protracted displacement. While resettlement is valorized by states and their civil societies as a laudable ‘solution’ offering permanent protection, a feminist geopolitical analysis exposes the Canadian Government’s racialized preferences and prejudice against Sub-Saharan African asylum seekers, masked as geography. The research presented exposes some of the Orientalist assumptions that frame and figure private refugee sponsorship. Taking this Orientalist critique and these additional literatures into the fold of feminist geopolitics, ‘feminist political geography’ offers a larger umbrella under which to collaborate, innovate, and intervene in political struggles that interrupt salient geopolitics and state discourse across world regions and inhibit violence wherever possible.     

Democracy and Islamist Violence: Lessons from Post‐Mubarak Egypt

This article explores the contentious relation between the absence of democracy in the Middle East and the use of armed violence by Islamist groups in light of the Arab Spring. Its main objective is to decipher the evolving positions of former and current groups who used or promoted violence and to relate them to broader academic debates on violence and democracy on the one hand, and deradicalization on the other. This research demonstrates that the large majority of former Islamist militants in Egypt reject any sort of violence in post‐Mubarak Egypt, even if they have not all renounced their religious legitimization of violence in the past. Second, it reveals that even if they maintain a religious opposition to democracy in Egypt, the opening of political opportunities and their progressive joining of the political process has favorably led most of them to accept democratic practices in reality. Third, it adds that the voice of those currently promoting violence in Egypt has been marginalized and that their main alternative has been the promotion of armed violence in Syria; and last, it stresses two potential security threats unrelated to the opening of political opportunities in post‐Mubarak Egypt and to the general debate on democracy and violence. First, local grievances in Sinai have led to violence in the past and are still to be dealt with. Second, the current political deadlock can potentially lead to localized and specific armed activities that could start a cycle of violence. This research is based on field research in Egypt and uses repeated interviews of leaders and members of the two main former militant groups, al‐Jama?ah al‐Islamiyya (the Islamic Group) and Jama? al‐Jihad (the Jihad Group) as well as interviews with militants of the salafi jihadi trend and their supporters in Cairo.     

Black man's Burden: some South African parallels with North America

ABSTRACT

Muthi, intelezi and associated rituals have played an important role in the lives of Africans for many centuries. For almost everything they do, muthi and rituals are applied, more so during times of war. Controversy around the use of intelezi, muthi, ritual killing and the role of izinyanga in, prior to and during the colonial period, is well documented. This paper, first, challenges the Comaroffian analysis of the subject which purports to contextualise the ‘deployment, real or imagined, of magical means for material ends’. They add that the discourse is entirely about ‘modernity’ and ‘neoliberalism’. Here I fundamentally disagree with this explanation; I indicate that it is a cultural continuity. The paper contends that ritual killing and muthi use continues into the present and was prevalent during the political violence in KwaZulu-Natal during the 1980s and 1990s. Secondly, the paper will discuss the centrality of the use of muthi during the violence. I reason that izinyanga played a clandestine but powerful role in this violence. In this, they were at the core of the violence and of the rise of warlords to power in the region. In this paper, I will also present reasons (or offer recommendations) why historians should pay attention to these practices in the recent past, as well as in colonial times. For one thing, they are a means of understanding the present. However, in many ways, because of its reliance on oral histories and insider content, this paper is neither history nor ethnography, but could be described as historical ethnography.     

Towards a Political Theology of Vulnerability Anthropological and Theological Propositions

Abstract

Recent experiences of terror, violence, and catastrophe, such as the terror attacks in Norway in 2011 or the Peshawar School Massacre leaving 132 children and nine staff dead on December 16, 2014, strengthen the sense of the fundamental vulnerability in human existence. In this article, it is argued that political theology, in responding to such experiences, should aim at perceiving and protecting vulnerability as a value. For this purpose, basic propositions for a theological anthropology of vulnerability are put forward. Likewise, propositions for interpreting God as vulnerable are presented, criticizing the traditional theistic concept of God as immutable and hence unable to suffer. The relevance of these propositions for political theology is finally addressed.     

