Arbitrary Violence Research Articles

Dilemmas and Insights About Recognition of Plant Rights

Plant rights, which are relatively new compared to animal rights theories have both negative and positive aspects. Because all of the negative rights established for animals are difficult to apply to plants, it is necessary to focus on positive relational responsibilities. For this reason, instead of applying the basic principles set out by animal rights theorists to plants, we are opening up discussions on issues that would prevent arbitrary violence against plants and their total instrumentalisation. Thus, we aim to evaluate the arbitrariness applied in both ordinary states and states of exception in the context of ecocide, ecological mourning, and the relationship between law and violence.

Necessary Exorcisms: Intercessory Law in S. Ansky's The Dybbuk

Abstract: "Necessary Exorcisms" reads S. Ansky's The Dybbuk in the context of Ansky's travels during World War I as a relief aid worker with the Jewish Committee to Help War Victims. Ansky's description of the fate of Jews in occupied Galicia—in the fragments of a diary he kept during these years and in a longer memoir published after the war—confronts us with two motifs at the heart of The Dybbuk : a blurring of the threshold between life and death, and the important role that law, litigatory practices, and lawful authorities play as entities to which one could appeal to prevent a wrong from occurring and/or to adjudicate a wrong after it has occurred. To read The Dybbuk alongside Ansky's account of what happened to Jews in Galicia during World War I is to see the play as a dramatic exploration of issues at the heart of what Giorgio Agamben has theorized as a state of exception—the geopolitical space in which there is no law or lawful authority to which to appeal when one's rights as a citizen have been revoked and one has become exposed to arbitrary violence. To read The Dybbuk as a play obliquely linked to the fate of Jews in occupied Galicia is to complicate contemporary readings that see Ansky staging the law's malign power to punish illicit desires so as to uphold patriarchal and classist norms. Reading The Dybbuk as a postwar play, "Necessary Exorcisms" discerns in it an apology for the law and its intercessions.

Daraa and the Altered Trajectory of the Syrian Crisis

Daraa City is widely known as the birthplace of the Syrian uprising. The uprising, which was initially motivated by high-minded ideas and opposition to the arbitrary violence of an authoritarian state, rapidly degenerated into a civil war orientated by external agendas and priorities. In this paper, I want to situate Daraa governorate at the centre of this development, with the intention of highlighting how the course of events in this small part of Syria had vital implications for the development of the Syrian Civil War. In seeking to develop an analysis of the interplay of internal dynamics and external influences, i seek to ‘reconcile’ the ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ dimensions of civil war, and also draw on contributions to the peacebuilding literature, and this enables me to reconceptualise the relationship between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ drivers of conflict.

Gendered gratitude: the civic subjectivity of israeli women soldiers

ABSTRACT Although most Western militaries include women, the military remains a hyper-masculine organization where women’s service is threatened and unstable. Since the military is a citizenship-conferring institution, we ask, what civic subjectivity do women soldiers develop considering their enduring experience of inequality? Based on 141 retrospective accounts by Israeli women soldiers, we argue that women’s civic subjectivity is based on a sense of gratitude for the opportunity to participate in a central state institution. As a moral sentiment, gratitude ties women to the nation in bonds of commitment and belonging, but at the same time ensures their acceptance of and compliance with the gendered military hierarchy. Women’s ‘civic subjectivity of gratitude’ is a byproduct and expression of structural gendered inequality and at the same time reproduces it. Nonetheless, cracks begin to appear in the women’s sense of gratitude when they encounter gendered devaluation, sexual harassment, or military acts of arbitrary violence. In these cases, the women become more critical, and gradually develop what we term ‘suspicious civic subjectivity’, which can sometimes serve as a source and catalyzer for developing and promoting gender equity policies.

‘Jáchymov’s Hell’: Trekking in the Memoryscape of Czechoslovakia’s Communist Forced Labour Camps

Abstract This article treks through the timeworn remnants of Czechoslovakia’s Communist forced and correctional labour uranium camps in the Ore Mountains in the northwest Bohemian region of Jáchymov. These camps held tens of thousands of detainees, largely political prisoners convicted in sham trials or individuals sent there for re-education. Conditions were deplorable. Throughout the 1950s, the young Czechoslovak Communist regime compelled detainees to hard, life threatening labour and subjected them to maltreatment and arbitrary violence. This article traces some of the visible, invisible or overgrown artefacts of the former camps, as well as public as private memories about what happened there. It reflects on the current memoryscape of these forgotten places of human suffering and describes the aesthetics of these aging sites of atrocity.

