History Of Political Violence Research Articles

Looking for Safe Haven in a City Torn Apart by War: Narratives of agency from internally displaced persons in the southern Philippines

In this paper, I interrogate the dominant representation of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in humanitarian discourse as helpless victims in need of rescue. Based on the stories of IDP women and gender diverse individuals in the Philippines affected by the Zamboanga City siege in 2013, I illustrate how they exercised agency to shape their trajectories of displacement. The capacity of Filipino IDPs to contend with their displacement is shaped by their power as bakwit (evacuees), and by their class and ethnoreligious identities. While Christian Filipino IDPs had access to material, financial, and social resources, allowing them to engage in temporary migration after displacement, Muslim Filipino IDPs with limited access to these same resources found themselves in unwanted mobility and prolonged situations of displacement. Yet, Muslim Filipino IDPs do not lack agency, as they continue to actively and consciously forge new strategies to regain a sense of home in extended exile. Ultimately, while identifying bakwit power as a useful conceptual tool to make legible how IDPs exercised control at different stages of their displacement, embracing such a framework should not negate the long history of political violence in the region that continues to keep some people on the move.

Quota, Class, and Political Violence in Mao's China

AbstractBy investigating a one thousandth national execution quota issued in the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries (1950–1953), the article explores an aspect of Maoist politics that has largely escaped mainstream scholarship on Mao, the CCP, and PRC history. It shows how the newly created Maoist regime sought to eliminate its political enemy based on a specific demographic estimate of one thousandth. Tracing the roots of this quantification of political enemies into Mao's class-analysis theory back to the 1920s and explaining other political campaigns throughout the 1950s as continuations of the party's use of this method, the article argues that quantitative concepts and relations were important instruments in Maoist ideology, the CCP's political strategy and the working of the party-state. By proposing a concept of “quotacide,” the article identifies an ignored type of large-scale, ideologically based, and politically driven homicide in the history of political violence. The article also brings in similar quantitative policies of political suppression in other authoritarian party-states such as the Soviet Union (the 1930s) and North Vietnam (the 1950s) in this context.

Хуту против тутси в Бурунди: почему местные «линчеватели» – это угроза будущему государства?

Burundi has a long history of political violence and vigilantism that were particularly widespread in the context of the 1993–2005 civil war. During this period, various armed groups and militias emerged and engaged in violent attacks against civilians, rival rebel groups, and even government forces for ethnic or political reasons. In the aftermath of the civil war, the government of Burundi has struggled to address the legacy of violence and establish a stable political system. Yet vigilantism remains a significant issue in Burundi, with reports of civilians taking the law into their own hands in response to perceived threats and injustices. In some areas, local communities have organized vigilante groups to protect themselves from different crimes, while police as the only legal law enforcement actor to fight crime remains unsuccessful in providing proper security. However, vigilante groups also engage in extrajudicial acts of violence, such as lynching, or mob justice, and can exacerbate existing ethnic tensions and conflicts. The article concludes that long-term interethnic antagonism, coupled with experience of mutual extermination, can become the main catalyst for vigilantism that presents a threat for the overall stability of political system.

Psychological legacies of intergenerational trauma under South African apartheid: Prenatal stress predicts greater vulnerability to the psychological impacts of future stress exposure during late adolescence and early adulthood in Soweto, South Africa.