War as Feminized Labour in the Global Political Economy of Neoimperialism

ABSTRACT

This article examines the structures of international relations that facilitate political violence in postcolonial states. It explores the intersections of patriarchy and imperialism in the contemporary political economy to understand how armed conflict and political violence in postcolonial states form an integral element of the global economy of accumulation in deeply gendered ways. By focusing on the structural level of analysis, this article argues that the siting of armed conflict in postcolonial contexts serves to maintain neo-colonial relations of exploitation between the West and non-West, and is made both possible and effective through the gendering of political identities and types of work performed in the global economy. I argue here that armed conflict is a form of feminized labour in the global economy. Despite the fact that performing violence is a physically masculine form of labour, the outsourcing of armed conflict as labour in the political economy is ‘feminized’ in that it represents the flexibilization of labour and informalization of market participation. So while at the same time that this work is fulfilling hegemonic ideals of militarized masculinity within the domestic context, at the international level it actually demonstrates the ‘weakness’ or ‘otherness’ of the ‘failed’/feminized state in which this violence occurs, and legitimizes and hence re-entrenches the hegemonic relations between the core and periphery on the basis of problematizing the ‘weak’ state’s masculinity. It is through the discursive construction of the non-Western world as the site of contemporary political violence that mainstream international relations reproduces an orientalist approach to both understanding and addressing the ‘war puzzle’.     

Violent Inaction: The Necropolitical Experience of Refugees in Europe

A significant outcome of the global crisis for refugees has been the abandonment of forced migrants to live in makeshift camps inside the EU. This paper details how state authorities have prevented refugees from surviving with formal provision, leading directly to thousands having to live in hazardous spaces such as the informal camp in Calais, the site of this study. We then explore the violent consequences of this abandonment. By bringing together thus far poorly integrated literatures on bio/necropolitics (Michel Foucault; Achille Mbembe) and structural violence (Johan Galtung), we retheorize the connections between deliberate political indifference towards refugees and the physiological violence they suffer. In framing the management of refugees as a series of violent inactions, we demonstrate how the biopolitics of migrant control has given way to necropolitical brutality. Advancing geographies of violence and migration, the paper argues that political inaction, as well as action, can be used as a means of control.     

Building Bridges of Trust: Child Transports from Finland to Sweden during the Second World War

Seventy thousand children were moved to Sweden from Finland during the Second World War with the purpose of giving them a break from the calamities of war. Moving children for this reason was common practice in the Western world during the twentieth century. Officially, the motives have always been humanitarian, but political motives have often played an important role — commonly, to foster suitable citizens within planned societies. Political goals were important in the moving of Finnish children, but in a different way. In this article, I suggest that the children were used as ‘commodities of compassion’ in a Swedish politics of indemnification.     

Between the South Sea and the mountainous ridges: biopolitical assemblages in the Spanish colonial Americas

SUMMARY: Although the historical archaeology of the Spanish colonial world is currently witnessing an explosion of research in the Americas, the accompanying political economic framework has tended to remain little interrogated. This paper argues that Spanish colonial contexts bring into particular relief the entanglements between ‘core’ capitalist processes like ‘antimarkets’, dispossession and the disciplining of labour with the specific biopolitical ecologies assembled through co-option, coercion and accumulation. This perspective is explored through two archaeological case studies from Peru and Guatemala, where competing concerns about altitude, climate, disease, violence and populations of differentiated labouring bodies (both human and non-human) came to the fore in unexpected ways. The resulting discussion challenges the reliance on abstract analytical totalities like ‘capitalism’ and ‘colonialism’, and shifts attention towards the diverse assemblages of actors that shaped and continue to shape the processes central to political economic analyses.     