Winnie Mandela: Homophobia and Dystopia in One of Achmat Dangor’s Forgotten Short Stories

This article focuses on a transition-era short story by Achmat Dangor, “Mama & Kid Freedom” (1995, Index on Censorship 24 [3]: 108–13), which has thus far been wholly overlooked by literary scholars. The story depicts a political dystopia that is characterised by assassinations, arbitrary violence, and the mass incarceration of those deemed to be homosexual. There are also clear overlaps between the eponymous character Mama and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. The story reproduces the binary tropes that surround Madikizela-Mandela and her then estranged husband, Nelson Mandela: whereas he is cast as the hero of the narrative of nation-building, she is cast as its villain. In this article, I argue that Dangor weaves a story that pulls together two particularly salient transition-era political discourses: Madikizela-Mandela as a homophobic and violent woman, and sexual rights as a bellwether of the country’s project of democratic modernity. The story evidences a homonationalist logic in which the recognition or non-recognition of sexual rights comes to be read as the axis on which post- apartheid democracy and human rights depend.

(Un)Exceptional Trauma, Existential Insecurity, and Anxieties of Modern Subjecthood: A Phenomenological Analysis of Arbitrary Sovereign Violence

This article examines the lasting phenomenological consequences of inhabiting “spaces” of exception by rethinking the operation of sovereign violence therein. Taking as its point of departure Giorgio Agamben’s suggestion that the ‘state of exception’ is the ‘rule’ of modern politics, I argue that arbitrary sovereign violence has taken the place of the ‘sovereign decision’ of Carl Schmitt’s original theory. However, recognizing that it is neither enough simply to articulate the institutional grid of intelligibility of the state of exception nor expose the logics of sovereignty that make possible arbitrary violence, it draws on phenomenology, affect theory, and trauma studies to reorient our focus from the sovereign to the subject upon whom sovereign power is executed. Ultimately it proposes a new understanding of modern subjecthood as one of existential insecurity generated by the ‘new age of anxiety’ permeating social and political life today.

Reforms, Protest, and Repression in Democratic Transition: A Hypothesis-Generating Case Study from Myanmar (2011-2015)

Existing scholarship lacks important knowledge about how protest and coercion change during regime change. This study provides new evidence by studying legal reforms as well as patterns of protest and repression during the first 46 months of Myanmar’s regime change. By examining law amendments and analyzing protest data compiled via a protest event analysis from local news resources, it can be shown that the de jure exercisability and de facto exercise of protest have changed considerably over time. Informal repression of protest, such as by arbitrary violence, have gradually made way for methods that are formally in accordance with the rule of law, but remained inconsistent with human rights standards. Additionally, repression has become more selective, demonstrating a continuous high state control over the civil society. I suggest that the observed changes may be general features of elite-controlled transitions to competitive authoritarianism, a hypothesis that merits future cross-national research.

Protest und Demokratisierung in Myanmar: Erste Erkenntnisse aus dem „Myanmar Protest Event Dataset“

Abstract Myanmar has been perceived to be in a sociopolitical and economic transition since the semi-civilian government under President Thein Sein took office in 2011. Amongst other things, for a representative democracy to function, citizens have to have the freedom to express their opinions and deliberate them with fellow citizens. This requires the secure granting of fundamental civil liberties, as prescribed in the freedom of expression, association, and assembly. Hence, once in the process of democratization, a formerly authoritarian state has to make significant improvements in the granting and protection of these rights too. To empirically test whether Myanmar has made such improvements since 2011 is the goal of a greater research project I am working on. This research note introduces the project and summarizes first findings. By combining knowledge on legal reforms and protest data from the Myanmar Protest Event Dataset, it is suggested that, in Myanmar, the de jure exercisability and de facto exercise of fundamental civil liberties have significantly improved from 2011 to 2015. Informal methods of suppressing the right to protest, such as arbitrary violence, have increasingly descended while methods that are formally in accordance with the rule of law but still lack compliance with international human rights standards have ascended.

CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC: Arbitrary Violence Continues

Africa Research Bulletin: Political, Social and Cultural SeriesVolume 52, Issue 11 p. 20787B-20788B National Security CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC: Arbitrary Violence Continues First published: 17 December 2015 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-825X.2015.06726.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume52, Issue11December 2015Pages 20787B-20788B RelatedInformation

Enclave Rustenburg: platinum mining and the post-apartheid social order

In the absence of a levelling out of income and resources, as well as arbitrary violence in everyday life, the post-apartheid social order is characterised by the formation of various enclaves. In the platinum mining town of Rustenburg, these enclaves are constructed on the foundations of the apartheid categories ‘suburb’, ‘compound’, ‘township’ and ‘homeland’. Such enclaves include security villages, converted compounds with access control, and informal settlements with distinctive gender, linguistic and class formations. The article draws on David Harvey's formulation of absolute, relative and relational space and the case of Rustenburg to elaborate the concept of enclave further.