South Africa's rates of psychiatric morbidity are among the highest in sub-Saharan Africa and are foregrounded by the country's long history of political violence during apartheid. Growing evidence suggests that in utero stress exposure is a potent developmental risk factor for future mental illness risk, yet the extent to which the psychiatric effects of prenatal stress impact the next generation are unknown. We evaluate the intergenerational effects of prenatal stress experienced during apartheid on psychiatric morbidity among children at ages 17-18 and also assess the moderating effects of maternal age, social support, and past household adversity. Participants come from Birth-to-Twenty, a longitudinal birth cohort study in Soweto-Johannesburg, South Africa's largest peri-urban township which was the epicentre of violent repression and resistance during the final years of the apartheid regime. Pregnant women were prospectively enrolled in 1990 and completed questionnaires assessing social experiences, and their children's psychiatric morbidity were assessed at ages 17-18. Full data were available from 304 mother-child pairs in 2007-8. Maternal prenatal stress in 1990 was not directly associated greater psychiatric morbidity during at ages 17-18. Maternal age and past household adversity moderated the intergenerational mental health effects of prenatal stress such that children born to younger mothers and late adolescent/young adult children experiencing greater household adversity exhibited worse psychiatric morbidity at ages 17-18. Social support did not buffer against the long-term psychiatric impacts of prenatal stress. Greater prenatal stress from apartheid predicted adverse psychiatric outcomes among children born to younger mothers and adolescents/young adults who experienced greater concurrent stress. Our findings suggest that prenatal stress may affect adolescent mental health, have stress-sensitising effects, and represent possible intergenerational effects of trauma experienced under apartheid in this sample.

Five Republics and One Tradition: A History of Constitutionalism in Chile 1810–2020 by Pablo Ruiz-Tagle

Ruiz-Tagle’s Five Republics and One Tradition poses a conundrum for a historian reviewing it in a history journal (even a journal identified with interdisciplinary methodologies): Ruiz-Tagle is a leading legal scholar, and the book, despite its title, is not a work of history, not even legal history. Since it does not employ primary sources, it contains no original research. Nor does it engage with the considerable historiography of modern Chile, often to its detriment. How then to assess its contributions? It is probably most useful to approach the book as a primary source, as the product of a particular historical moment (a “constitutional moment” in the author’s own words) and a particular political-ideological perspective (liberal.) Rather than a work of history, Ruiz-Tagle’s book is a legal brief for a new constitution free of the excessive presidentialism that he views as a legacy of Chile’s republican tradition.In 2019, a small hike in subway fares sparked massive protests throughout Chile. Ruiz-Tagle provides a short afterword describing the estallido social (social explosion) in which Chile “woke up” (the protesters’ phrase) after three decades of a limited transition to democracy following the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990). Weeks of protests by sometimes more than 1 million people included a dazzling array of social actors and movements, ranging from students to indigenous right and feminist, lgbtq, and environmentalist groups. By the end of several months of protests during which, to Ruiz-Tagle’s dismay, “the government [had] a hard time controlling public order” (280), parties in congress agreed to protestors’ demands for a popular assembly to write a new constitution to replace the one imposed at gunpoint by the Pinochet dictatorship in 1980. As Ruiz-Tagle notes, this constitution has been reformed innumerable times since 1990. But, as he also recognizes, many of its anti-democratic and authoritarian features remain, especially those designed to prevent any challenge to the neoliberal economic policies that became the military regime’s signature legacy along with its atrocious record on human rights. The 1980 constitution has been a major obstacle to redressing Chile’s severe social inequalities, another unfortunate legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship and its free-market reforms.Written in the years between President Michele Bachelet’s 2015 proposed plan for a new constitution and the 2019/20 estallido social, Five Republics and One Tradition examines the history of five Chilean republican periods to make a case for what a new Chilean constitution should look like. As Ruiz-Tagle’s apparent distress at the radicalism of the 2019/20 protests suggests, his is a self-consciously moderate and centrist set of proposals for a new republican constitution free of what he terms “Jacobonism,” “political correctness,” and “the fear and the menace generated by threatening and arrogant speeches that promote only profound changes” (2–3). Ruiz-Tagle’s intellectual inspirations are Alphonse de Lamartine’s three-volume Histoire des Girondists (Paris, 1947) and prominent nineteenth-century Chilean Liberal Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna’s The Chilean Girondists: Reminiscences of an Eyewitness (New York, 2004; orig. pub. 1876). He concludes the book with a call for a new generation of Chilean Girondists who might author a liberal constitution free of the excessive presidentialism that, he argues, has been an important part of Chilean republican tradition.Ruiz-Tagle strains to distinguish Chile’s republican and liberal traditions (developed during the “five Republics”) and the 1980 neoliberal constitution without paying much attention to the shared features and historical continuities of Latin American liberalism and neoliberalism. Despite his occasional protestations to the contrary, as well as some of the actual historical material presented in the book, the book is a Whiggish account of the progressive expansion of freedom and rights since independence in Chile, with the Pinochet dictatorship and the neoliberal era in historical parentheses. To draw a sharp distinction between Chilean liberalism and neoliberalism requires that Ruiz-Tagle ignore a considerable body of historical scholarship on authoritarianism and political violence in Chile since independence. Notably absent from his bibliography, for example, are the groundbreaking works of Lira and Loveman on the history of political violence and the use of authoritarian legal instruments like states of siege, amnesties, extraordinary faculties, internal state-security laws, “decrees with force of law,” and “decree-laws” by republican governments during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1Absent too is any reckoning with the flipside of Chilean (and Latin American) liberalism—its commitment to “public order,” which translated into a suspicion of popular participation and democracy and a commitment to the genocidal elimination of indigenous peoples and appropriation of their land. For example, Vicuña Mackenna, Ruiz-Tagle’s model for the Chilean Girondists, was an ardent advocate of the military subjugation of independent Mapuche groups. Fanning the exterminationist flame circulating in liberal publications at the time, Vicuña Mackenna denounced them as “savages,” the “enem[ies] of civilization,” and not belonging to the Chilean nation. Nor does Ruiz-Tagle pay attention to major moments of state violence and authoritarianism that also defined the Liberal governments. He describes the expansion of political and social rights under Liberal President Arturo Alessandri without mentioning the massacres of nitrate workers in San Gregorio (1921) and La Coruña (1925), and of peasant rebels in Ránquil (1934). Ruiz-Tagle briefly mentions (in a block quotation from a secondary source) Alessandri’s resort to the authoritarian toolkit codified in the Internal State Security Law (Decree-Law No.50) to establish social and political order during the 1930s, but he fails to analyze it. This decree-law and others like it reflected the limits of the republican constitutional moments that Ruiz-Tagle views as laying the foundation for the expansion of political freedoms and rights going forward.