Teaching about political violence: a primer on representation

Geography is not generally viewed as a ‘source’ discipline for political violence studies, but this paper begins with the presumption that geography is well disposed to teach courses on the subject. The key purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that engaging issues of political violence is useful for our pedagogy. In particular, teaching about political violence allows geography to address concerns arising from the ‘crisis of representation’. It does so in two ways. First, it provides another venue for teaching about the ‘the other’ and ‘othered places’ in our curricula. Second, it also allows geography to challenge uncritical tropes about political violence as emerging from some peoples and places and not others. As a case study this paper overviews a course entitled Militia Movements in Comparative Perspective. This course was organized around a theoretical unit and four case study units. The case conflicts were chosen to represent conflicts that crossed ideological (right/left) and geographical (Global North/Global South) divides. The course structure is overviewed and a classroom discussion that highlighted questions about representation is described and analysed. The paper concludes by reviewing current efforts to address violence in the discipline, noting problems with these efforts, and suggesting alternatives to them.     

Slum Wars of the 21st Century: Gangs,Mano Dura and the New Urban Geography of Conflict in Central America

The political economy of violence in Central America is widely perceived as having undergone a critical shift during the past two decades, often pithily summarized as a movement from ‘political’ to ‘social’ violence. Although such an analysis is plausible, it also offers a depoliticized vision of the contemporary Central American panorama of violence. Basing itself principally on the example of Nicaragua, the country in the region that is historically perhaps most paradigmatically associated with violence, this article offers an alternative interpretation of the changes that the regional landscape of violence has undergone. It suggests that these are better understood as a movement from ‘peasant wars of the twentieth century’ ( Wolf, 1969 ) to ‘urban wars of the twenty‐first century’ ( Beall, 2006 ), thereby highlighting how present‐day urban violence can in many ways be seen as representing a structural continuation of past political conflicts, albeit in new spatial contexts. At the same time, however, there are certain key differences between past and present violence, as a result of which contemporary conflict has intensified. This is most visible in relation to the changing forms of urban spatial organization in Central American cities, the heavy‐handed mano dura response to gangs by governments, and the dystopian evolutionary trajectory of gangs. Taken together, these processes point to a critical shift in the balance of power between rich and poor in the region, as the new ‘urban wars of the twenty‐first century’ are increasingly giving way to more circumscribed ‘slum wars’ that effectively signal the defeat of the poor.     

The Unbearable Lightness of Bones: Memory,Emotion, and Pedagogy in Patricio Guzmán’s Chile,La Memoria Obstinada and Nostalgia De La Luz

Focusing on two documentary films by Patricio Guzmán, Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997) and, especially, Nostalgia of the Light (2010), this paper examines some of the relations between neoliberal violence (during and after the Pinochet dictatorship), memory, knowledge and emotionality, both historical and personal. It does so by reading and reviewing the actions, narratives and experiences of a group of astronomers, archaeologists and geologists who work in the Atacama desert of northern Chile and a group of women who search for the remains of their loved ones, victims of political violence, in the same desert within the shifting contexts of cinematic spectatorship. Attentive to the possibilities and pitfalls of empathic identifications and connections, it also considers the ethical and political implications of the interplay of cinema (Guzmán), photography (Paula Allen) and poetry, sky writing and "land art" (Raúl Zurita).     

Memory and Non-Place: Visual Testimonies of Japanese American Internment During World War II

This article addresses the little-known history of Japanese Latin American internment during WWII. Classified as ‘illegal aliens’ and ‘enemy aliens’, 2,264 Japanese Latin Americans were stripped of citizenship from their home countries, denied rights in the United States, and ultimately deprived reconciliation due to their undocumented status. Using the traces of this history as a case study, I explore the strategic memories Japanese Latin Americans create about non-place – spaces of statelessness or states of exception – that allow them to make claims about state violence committed against them under these conditions, and, second, argue that demands for justice against political violence entail not only bringing light to erased histories but also developing engaged acts of reception that account for survivors’ claims to the memories of non-place. Visual testimonies, such as the Denshō Digital Archive and the short documentary Hidden Internment: The Art Shibayama Story (2004), affectively connect a viewer/listener to the memory of trauma, to an inexpressible haunting, and thus are critical platforms for creating a collective memory between survivors and the digital generation of postmemory.     

