Systematic racist violence in Russia between ‘hate crime’ and ‘ethnic conflict’

Hate crime and hate speech are extreme examples of negative intergroup relations. It is thought that it would be very useful to analyze the variables that lead up to for dealing with hate speech and crimes that have many physical and psychological destructive consequences for the exposed group members. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to address some of the social psychological variables associated with hate speech and hate crimes and to suggest solutions to reduce hate speech and hate crimes in this context. For this purpose, first of all, hate speech and hate crimes were defined and various examples were presented in this direction. Later, hate crimes and hate speech were examined in terms of social identity identification, social dominance orientation, system justification, realistic and symbolic threat perception, frustration and scapegoat concepts. The relationship between hate speech and crimes of this concept has been embodied with research findings and examples from various regions in Turkey and the world. Finally, some solution suggestions have been presented by making use of this theoretical knowledge in terms of combating hate crimes and hate speeches. Keywords: Hate crime, hate speech, intergroup relations, social psychology

Hate/bias crime against racial/ethnic minorities in the United States: A systematic review of empirical research and assessment of next steps

Racial and ethnic violence takes many forms. Genocides, ethnic cleansing, pogroms, civil wars, and violent separatist movements are the most obvious and extreme expressions, but less organized violence such as rioting, and hate crimes by individuals or small groups are products of racial and ethnic conflict as well. Also, the distribution of criminal violence within societies, which may or may not be aimed at members of another group, is in some places a by-product of ongoing conflicts between superior and subordinated racial or ethnic groups. Although estimates of the number of deaths attributable to ethnic violence vary widely, range of eleven to twenty million given for the period between 1945 and the early 1990s show the gravity of this type of conflict (Williams 1994, 50). So it comes as no surprise that scholars have paid increasing attention to such conflicts over the last decades.

Racial and ethnic violence is widespread in the West, including the USA, and is hardly a specific attribute of post-Soviet Russia. It is not caused by post-Soviet Russia’s unwillingness to follow the road of Western democratic capitalism. In broader context, ethnic violence in Russia and elsewhere could be framed in the context of a broader picture – it is the peculiar manifestation of global shifts, which could be seen in the context of Spenglerian “decline of the West.” Ethnic and racial violence in Russia and the West have a lot of similarities, it is often conflict between two different cultures. One is “premodern”/criminal and the other manifests modernity with self-controlled “civic society.” Still, riots in Russia are clearly different from one perspective. In the West (e.g. the USA) it is minorities who launch the riots; it is the majority who do the same in Russia. The ethnic riots in Stavropol’ (2007) could be here a good example.

The overallaim of the review is to map the definitions and measurement tools used to capture the whole spectrum of hate motivated behaviors, including hate crime, hate speech and hate incidents. This will benefit the field of hate studies by providing a baseline that can inform the building of cumulative knowledge and comparative research. The first review objective is to map definitions of hate crime, hate incidents, hate speech, and surrogate terms. Specific research questions underpinning this objective are: (a) How are hate crimes, hate speech and hate incidents defined in the academic, legal, policy, and programming literature?; (b) What are the concepts, parameters and criteria that qualify a behavior as being hate crime, hate incident or hate speech?; and (c) What are the most common concepts, parameters and criteria found across definitions? What are the differences between definitions and the elements they contain? The second review objective is to map the tools used to measure the prevalence of hate crime, hate incidents, hate speech, and surrogate terms. Specific research questions underpinning this objective are: (a) How are definitions operationalised to measure hate crimes, hate speech, and hate incidents?; and (b) How valid and reliable are these measures?

This paper examines the concept of ‘race hate’ that has emerged and flourished in British society in recent years. It will discuss a number of inter-related issues that constitute important causal factors in articulations of ‘race hate’ among sections of the white working class. Many of these issues relate to deep-seated structural factors like socio-economic marginalisation and perceived challenges to hegemonic white identity. The paper also considers a combination of developments that facilitate the particular form that ‘race hate’ takes in British society. Thus, dominant political discourses, as expressed and perpetuated within sections of the tabloid press and government policy surrounding immigration and asylum, ‘facilitate’ this form of racism in the presence of other causal factors.