Biometrics and the disciplining of democracy: technology, electoral politics, and liberal interventionism in Chad

ABSTRACT In a large number of countries in Africa, biometric identification technologies have become a key element of voter registration procedures. Based on an in-depth study of biometric voter registration in Chad, a country marked by a long history of political violence, the article explains how the technology has been construed as a “solution” to address a situation labelled as a political crisis. To make sense of the unlikely introduction of biometrics in Chad, two main elements are considered: the socially constituted belief in the potential of biometrics and – paradoxically – the unfulfilled promises and fallibility of that same technology. Combining the literature on biometrics, election technologies, and liberal democracy promotion, the analysis concludes that biometric voter registration is a disciplining technology. In addition to capturing the personal data of individuals, it fosters the framing of democracy in narrow technological and procedural terms.

Laying Foundations for Democratic Regimes through Memorialization Practices

This article addresses the question of how the history of political violence targeting individuals on the basis of their race, religion, or ethnicity is memorialized in democracies. To what extent do states’ memorialization practices reflect their democratic values and institutions? The study addresses these questions by bridging the theoretical literatures of memory studies and political regimes. It compares two cases that differ in the circumstances under which they transitioned to democracy, but that have in common the history of political violence of exclusion. The first case includes the Holocaust memorials and monuments in Germany following the reunification, and the second case, the memorialization of the inter-ethnic violence in the 1990s in Bosnia and Herzegovina. By focusing on the memorials, rather than on the characteristics of a political regime, the article argues that memorials that are inclusive of different perspectives and experiences and those that encourage critical reflection and community involvement are more aligned with democratic values. The congruence between the characteristics of the political regime and those of the memorial should not be assumed even in the cases of consolidated democracies.