The battle for Zimbabwe in 2013: from polarisation to ambivalence

AbstractOn the face of it, the triumph of Robert Mugabe and ZANU(PF) in the 2013 elections came as a shock, not least to opposition MDC activists. However, after a period of introspection, many have begun to construct a coherent and wide-ranging account of the result which explores opposition shortcomings, and the revived relationship between the electorate and Mugabe's ZANU(PF). This article, based on interviews with political activists conducted three months after the election, outlines and attempts to explain this account. It explores the way in which a politics of polarisation that dominated Zimbabwe in recent years appears to have given way to a politics of ambivalence: where Zimbabweans once viewed their political landscape as one populated by antinomies, they now see their state and its relation to themselves in more complex and ambiguous ways. As a result, Zimbabweans' conception of the state is increasingly coming to resemble Mbembe's formulation of states as contemporaneously ‘organizers of public happiness’ and wielders of arbitrary violence.

Soldiers, Martyrs, Traitors, and Exiles: Political Conflict in Eritrea and the Diaspora (review)

Reviewed by: Soldiers, Martyrs, Traitors, and Exiles: Political Conflict in Eritrea and the Diaspora David Bozzini (bio) Soldiers, Martyrs, Traitors, and Exiles: Political Conflict in Eritrea and the Diaspora, by Tricia Redeker Hepner Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009; pp. 249. $55 cloth/$22.50 paper. Over the last decade, the Eritrean police state has practiced blatant repression, even to the extent of eating "its own children," as the famous expression sadly goes. In short, government purges sweep national heroes and loyalists from the party-state leadership, and ordinary citizens and National Service members are subjected to arbitrary violence. Tricia Redeker Hepner witnessed such events while carrying out fieldwork research in Eritrea in 2001; thereafter, she followed the echoes and reverberations of the government's increasingly repressive politics within the Eritrean diaspora in the United States. [End Page 141] The result of her research is an impressive study of the social history of Eritrean political dynamics that roots the current Eritrean political situation in the transnational history of the country's nation-building process over the last four decades. Hepner's book revolves particularly around the various contributions made by the Eritrean diaspora to the struggle for independence and its attempts to participate in postindependence governance and reconstruction (xii). Hepner builds her arguments around the extensive contemporary debates and the conceptual framework of political transnationalism, reminding us that Eritrea comprises an exemplary case of the transnational nation-state. The author's objective in exploring the complexity of Eritrean political transnationalism is to elucidate its ambivalent dimensions. Along these lines, Hepner convincingly demonstrates "the contradictory nature of transnationalism as both an emancipating and repressive force" (104). This represents a major contribution to the theory of transnational political processes. The author skillfully traces the uncertainties, the mistrust, and the conflicts that shape the rugged terrain of Eritrean politics. As she puts it at the beginning of the book, "The contemporary dilemmas associated with transnational political struggle and the encounter between territorial nationalism and globally constructed models of political and social power" (xiii) represent her main concern. More precisely, she recounts the major conflicts and tensions over identity, nationalism, and the various political agendas of the armed movements, particularly the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) and the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPFL), and the different groups scattered across Eritrea and the United States during the historical evolution of the struggle for independence and the building of the independent state. In highlighting the significant internal heterogeneity of these organizations, Hepner also provides a timely analysis of the unceasing cycles of consolidation and disintegration of the major historical political factions, including the current ruling party. Based on a variety of sources, including ethnographic accounts and the fruits of archival research, this study navigates a sophisticated blend of microhistories and global processes. Here, multisited research perspectives truly reveal the heuristic potential of transnational studies to explain long-lasting sociopolitical processes. This well-written and touching book clarifies historical legacies, continuities, and transformations, as well as the emergence of new processes. But at the same time, Hepner avoids the [End Page 142] common trap of overemphasizing connections at the expense of the ruptures and cracks also present in these processes. Hepner's narrative is chronological: the six chapters of her book provide an analysis of crucial political events that occurred between the 1970s and the first decade of the twenty-first century. The author, thus, takes up the challenge of drawing continuities and ruptures across four discrete periods: the various stages of the armed struggle for Eritrean independence; the immediate postindependence period, marked by euphoric state-building processes, the EPLF's accession to power, and its transformation into the Peoples Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ); the Ethio-Eritrean War (1998-2000); and finally the current postwar political descent into repression and violence. The chapters are extensively documented with rich ethnographic and archival materials that pull the reader close to the reality that is being analyzed. The author's careful and well-balanced analyses of these materials allow her to explain the various subjective political positions and "different interpretations of the past and present" (xiii) that are necessary to unveil the multifarious and ceaseless tensions occurring among...