The Indexification of Poverty: The Covert Politics of Small-Area Indices

In recent decades statistical indices have become a dominant method for measuring many features of the social world. While the resulting enumerations are regularly cited by critical human geographers, the wider political stakes of indexing the world remain unaddressed. In this article, we theorise indexification as the process through which composite statistics transform theoretical constructs into epistemic objects, and then geographically bounded rankings. Rather than a neutral process, we argue that these epistemological manoeuvres can mask various forms of violence. Through a detailed analysis of the UK's Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), we highlight the clandestine politics of indexification and their tendency to conceal harms meted out by the state. Seeking a more critical reckoning with indices, we conclude by calling for and outlining a project of radical indexification—a participatory, democratic, and transparent endeavour that takes spatial justice as its organising principle.     

The Land of Allium: an exploration into the magic of place

Magical. A common adjective used to describe places. But does the magic of place spring from genius loci? Or could it be that we are the magicians, casting spells to transform places into what we desire (or what we fear)? Our sense of place is not a mirror on reality. We come to know places by inscribing our fantasies atop them, by writing onto the landscape our own imagined geographies. C.S. Lewis provides an intriguing glimpse into sense of place through the Pevensie children and their experience in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: a mere wardrobe becomes a complex fantasy world in which the children play and interact. As adults, and as societies, we take real geographies and treat them as Lewis's wardrobe, creating Narnias in the depths of our most mundane landscapes. In this paper I explore the magic of place through an autobiographical photo essay set in a nature preserve in eastern Kansas. The stories I tell highlight in a literary and artistic way the phenomenological aspects of sense of place and the potential political import of the geographical imagination.     

Fording differences? Conditions mitigating water insecurity in the Niger River Basin

River basins are an extremely important source of freshwater for Africa and the impact of climate change on these communities constitutes an important question worth studying. Among these basins, the Niger River Basin is an ideal candidate for meso-level theory testing of climate change-induced political violence because of its importance as one of the largest sources of freshwater in Africa, its high vulnerability to climate change, and its location in a politically unstable region. This paper utilizes the benefits of GIS to test whether effects of water insecurity on the various incidences of political violence are conditional on economic, geographic, and social means of connectivity. Our analysis uses the density of secondary road networks, the geographic distance to the Niger River, and a shared co-ethnicity with one's head-of-state to evaluate the impact of hydrological stress and its subsequent risk for political violence across nine West African countries from 1997 to 2012. Using climatological data and an econometric de-trending method, we measure the separate, substantive impact that individualized changes in precipitation trend and precipitation variability have for the incidence of ACLED's political violence events, conditional on local economic, geographic, and social factors. Our results reveal a complicated web of circumstances under which certain forms of political violence are more/less likely to be observed. The implications of this analysis serve as a call for a closer inspection of the micro-channels by which climate stress impacts heterogeneous communities in the developing world.     

Ritual performances and collective violence in divided cities – The riots in Belfast (1886) and Jerusalem (1929)

This article explores the interrelation of violence, space, and public rituals in Belfast and Jerusalem. With the image of being cities of violence, contested by two groups that compete for political and spatial hegemony, Belfast and Jerusalem are also characterised as divided, both on a material and symbolic level. The roots of this division can be traced back to the era of the British Empire, especially to the riots in Belfast in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the uprisings in Jerusalem during the British Mandate of Palestine. In the wider context of British imperial policies of differentiation along religious lines and urban separation, communal identities were strengthened, and processes of residential segregation were accelerated, thereby creating urban frontiers. On the basis of historical sources, particularly reports by Royal Commissions of Inquiry that were set up to investigate the riots in Belfast and Jerusalem, this paper analyses how violent urban geographies were created in both cities in different but also remarkably similar ways. Down to the present day, public religious and political rituals, often combined with nationalist and militarist elements, are a crucial part of periodic manifestations of collective violence in these cities. Practices of appropriation of space and a temporary redrawing of borders and boundaries are dominant features of these rituals. Religious ceremonies, street parades, funeral processions or political demonstrations take place at contested sites or are led through areas “belonging” to the “other” group. The analysis shows that these ritual practices contributed greatly in transforming parts of the cities into urban spaces characterised by exclusion and imbued with memories of violence. This paper concludes that ritual performances in public space have a strong impact on the production and shaping of collective violence during riots.