Cruelty and Violence in the Global South

Abstract

Abstract There is limited understanding of cruelty in critical security studies. While cruelty tends to be conceptualized within the context of large-scale, violent conflicts and situations, it is helpful to consider cruelty through the lens of everyday forms of violence and subjugation. Understanding cruelty and its complex entanglements with overlapping frameworks of necropolitics, structural violence, and necrogeopolitics, and drawing on research from Nigeria, Jordan, and Myanmar, this article discusses the normalization of cruel, everyday “living death” and violence experienced by many in Global South. Overlapping marginalities of localized conflicts, political repression, gendered violence, marginalized livelihoods and precarity, climate change, and migration illustrate this entangled conceptualization of cruelty. This complex and entangled understanding of cruelty helps to better understand the lived experiences and situations of peoples and communities in the Global South. Further, everyday necropolitical violence and cruelty provide an understanding of the suffering, pain, and state of unease that many experience in the Global South and beyond, and this understanding of shared human vulnerabilities informs our common humanity. The main contribution of this analysis is to provide dialectical insights into the potential of radical empathy and compassion, rooted in decolonial humanism, as a means to ignite political consciousness, dismantle oppressive structures, and support emancipatory agency of peoples and communities globally.