In 1996, the late Prof JMT Labuschagne wrote an article dealing with the limits of freedom of speech and hate speech (“Menseregtelike en Strafregtelike Bekamping van Groepsidentiteitmatige Krenking en Geweld” 1996 De Jure 23). He discussed freedom of expression and hate speech in the United States of America, various European countries, South Africa and also within the context of international law. He subsequently discussed the idea of updating his thoughts, taking into consideration the influence of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 and the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act (4 of 2000, commonly referred to as the “Discrimination Act”). Sadly, he never got around to doing so. Since his 1996 article, much development has taken place in this field including the introduction of the 2004 Draft Prohibition of Hate Speech Bill. The events of 11 September 2001 in the USA and the 2005 bombings in London (and other similar attacks all over the world) have increased intolerance and suspicion between people from different races and religions manyfold. Immediately following the London bombings, it was reported that religious hate crime (that is, attacks targeting England’s Muslim community) had increased by nearly 600% (“Religious Hate Crime Up 600%” 2005-08-0221:14 SA http://www.news24.com visited 2 Aug 2005). Hate speech is regarded as an exception to freedom of speech/expression. The notion of freedom of expression has been discussed at length by various South African writers (Johannessen “A Critical View of the Constitutional Hate Speech Provision: Section 16” 1997 SAJHR 136; Devenish “Freedom of Expression: The ‘Marketplace’ of Ideas”1995 TSAR 442; Carpenter “Fundamental Rights: Is There a Pecking Order?” 1995 Codicillus 27; Johannessen “Freedom of Expression and Information in the New South African Constitution and Its Compatibility with International Standards” 1995 SAJHR 216; Van Rooyen “Censorship in a Future South Africa: A Legal Perspective” 1994 De Jure 283; Nesser “Hate Speech in the New South Africa: Constitutional Considerations for a Land Recovering from Decades of Racial Repression and Violence” 1994 SAJHR 336; and Marcus “Freedom of Expression Under the Constitution” 1994 SAJHR 140). This note briefly touches on some aspects relating to freedomof expression and hate speech and also explores the (rather newly discovered) notion of hate crime. It asks the question whether there is any connection between hate speech and hate crime.

The subject of the research is criminal law rules that provide for criminal liability for hate crimes and the judicial decisions of the European Court of Human Rights on hate crimes. The purpose of the article is to confirm or refute the hypothesis that a unified approach to the definition of the legal concept of hate speech and the limits of its application is nec-essary. This approach must be based on the legal positions of the European Court of Hu-man Rights The research methodology includes analysis and interpretation of court decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, as well as a dialectical approach to the analysis of vari-ous points of view to the definition of extremist activity. The main results and scope of their application. The relevance of the research proposed for publication is due to the lack of uniform practice of applying the articles of the Russian Criminal Code on so-called "hate crimes" by Russian courts and the presence of signifi-cant contradictions in the positions of the European Court of Human Rights and the state position of the Russian Federation in defining key concepts in this area that are extremely important for criminal procedure and administrative activities. The paper considers scien-tific and practical attempts to define "hate crimes" in the global and regional human rights systems, basic recommendations of the UN on countering such crimes, and offers an interpretation of the term hate speech in relation to the related criminological concept of hate crime. The text provides statistical data describing the level of such crime and the practice of the ECHR in this area, mentions a list of criteria according to which "hate crimes" can be motivated by language differences, gender, sexual orientation and other characteristics, as well as criteria that distinguish hate speech from freedom of expres-sion, and suggests decriminalization of part 1 of article 282 of the Russian Criminal Code. Conclusions. It is necessary to unify the concepts of "hate crimes" (and the practice of their application) in the direction of, in particular, reducing the number of decisions of the European Court of Human Rights against the Russian Federation and increasing the level of legal protection of both the individual citizen of the Russian Federation and freedom of speech and expression.

