Exercise Of Violence Research Articles

Las mujeres van a la guerra

Este artículo explora el debate académico que existe en torno al rol que cumple el género en los conflictos armados. Históricamente se ha creído que las mujeres tienen un papel secundario en la práctica de la violencia en conflictos internos, centrándolas como víctimas y no como victimarías. Se ha pretendido sustentar estas afirmaciones con estudios psicológicos y prejuicios de género. Por este motivo, el enfoque que este artículo propone hace referencia también a estudios psicológicos pero además toma estudios acerca de conflictos armados internos en los que las mujeres han tenido protagonismo. Pretende sustentar que las mujeres son igual de violentas que los hombres. Este argumento se apoya en la ya demostrada participación activa de las mujeres como efectivos militares en enfrentamientos bélicos acaecidos en conflictos post Guerra Fría y en los diferentes tipos de violencia que ellas perpetran. Como estudio de caso se tomará al conflicto en Siria.

THE UKRAINIAN ANTI-BOLSHEVIK RISINGS OF SPRING AND SUMMER 1919: INTELLECTUAL HISTORY IN A SPACE OF VIOLENCE

This article examines the activity and propaganda of the leaders of independent military bands (in Ukrainian: otamans) during the risings of spring and summer 1919 against the Bolsheviks in the Ukraine. It uses the otamans as a case study to question recent interpretations of violence informed by the German-language ‘new sociology of violence’, according to which ideas are assumed to have little relevance to the exercise of violence. The article pays particular attention to how the stated goal of ‘soviets without Jews' led to the pogroms committed by the otamans as a means of mobilising peasant support.

Más allá de las migraciones internas. Destierro y despojo en la guerra

Forced internal migration is a way of theft and deterritorialization increasing in Latin America. Overexploitation, justified in the development and exercise of violence are two articulated poles which swing and mix among armed conflicts, environmental disasters, infrastructure, and mining-energetic megaprojects; dynamics deeply related, as shown in the colombian case. Those activities are embedded in such precarious structural conditions, that disable it´s timely resolution, fact that generates a long-term impact on a growing and inertial impoverishment.

Algunas reflexiones sobre el estudio de los hombres desde el feminismo y desde los derechos humanos

En este texto se comentan algunos encuentros y desencuentros en la investigación e intervención sobre problemáticas que viven los hombres, a partir de contrastar acercamientos analíticos próximos al concepto de derechos, pero dependiendo de si se adopta una postura feminista o de género, ya sea explícito o no, o bien si la aproximación surge de otros referentes teóricos y políticos. La hipótesis de trabajo es que las tensiones son mayores cuando no se recupera en su sentido relacional la perspectiva de género. No se asume que el feminismo y los derechos humanos sean excluyentes entre sí, pero sí que pueden tener énfasis distintos en las estrategias para reparar exclusiones y para identificar titulares de las garantías que le viabilizan a toda persona participar en la construcción de las condiciones de posibilidad de un entorno social más equitativo y solidario. El relato de algunas experiencias en tres ámbitos de estudio pretende mostrar cómo permean lecturas maniqueas, las cuales siguen victimizando y satanizando a algunos de los personajes que interactúan en las relaciones de género, por lo que ello limita la selección de categorías analíticas y políticas más integrales y comprensivas para cuestionar las relaciones de poder y los ejercicios de violencia en sus diferentes acepciones. No hay la intención de descalificación alguna, sino estimular un intercambio dialógico que permita enriquecer el trabajo con los hombres como sujetos genéricos.

Violência e poder no discurso psiquiátrico: da exclusão sistemática às subjetivações normativas

Este artigo versa sobre as relações de poder e o exercício da violência nos atos médicos de psiquiatras de um hospital psiquiátrico público brasileiro. Valendo-se das noções de poder disciplinar e biopoder em Foucault, e das contribuições de Hannah Arendt sobre o conceito de violência e política, busca-se compreender o modo como os entrevistados se posicionam frente ao discurso psiquiátrico e qual o lugar reservado nesse discurso para os pacientes. Verifica-se como o discurso psiquiátrico asilar sofreu transformações após o início da reforma psiquiátrica, passando da exclusão sistemática da loucura para o imperativo de inclusão social. Conclui-se que o exercício da política, tal como Arendt o compreende, pode apresentar uma terceira via discursiva para um novo avanço na reforma psiquiátrica.