The divine kingship of the Shilluk

Since Frazer’s time, Shilluk kingship has been a flashpoint of anthropological debates about the nature of sovereignty, and while such debates are now considered irrelevant to current debates on the subject, they need not be. This essay presents a detailed analysis of the history, myth, and ritual surrounding the Shilluk institution to propose a new set of distinctions: between “divine kingship” (by which humans can become god through arbitrary violence, reflexively defining their victims as “the people”) and “sacred kingship” (the popular domestication of such figures through ritual), and argues that kingship always represents the image of a temporary, imperfect solution to what is taken to be the fundamental dilemma of the human condition—one that can itself only be maintained through terror.

The divine kingship of the Shilluk: On violence, utopia, and the human condition, or, elements for an archaeology of sovereignty

Since Frazer’s time, Shilluk kingship has been a flashpoint of anthropological debates about the nature of sovereignty, and while such debates are now considered irrelevant to current debates on the subject, they need not be. This essay presents a detailed analysis of the history, myth, and ritual surrounding the Shilluk institution to propose a new set of distinctions: between “divine kingship” (by which humans can become god through arbitrary violence, reflexively defining their victims as “the people”) and “sacred kingship” (the popular domestication of such figures through ritual), and argues that kingship always represents the image of a temporary, imperfect solution to what is taken to be the fundamental dilemma of the human condition—one that can itself only be maintained through terror.

Humanitarian exception as the rule: The political theology of the 1999 Tragedia in Venezuela

ABSTRACTIn recent years, Walter Benjamin's illumination that “the state of exception has become the rule” has been reactivated by several authors who have seen in contemporary politics a trivialization of situations of emergency. Instead of accepting prima facie the banality of the exception, we submit it to an empirical analysis to show its complexity and ambiguity. Our case study is the political management of the worst natural catastrophe in modern Venezuelan history: the 1999 Tragedia caused by massive landslides triggered by heavy rains on the same day that the country's new constitution was voted. A state of emergency was proclaimed and militarization of the disaster area followed, but instead of being feared or denounced, this governmental response appeared to be desired by the majority of the population. The army, under the leadership of President–Colonel Hugo ChÁvez, embodied the regeneration of the nation, redeemed from the corruption of the preceding regime and united through communion in solidarity with the victims. Arbitrary violence and ordinary looting eventually occurred, but the dominant moral sentiment expressed at the time was deep compassion. The 1999 Venezuelan scene is, thus, exemplary of a more general phenomenon, described by Claude Lefort as “the permanence of the theological‐political in modern democracies,” for which the humanitarian state of exception can be seen as a paradigm.

Putting state‐formation first: some recommendations for reconstruction and peace‐making in Afghanistan

AbstractThe authors suggest a revision of the current strategy of reconstruction and peace‐building in Afghanistan with reference to four points. (i) The programme of reconstruction should have a clear strategic focus and be designed as a state‐building project. The main problem Afghanistan faces is the absence of a monopoly of power and of other basic state functions, without which no sustainable economic development is to be expected. Fostering ‘civil society’—the standard pre‐occupation of many current development co‐operation programmes—may have a negative impact in the cases of countries suffering from state failure. (ii) A monopoly of power cannot be established only by building up a central army and disarming or integrating local armed forces. Rather, the loyalty of the country's citizens must be won through a long‐term process of providing them with equality before the law and protection from arbitrary violence in such a way as to make them independent of the ‘protection’ of local strong men or regional warlords. (iii) It is too early to achieve democracy in Afghanistan through elections. A democracy can only release the potential for political integration following successful political stabilization and institutional consolidation. And the institutional framework should be designed in such a way as to avoid an escalation of conflicts along ethno‐religious lines. An ethno‐religious quota system of the sort that many have in mind at the moment would tend rather to increase such conflict than to reduce it. (iv) A programme of reconstruction and peace‐making must necessarily take a long‐term perspective. Spending the resources that have now been approved over the next four years and hoping for a continuation of aid approvals in the future is too risky, given the dependence of these approvals on the future political climate. © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Verby die geweld van die metaflsika: Die Christelike erfenis en sekularisasie

Beyond the violence of metaphysics: The Christian tradition and secularisation. This essay reinterprets Christian faith in terms of the contemporary philosophical discourse on nihilism and the "end" of metaphysics, especially Heidegger's ontology of "decline." If Christianity is to regain its relevance in the contemporary world, it should purge itself from remnants of the natural religions as well as metaphysical beliefs, because they are instrumental in concealing (and thereby perpetuating) the arbitrary violence on which communities and their moral systems are founded. Christianity can play a meaningful role in unmasking these beliefs, thus paving the way for a "healthy" secularism and an ethics of love and non-violence.