Reviewed by: HATE: Why We Should Resist it with Free Speech, Not Censorship by Nadine Strossen Richard Ashby Wilson (bio) Nadine Strossen, HATE: Why We Should Resist it with Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford University Press 2018), ISBN: 9780190859121, 232 pages. Hate is trending. The sitting president of the United States regularly mobilizes his political constituency by vilifying Mexican immigrants as “criminals and rapists” who “infest” America, and by promoting a “zero tolerance” policy at the border that punitively separates children from their parents, including persons applying for asylum. There has been a resurgence in white nationalist ideology globally both in mainstream electoral politics and in ugly scenes on the streets of Charlottesville, Dresden, and Warsaw. In the United Kingdom, hate crimes spiked after the Brexit referendum and in the USA, there has been a steady rise in hate crimes against African-Americans, Muslims, immigrants and members of the LGBT community. Given this current paroxysm of populism, isn’t it high time we re-evaluated our commitment to freedom of expression and start contemplating new legislation to regulate discriminatory speech that targets vulnerable minorities? In HATE: Why We Should Resist it with Free Speech, Not Censorship, Nadine Strossen, former national President of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), offers a resounding defense of free speech and rejects attempts to suppress or ban speech that is constitutionally protected under the First Amendment. Free speech is the lifeblood of democratic deliberation, argues Strossen, and much hate speech in the United States, while offensive, is protected speech and should remain so. Current US law only suppresses speech that intentionally advocates imminent lawless action that is likely to occur, and even then, the regulation of speech must occur in a way that is consistent with the viewpoint (or content) neutrality principle which inhibits the state from disfavoring some opinions simply because they are disagreeable. Strossen starts with the observation that there is no clear and consistent definition of “hate speech,” which she puts in scare quotations throughout the book. Hate speech is not a term of legal art and it is simply wrong to assert, as some liberal politicians have, that “hate speech is not free speech.” In Strossen’s view, “the terms ‘hate speech’ and ‘hate crimes’ are simply deployed to demonize views people find offensive and to call for punishing a broad swathe of expression, including political discourse that is integral to our democracy.”1 Reviewing hate speech laws in the US and globally, Strossen concludes that it is simply not possible to draft hate speech laws that are not unduly vague, overbroad and counter-productive.2 Germany, France, and other European countries convict hundreds of defendants a year for offences as capacious as “incitement to hatred,” and Strossen documents a number of cases that seem disproportionately chilling of political [End Page 213] speech. They include the 2014 arrest of a British politician for publicly reading a Winston Churchill quote from 1899 that denounced the treatment of women in Muslim countries, and the conviction of a Danish man in 2016 who criticized “the ideology of Islam” on Facebook, and posted the statement, “Islam wants to abuse democracy in order to get rid of democracy.”3 She reminds us also of the long and repressive history of government censorship in the United States, including how, in the 1830s, Southern states banned abolitionist speech on the grounds that it had the potential to incite violence and rebellion. She observes that the Republican National Committee and some state legislatures have included the Black Lives Matter movement in resolutions condemning hate speech. HATE addresses the lively and fairly acrimonious campus hate speech debate currently taking place in the United States, and Strossen counsels faculty and students to confront provocative speakers at universities with “counterspeech” and vigorous opposing arguments, rather than to silence them with heckling and censorious campus hate speech codes.4 She points out that all the campus speech codes challenged in the courts by the ACLU have been struck down on First Amendment grounds and recommends that universities permit all speech that the government does not itself censor.5 Strossen does not countenance the view that merely being exposed to denigrating speech is in...

This note provides an overview of available cross-country data on ethnic conflict, tensions, and protests. First, it documents the steps taken in the selection of 16 different relevant data sources, before they are briefly described, and their distinct aspects are highlighted. Second, it includes some descriptive analysis of selected indicators, as well as comparisons between them. Overall, it suggests that data on ethnic armed conflict is easily accessible, especially through the GROWup – Geographical Research on War, Unified Platform. Moreover, the updated version of the Minorities at Risk (MAR) and accompanying datasets will also provide useful data. However, data on ethnic tensions, protests, and other types of violent and non-violent events (including the actors involved) is currently scattered across different sources, with differences in coverage and in the information provided.