The art of being in-between: native intermediaries, Indian identity, and local rule in colonial Oaxaca

In The Art of Being In-between Yanna Yannakakis rethinks processes of cultural change and indigenous resistance and accommodation to colonial rule through a focus on the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, a rugged, mountainous, ethnically diverse, and overwhelmingly indigenous region of colonial Mexico. Her rich social and cultural history tells the story of the making of colonialism at the edge of empire through the eyes of native intermediary figures: indigenous governors clothed in Spanish silks, priests’ assistants, interpreters, economic middlemen, legal agents, landed nobility, and “Indian conquistadors.” Through political negotiation, cultural brokerage, and the exercise of violence, these fascinating intercultural figures redefined native leadership, sparked indigenous rebellions, and helped forge an ambivalent political culture that distinguished the hinterlands from the centers of Spanish empire. Through interpretation of a wide array of historical sources—including descriptions of public rituals, accounts of indigenous rebellions, idolatry trials, legal petitions, court cases, land disputes, and indigenous pictorial histories—Yannakakis weaves together an elegant narrative that illuminates political and cultural struggles over the terms of local rule. As cultural brokers, native intermediaries at times reconciled conflicting interests, and at other times positioned themselves in opposing camps over the outcome of municipal elections, the provision of goods and labor, landholding, community ritual, the meaning of indigenous “custom” in relation to Spanish law, and representations of the past. In the process, they shaped an emergent “Indian” identity in tension with other forms of indigenous identity and a political order characterized by a persistent conflict between local autonomy and colonial control. This innovative study provides fresh insight into colonialism’s disparate cultures and the making of race, ethnicity, and the colonial state and legal system in Spanish America.

Foucaulte o Poder

The purpose of this paper is to present some thoughts upon the ever pressing question of the role of justice in our societies, according to Michel Foucault. Centered upon Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, the paper draws the guidelines which Foucault developed about the aggiornamento of the exercise of power and its changing methods, from torture to the scientific methods which he named technologies of the self. Going from the exercise of violence centered upon the body to its submission by means of idea and mind control, power has associated itself to the scientific (psychiatric) approach of identity, leading to a controllable abnormality (present in prisons). All of this in the name of a population policy, a bio power which ensures the docility of individuals while optimizing their productive force. Hence the remaining epigraph quoted challenge where Plato provocatively States: justice is the same everywhere, it is the rule of the strongest.

Off the Map

This article explores the link between the territorial imperative of the modern state, the exercise of violence and the practice of cartography. After first tracing the ways in which the exercise of ‘non-state’ coercion has been either eliminated historically or isolated ideologically, the question of the map is brought to bear on the issue of violence and territoriality. The article thus illustrates the importance of cartographic violence: the way the state and its violent constitution of territory have been sanctified through the project of the map.

The Carracci, visual narrative and heroic poetry after Ariosto: the ‘Story of Jason’, in Palazzo Fava