Health system preparedness for integration of mental health services in rural Liberia

BackgroundThere are increasing efforts and attention focused on the delivery of mental health services in primary care in low resource settings (e.g., mental health Gap Action Programme, mhGAP). However, less attention is devoted to systematic approaches that identify and address barriers to the development and uptake of mental health services within primary care in low-resource settings. Our objective was to prepare for optimal uptake by identifying barriers in rural Liberia. The country’s need for mental health services is compounded by a 14-year history of political violence and the largest Ebola virus disease outbreak in history. Both events have immediate and lasting mental health effects.MethodsA mixed-methods approach was employed, consisting of qualitative interviews with 22 key informants and six focus group discussions. Additional qualitative data as well as quantitative data were collected through semi-structured assessments of 19 rural primary care health facilities. Data were collected from March 2013 to March 2014.ResultsPotential barriers to development and uptake of mental health services included lack of mental health knowledge among primary health care staff; high workload for primary health care workers precluding addition of mental health responsibilities; lack of mental health drugs; poor physical infrastructure of health facilities including lack of space for confidential consultation; poor communication support including lack of electricity and mobile phone networks that prevent referrals and phone consultation with supervisors; absence of transportation for patients to facilitate referrals; negative attitudes and stigma towards people with severe mental disorders and their family members; and stigma against mental health workers.ConclusionsTo develop and facilitate effective primary care mental health services in a post-conflict, low resource setting will require (1) addressing the knowledge and clinical skills gap in the primary care workforce; (2) improving physical infrastructure of health facilities at care delivery points; and (3) implementing concurrent interventions designed to improve attitudes towards people with mental illness, their family members and mental health care providers.

Is Colombia a violent country?

"In Colombia violence does not disappear, it transforms," said the director of the National Institute of Forensic Medicine and Forensic Science (INMLCF) of Colombia recently. The Director refers to the long history of political violence that has persisted despite several peace processes; Mentions the social violence of children dying of malnutrition; Of the abuses against minors, that until October of the last year already passed of 18,000 denounces; Acid attacks on women, etc. The cruel murder of an eight-year-old girl recently happened in Bogotá is one more manifestation of the multiform violence that exists in Colombia, and that has raised the question of whether Colombia is truly an exceptionally violent country. [1] http://www.semana.com/nacion/articulo/carlos-valdes-director-del-instituto-de-medicina-legal-violencia-en-colombia/511538

The Continuum of Political Violence in Zimbabwe

The paper interrogates political violence in Zimbabwe. The interrogation discusses violence in the pre-colonial era, the colonial era and the post-colonial era. The study used the desktop approach and reviewed secondary sources as literature review. The findings are that in Zimbabwe violence goes beyond ordinary episodic eruption as commonly experienced by societies generally, as it is entrenched in political systems that existed in various cultural forms over the years and encompasses the known history of Zimbabwe. The paper established that there is a history of political violence in Zimbabwe that predates the Zimbabwean state-system modeled on the European Concert of state. The paper concludes that violence in Zimbabwe is both systemic and political. Violence was used as a tool to control nation-states in pre-colonial Zimbabwe, to colonize Zimbabwe, and to liberate Zimbabwe from colonialism. As such, it continues to be used for statecraft, and therefore, intrinsically linking violence to politi...

Perpetrating ourselves: reading human rights and responsibility otherwise

This article argues for an expanded and more nuanced conception of the figure of the ‘perpetrator' than currently exists with respect to human rights. It examines the poetry of the diasporic Chinese-Indonesian writer Li-Young Lee and the postwar history of political violence in postcolonial Indonesia, in relation to the ethical theory of Emmanuel Levinas. By considering how relations of responsibility extend beyond individual agents of violence, to a multitude of beneficiaries, the article provides a model for how diasporic acts of literary imagination grapple with past violence, loss and repression that often remain unaddressed in more official state venues of law and politics.

Politik Kekerasan (Para Jagoan) dan Dendam di Bali

Violent tragedy in Bali has a long history. Violence during the Dutch colonial regime, until the 1965 massacre of local political violence under the Orde Baru occurred. Post-Reform of 1998, the tragedy of violence re-emerged in tandem with the strengthening of indigenous authority (Pakraman Village) that forced silence during the centralized authoritarian Orde Baru regime. Pakraman village go hand in hand with the spirit of strengthening the cultural movement (Ajeg Bali) post Bali bombings of 2002 and 2005. Within institutions of Pakraman Village, there lies pecalangan, a traditional indigenous security forces who participates in the business of security and control of new settlers in these territories. In political violence contestation and strengthening of the culture, the local-hero who has a long history of political violence in Bali plays their vital role through the mass organizations and also joined as pecalangan. This paper tried to describe the relationship between political history of violence in Bali and the pursuit of the local-hero in it. Key words: Political violence, Ajeg Bali, Pecalangan, Pakraman Village, Local-hero