City Jungles and Expressionist Reifications from Brecht to Hammett

The subject of expressionism, that tortured mutilation of congealed panic and anxiety, emanates its strongest contours when cast against background of modern urban landscape. The noisy and unpredictable machinery of metropolis confronts subject as an alien force that continuously threatens any vestige of individual autonomy. The harsh juxtaposition of wounded subjectivity with chaos of commerce, cacophony of technologies, and utterly inhuman industrial backgrounds exhibits dissolution of social community into scattered and disconnected fragments. In midst of most developed concentration of forces of technological achievement and civilized social organization, isolated and alienated character of modern subject comes most prominently to surface. The urban zone of expressionism is a monolithic entity that antagonizes and annihilates isolated energies of subject. Walter Benjamin refers to the impenetrable obscurity of mass existence (Baudelaire 64) in which individual is dissolved into mob. The city itself figures as anthropomorphic subject of many modernist endeavors, from Fritz Lang's Metropolis to Alexander Doblin's quasi-expressionist Berlin Alexanderplatz, which depicts a protagonist entirely constructed from assembled rhythms, ideologies, and fragments of information imposed on subjectivity by monolith metropolis. In cityscapes of George Grosz and Otto Dix, geography of city resembles infernal regions of Hieronymous Bosch, where each individual is consigned to a particular torment and compelled to replicate mechanically a specific and pointless task in utter isolation from swarming multitudes on all sides. Modern literatures unite paradoxical vision of urban landscape as technological anti-utopia with metaphor of primeval jungle. Metropolitan technologies contribute to an atmosphere of noise, light, and sudden violence whose obscure origins and unpredictable concatenations conjure visions of jungle environments. The arbitrary violence and apparent lawlessness of city life create an atmosphere of anarchy that recalls social configurations of tribal warfare. Economic imperatives that set individuals in hostile competition replicate primeval conditions where survival is based on a struggle against all others. The conflation of city and jungle corresponds to a similar conflation of machine and animal. The total mechanization of activity and subsequent death of inner life experienced by subject of modern labor is represented by analogies to inanimate mechanical processes or to unreflective instinctual violence of savage beast. The absence of civilized responses of sympathy and social conscience, made obsolete by market imperatives of total competition, engender a sense of identity with amoral extravagances of animal kingdom. American gangster and detective literatures fully incorporate urban mythos of expressionism; noir genre is based on exploration of underside and unconscious of city and its geography. Noir film and detective story of 1920s and 30s do not merely adopt landscape of expressionist scene, but further assimilate and develop expressionist atmospheres, techniques, and theoretical orientations. These genres intersect most prominently in films like Fritz Lang's M and works of German emigrant Otto Preminger. The expressionist resonances in Dashiell Hammett's work are so pronounced that direct citations from movement can be clearly identified. The urban jungle mythos that serves as background for expressionism and noir is elaborated in Bertolt Brecht's Jungle of Cities, composed in 1924. Brecht constructs a gigantic Chicago of mythic proportions, a metaphysical projection of Chicago in its distorted and transfigured essence in which audience is instructed to concentrate on expressionist agon: concern yourself with human element, evaluate antagonists' fighting spirit impartially and concentrate your interest on showdown (12). …

“Witness to the Uttermost Edge of the World”: Judge Holden's Textual Enterprise in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian

At the center of Cormac McCarthy's epic fifth novel, Blood Meridian (1985), we find Judge Holden,1 a Mephistophelean figure who seduces a nomadic horde of scalp hunters into a “terrible covenant” (126), which consigns both their spiritual and physical lives to the judge's jurisdiction. With his “disciples of a new faith” (130), the judge wanders the Mexican-American borderlands like an anti-Moses, a lawgiver who has made no covenant with a higher power, save, of course, war. Amidst the arbitrary violence and mindless wanderings of the Glanton Gang, we find only the judge's voice, for he provides the coherence, the order, the meaning that defines the scalp hunter's pilgrimage west.