The idea of chivalry was propagated in the sixteenth century through widely read works of narrative fiction, which circulated in printed form well beyond their traditionally aristocratic reading public. The popularity of the romances, and their centrality to conceptions of dynastic, aristocratic and even national identity, were regarded with misgivings by a small but articulate minority. For humanist critics, romance became the focus for more general concerns regarding the exemplary status of heroes past and present, and of what could be called the ethical significance of literary form. The heroes of chivalric romance lived according to a warrior code which, by conceiving honor as attainable through the exercise of violence, was found to be disastrously out of step with the needs of the time: the precarious protocols of statecraft, the civil obligations of courtiers, the grim realities of modern warfare.1 This was especially the case with those heroes of Greco-Roman myth, such as Hercules and Jason, who had a rich and varied afterlife in post-classical literature. The very features which allowed these pagan heroes an affinity with chivalric romance (their distinction as lovers and warriors, their association with supernatural agency) made them problematic according to humanist norms of virtuous conduct. In part, the problem lay in the composite nature of mythological characters; they appeared in manifestly different aspects across a range of Greek and Roman literary genres, each of which determined its own mode of characterization. Hercules was not just the destroyer of monsters, performer of superhuman labors and hence a classical forebear for the Dukes of Ferrara and other princes;2 Ariosto and Boiardo also knew him from Seneca's Hercules Furens as tragically conflicted, given to madness, error, and murder. Jason's identity as the leader of a heroic quest collided with his status as a seducer and adulterer, marked by an inner weakness and self-doubt — especially as the Argonautica by the ‘decadent’ Apollonius Rhodius came to be better known in the sixteenth century.3 Yet Jason had posed difficulties long before. The hero was known, after all, to a large extent from the multiple perspectives created by Ovid in Metamorphoses VII and the Heroides, and from Seneca's Medea, which presented Jason from the point of view of the women he had seduced and abandoned. Jason was seen to have performed his heroic feats not though his own virtù, but aided by the witchcraft of the beautiful and love-struck Medea. His treatment of Medea thereafter was far from chivalrous: having promised to marry her, he abandoned her, precipitating her vengeful murder of their two children along with other spectacular crimes. Dante, for instance, although drawn to the symbolic possibilities of the voyage of the Argo, regarded Jason as a multiple adulterer and consigned him to the first circle of the Inferno, while Boccaccio condemned him for his cruelty and ingratitude to Medea.4 Yet Jason subsequently would serve as patron for one of the most important and celebrated manifestations of Renaissance chivalry, the Order of the Golden Fleece, founded in Burgundy in 1430. The story of the Argonauts, their perilous voyage to Colchis, and the capture of the Golden Fleece, served the Burgundian knights as a powerful symbol of men of valor united in and ennobled by a common purpose, paradigmatic of the wandering knights of the Grail or of the crusaders dedicated to the liberation ofJerusalem or Constantinople. Philip the Good's choice of Jason as patron of his Order initiated a new phase of vernacular compositions on this theme; it also provoked controversy.5 In 1431 the chancellor of the order, Jean Germain, vehemently condemned Jason for his breach of faith with Medea and proposed Gideon as a more appropriate champion. As a result, subsequent adaptations or commentaries on the story were concerned specificallywith the rehabilitation of the hero, inventing happier and more palatable endings, or using allegorical interpretation to justify the more outrageous episodes.6

Private Revenge and Public Justice

This article intends to show that the study of the Homeric epics may be useful for understanding the historical roots of our modern institutions of Criminal Justice. The Iliad and the Odyssey (both the product of an oral tradition that lasted several centuries) were written down around the middle of the 8th century BC and describe the moral values and the social life of the Greek world of that period. The social organization that they describe was not yet a polis, and the law did not exist (at least in the modern sense of the word). Nevertheless, a set of social rules existed and was basically respected. The fundamental rule was an obligation to react to any offensive behaviour by taking revenge on the offender. The sanction for not taking revenge was `losing face'. But revenge was not a free exercise of violence. It was regulated by detailed rules, some of them considered so important that if a dispute arose concerning their violation, the Council of Elders settled the dispute, acting as the first documented body of jurors in western history. The Homeric epics, therefore, show the instruments and the effectiveness of social control in situations where a state does not exist, as well as the way - or one of the ways - in which a legal system may come into existence.

Burundi: des identités ethnico-politiques forgées dans la violence

Taking the recent political situation as background, the author examines the rhetoric of political propaganda in Burundi. By considering several texts, both written (newspaper articles, politicians’ statements, political leaflets) and oral (speeches and radio declarations), of which long excerpts are reproduced, the author is able to demonstrate that all parties call for violence in Burundi, regardless of political side. The Other, whoever he may be, is systematically denied the right to exist; meanwhile, the exercise of violence appears as a means of delimiting the space belonging to each group. This in turn legitimates and generalizes daily use of violence.