An Overview of the Political Theories of Terrorism

The history of terrorism, most likely originated from the history of political violence yet the term terrorism is comparatively recent. This action is used for coercion, however, there is no unanimously agreed and internationally recognized definition to this action. Common definitions refer this phenomenon to the terrifying acts for any political and religious interest through targeting non-combatants (civilian). By this means, this action is politically and emotionally stimulated and hard to be defined through a single definition. [5]. This research paper attempts to review the most important political approaches to the study of terrorism within the sphere of Political discipline in order to understand the nature and intensity of this action .

Introduction

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsEmmanuel BergerEmmanuel Berger is Marie Curie Fellow at the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium). He led several research projects at the Université Paris 1-Sorbonne, CESDIP (CNRS), Université de Montréal, National Archives (Belgium), European University Institute and University of Leicester. His main research fields are the history of criminal justice during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire and the history of popular justice in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. He published Le tribunal correctionnel de Bruxelles sous le Directoire (Archives générales du Royaume, 2002) and La justice pénale sous la Révolution. Les enjeux d'un modèle judiciaire liberal (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2006). He edited L'acculturation des modèles policiers et judiciaires français en Belgique et aux Pays-Bas (1795–1815) (Archives générales du Royaume, 2010).Heinz-Gerhard HauptHeinz-Gerhard Haupt is Professor of History at Bielefeld University. He has taught in several universities: Bremen, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences sociales, Lyon 2, European University Institute and Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. He has published books and articles dedicated to the history of nationalism (nineteenth and twentieth centuries), the “petite bourgeoisie” in Europe (nineteenth and twentieth centuries), the history of consumption, the history of political violence and methodology in comparative and transnational history. He recently co-edited Control of Violence: Historical and International Perspectives on Violence in Modern Societies (2010) and Comparative and Transnational History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives (2012).

A Gendered Perspective on the Arrival and Settlement of Colombian Refugees in the United Kingdom

Colombia has a long history of political violence which, in recent decades, has been exacerbated by other types of violence related to the illegal drugs trade and growing socio-economic inequalities. As a result, large sectors of the Colombian population have been displaced internally or abroad. Despite this, little is known about Colombian refugees, especially those coming to Europe. This article seeks to partly remedy this by analysing the experiences of Colombian refugees living in London from a gendered perspective, based on qualitative fieldwork carried out between 2003 and 2007. First, it shows that these migration flows are remarkably heterogeneous and include threatened political activists in search of refuge, and asylum-seekers and others escaping insecurity and more-generalised violence, thus differing from more-traditional Latin American refugee movements to Europe. Secondly, it focuses on how gender, contexts of exit and arrival, class, type of refugee migration and life course, combine to frame the migration experiences of refugees in industrialised countries.

Versions of violence: Zimbabwe's domestic violence law and symbolic politics of protection

This article argues that political uses of violence and discursive representations of violence are part of a political discourse of legitimacy in Zimbabwean politics, and that this discourse relies on a gendered power matrix in which acts of violence are depicted either as legitimate protection or as illegitimate aggression or terror. The analysis is based on public debates about domestic violence legislation and media representations of political uses of violence in 2006 and 2007. However, this is viewed as part of a longer history of political violence, entailing a symbolic politics of protection and political legitimacy, in which the protection of the nation's women figures as metonymy for ‘the people’ in need of protection.