Claudia Rankine, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the Untimely Present Abram Foley (bio) A discourse of timeliness haunts the marketing and reception of recent writing by African American authors. A quick review of a few works shows just how much. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's marketing description for Angela Flournoy's The Turner House (2015), a novel about post-recession Detroit, assured potential buyers that it was "A powerful, timely debut" ("Angel Flournoy"). Blake Butler of Vice praises John Keene's Counternarratives (2015), which collects stories of black life in the Americas from early colonization to present, as "one of the most vitally timed books of the year" (Butler 2015). Jabari Asim's Only the Strong (2015), set in a fictionalized version of St. Louis in the 1970s, bears a front-cover blurb praising the novel's "eerie timeliness" (Bell 2015). In a compilation of reviewer blurbs for Paul Beatty's Man-Booker-Prize-winning novel The Sellout (2016), three separate reviewers praise the book as "timely" ("The Sellout"). Ron Charles's Washington Post review of T. Geronimo Johnson's Welcome to Braggsville (2015), a satire on race, lynching, and liberal America, applauds the novel for forcing Americans to confront their "national amnesia" concerning the history of lynchings and racial violence in the U.S. "Welcome to Braggsville," he concludes, "It's about time" (Charles 2015). Charles's idiomatic conclusion suggests that something belated has—at last—come to pass. It's about time, that is, that implicitly white, novel-reading Americans remember the deep history of racial violence in America. And yet, as Charles's review somewhat inadvertently points out, timeliness itself works by way of cultural amnesia, in the operative privilege of forgetting that racial violence has been the status quo since colonization and so this or that book seems particularly relevant just now. This is the bind of the timely: it attempts to make literature relevant by attaching it to cultural events, but the attempt is predicated on a forgetfulness that should remain troubling. Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric—a surprise bestseller in 2014 that has made Rankine one of the foremost figures for thinking about race in America—did not escape the discourse of timeliness in its reception. This is hardly surprising, given that Citizen's poems chart the correspondence between the microaggressions of everyday racism and the fatal aggressions [End Page 225] of highly visible police violence and hate crimes in the United States and elsewhere. Perhaps the most famous passage of Rankine's book records the names of those recently killed by hate crimes and police violence, a macabre list that has grown with over subsequent printings of the book, literally keeping time with America's ongoing racial violence..1 Rankine's close attention to racism in America led Dan Chiasson, poetry critic for The New Yorker, to comment that Citizen is "An especially vital book for this moment in time" (Chiasson 2014). Recall, too, that Blake Butler described John Keene's Counternarratives as a "vitally timed" book. Chiasson's remark, like Butler's, adds an important nuance to the timely by drawing a connection between timeliness and vitality, that is, between timeliness and life. While Chiasson's description of Rankine's "vital book" speaks rather straightforwardly to his perception of the book's importance, his word choice also follows Rankine's writing back to a modernist philosopher of life and untimeliness, Friedrich Nietzsche. In his preface to "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," the most renowned of his four Untimely Meditations published between 1873 and 1876, Nietzsche characterizes the "untimely" as that which "acts counter to our time and thereby acts on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come" (1997, 60). Following from Nietzsche's definition, does it not seem possible that the supposed timeliness of African American writing has more to do with "untimeliness," in acknowledging an ongoing disjuncture between amnesia and racial memory that continues to take shape along the rift of the color line? I propose over the course of this essay that Rankine's poetry re-envisions Nietzsche's philosophy of life, particularly his notion that life emerges from a...

The International American Studies Association is dismayed to see the explosion of anger, bitterness and desperation that has been triggered by yet another senseless, cruel and wanton act of racialized violence in the United States. We stand in solidarity with and support the ongoing struggle by African Americans, indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, migrants and the marginalized against the racialized violence perpetrated against them.
 As scholars of the United States, we see the killing of George Floyd and many before them as acts on the continuum of the history of the powerful committing racialized violence against the powerless in the United States from before the birth of that country to the here and now of the present day. This continuum stretches from the transatlantic slave trade, the genocide of the indigenous population, the denial of rights and liberties to women, through the exploitation of American workers, slavery and Jim Crow, to the exclusion and inhumane treatment of the same migrants who make a profit for American corporations and keep prices low for the U.S. consumer. As scholars of the United States, we are acutely aware of how racialized violence is systemic, of how it has been woven into the fabric of U.S. society and cultures by the powerful, and of how the struggle against it has produced some of the greatest contributions of U.S. society to world culture and heritage.
 The desperate rebellion of the powerless against racialized violence by the powerful is in turn propagandized as unreasonable or malicious. It is neither. It is an uprising to defend their own lives, their last resort after waiting for generations for justice and equal treatment from law enforcement, law makers, and the courts. In too many instances, those in power have answered such uprisings with deadly force—and in every instance, they have had alternatives to this response.
 We are calling on those in power and the people with the guns in the United States now to exercise their choices and choose an alternative to deadly force as a response to the struggle against racialized violence. You have the power and the weapons—you have a choice to do the right thing and make peace.
 We are calling on U.S. law makers to listen and address the issues of injustice and racialized violence through systemic reform that remakes the very fabric of the United States justice system, including independent accountability oversight for law enforcement.
 We are calling on our IASA members and Americanists around the world to redouble their efforts at teaching their students and educating the public of the truth about the struggle against racialized violence in the United States.
 We are calling on our IASA members and Americanists around the world to become allies in the struggle against racialized violence in the United States and in their home societies by publicizing scholarship on the truth, by listening to and amplifying the voices of black people, ethnic minorities and the marginalized, and supporting them in this struggle on their own terms.
 We are calling on all fellow scholarly associations to explore all the ways in which they can put pressure with those in power at all levels in the United States to do the right thing and end racialized violence.
 There will be no peace in our hearts and souls until justice is done and racialized violence is ended—until all of us are able “to breathe free.”
 
 Dr Manpreet Kaur Kang, President of the International American Studies Association, Professor of English and Dean, School of Humanities & Social Sciences, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, India;Dr Jennifer Frost, President of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association, Associate Professor of History, University of Auckland, New Zealand;Dr S. Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş, Associate Professor, Department of American Culture and Literature, Hacettepe University, Turkey;Dr Gabriela Vargas-Cetina, Professor of Anthropology, Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, Mexico;Dr Paweł Jędrzejko, Associate Professor of American Literature, University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland;Dr Marietta Messmer, Associate Professor of American Studies, University of Groningen, The Netherlands;Dr Kryštof Kozák, Department of North American Studies, Charles University, Prague;Dr Giorgio Mariani, Professor of English and American Languages and Literatures, Department of European, American and Intercultural Studies, Università “Sapienza” of Rome;Dr György Tóth, Lecturer, History, Heritage and Politics, University of Stirling, Scotland, United Kingdom;Dr Manuel Broncano, Professor of American Literature and Director of English, Spanish, and Translation, Texas A&M International University, Laredo, USA;Dr Jiaying Cai, Lecturer at the School of English Studies, Shanghai International Studies University, China;Dr Alessandro Buffa, Secretary, Center for Postcolonial and Gender Studies, University of Naples L’Orientale, Italy;

The rights of victims of hate speech and hate crimes are part of the rights in the system of support for victims and witnesses of criminal acts according to domestic legislation and international and European standards. Directive 2012/29/EU foresees an obligation for member states (and candidates) to take measures to establish a protection system. Effective protection implies not only a normative framework but also real protection. The specifics of hate speech and hate crimes also conditioned the adoption of Directive CM/Rec (2022) 16, which foresees measures to combat hate speech. Some expressions of hate speech require a criminal law response, including obligations of a preventive nature on the part of public authorities. That is why encouraging individuals and groups to report hate speech and hate crimes and providing protection is part of an evolving legal culture. Victims should also be supported by the media, which in modern society often has a decisive role, through compliance with legal regulations and reporting in accordance with the rules of the profession. Social networks are an indispensable element in the policy of preventing and fighting against hate speech and hate crimes, and their role is becoming increasingly important.

The introduction of racially aggravated offences in Part II of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 (the Act) represents a major shift in the state response to violence and harassment of minorities in the United Kingdom (UK).1 It comes at a time when 'racial violence' is increasingly recognised as a persistent social problem. High profile incidents such as the Stephen Lawrence enquiry have ensured that the debate about the relationship between racial violence, crime and law enforcement agencies in the United Kingdom has taken on greater urgency.2 Previous governments resisted pressure to introduce a specific criminal offence of racial violence and harassment. In 1994, the Home Secretary, Michael Howard summarised this approach in setting out the Government's objection to the Home Affairs Committee's call to introduce such an offence in its report on Racial Attacks and Harrassment: 'All violent crimes, regardless of motivation, can already be dealt with properly under existing legislation'.3 In a sharp contrast to this approach, the Labour Party election manifesto stated that 'Britain is a multiracial and multicultural society. All of its members must have the protection of the law. We will create a new offence of racial harassment and a new crime of

In 1971 British Home Secretary Reginald Maudling suggested that the situation in Northern Ireland amounted to ‘an acceptable level of violence’. During ‘the Troubles’ this became the de facto security policy of successive British governments prepared to countenance a ‘manageable’ level of paramilitary activity. This reality supposedly changed irrevocably with the peace process and the 1997 Good Friday Agreement. Over the last fifteen years, however, Northern Ireland has been dubbed ‘the race hate capital of Europe’ with the ‘targeting of ethnic minorities’ by loyalist paramilitaries characterised as ‘ethnic cleansing’ by the police. The demography of Northern Ireland is changing, with eastern EU and non-white migrant workers arriving, which accentuates the reversing Protestant/Catholic differential and further undermines the ‘Protestant majoritarianism’ on which the state was founded. Alongside ‘flags protests’, racist violence has become one of the principal manifestations of unionist unease. The riposte by the state to racism has been to reach for empty models of ‘hate crime’ and ‘good relations’ alongside a criminal justice policy that appears to find acceptable a certain level of racist violence. Broadly, therefore, the author characterises the experience of people of colour and migrant workers in Northern Ireland as ‘living the peace process in reverse’. He concludes that this reality has profound implications – both for the future of Northern Ireland and for the ways in which we understand the relationship between the state and new forms of British nationalism across the UK.