L'Urne et le fusil

Résumé Étudier les pratiques de violence électorale, c’est réfuter un idéalisme tenace. La règle électorale ne s’est pas formée contre la violence, ni en dehors d’elle, mais au cœur de celle-ci, en utilisant ses éléments matériels pour se construire et se justifier. C’est ce que montre cette vaste enquête de terrain sur les violences du 23 avril 1848, date du premier scrutin du suffrage universel. De lutte, la politique s’est muée en une compétition. Comprendre la façon dont les règles du jeu électoral ont pu pacifier les luttes pour l’accès aux positions de pouvoir suppose de prendre acte que les violences politiques ont une histoire, une histoire inséparable des formes de l’État comme des rapports sociaux.

Political violence, psychosocial trauma, and the context of mental health services use among immigrant Latinos in the United States

Objectives. We present the prevalence of exposure to political violence (PV) among Latino immigrants in the US, and perceived need for and correlates of mental health services use among this population. Methods. We use the National Latino and Asian American Study (NLAAS), a nationally representative epidemiological survey of US Latinos, including a probability sample of 1630 immigrant Latinos. Our conceptual framework assumes a strong role of social and cultural factors in understanding the risk for psychopathology and mental health service use. Results. Eleven percent of all immigrant Latinos reported PV exposure and 76% described additional lifetime traumas. Among those with a history of PV, an increased likelihood of using mental health services was associated with female gender, English language proficiency, experiencing personal assaults, higher perceived discrimination, and having an anxiety or substance disorder. Latino men and specific subgroups of Latinos were less likely to access mental health services after experiencing PV. Perceived need for mental health services use is the strongest correlate of any lifetime and last-12-months service use. Conclusions. Individuals who come from countries with a history of political violence often have multiple traumatic experiences. This suggests a need for systematic screening for trauma and related psychiatric disorders. Specific outreach interventions focused on perceptions of need could be helpful for subgroups of Latinos including men who are particularly underrepresented in mental health services but who exhibit significant trauma histories.

Political Reconciliation Through a Struggle for Recognition?

In societies divided by a history of political violence, political reconciliation depends on transforming a relation of enmity into one of civic friendship. In such contexts, the discourse of recognition provides a ready frame in terms of which reconciliation might be conceived. Yet social theorists are divided in their assessment of the emancipatory potential of the struggle for recognition. For Charles Taylor, it establishes the possibility of reconciliation through a reciprocal dialogue oriented towards a fusion of horizons. Yet Frantz Fanon highlights the violent appropriation inherent in the logic of recognition that curtails the possibility of reconciliation. I demonstrate that Taylor’s optimism about the possibility of reconciliation through a struggle for recognition is unwarranted. For, although recognition provides the rough ground in terms of which an ethical encounter between former enemies becomes possible, it tends to fix the terms on which a reconciliatory politics might be enacted in a way that reduces the prospect of community between them. This argument is developed through a consideration of the legal-politics of reconciliation in Australia. But against Fanon’s pessimism, I advocate an agonistic reconciliation, according to which political actors would indefinitely postpone the moment of positive recognition while staking the prospect of community on the non-identity of the other, i.e. that quality in the other that cannot be reduced to the terms of identity or otherness.

Founding and Crushing: Narrative Understandings of Political Violence in Pre-modern and Colonial South Africa

The significance of violence in the founding of states and the quest for democracy is a basic concern not only for general and abstract political theory but also at the level of particular political discourses in their historical contexts. South Africa has had a long and varied history of political violence from pre-colonial times, through conquest, slavery and a century of frontier wars to apartheid, the liberation struggle and the violent funding of a post-apartheid democracy. Some, but by no means all, of this proliferating and destructive violence can be accounted for in instrumental or strategic terms. For the rest, though, this violent history was not understood, either at the time or in retrospect, as simply that of random violence or of endemic strife, a succession of arbitrary and irrational conflicts. Significantly, this often took the form of narratives of political violence whether at the level of oral histories, of popular legends, of partisan accounts, of official findings, of stories of nation-building or of academic histories. These diverse narratives may themselves be interrogated for the implicit understandings of the significance of political violence in the founding of political order and democracy of which they speak. Thus, at a macro-level, we may be concerned with what might be called the master narrative of violence and democratic inclusion. It is possible to discern, at least from the vantage point of the present, a certain overall shape and thrust to the sequence of violent events and conflicts which went into the making of South African history, culminating in the recent transition to post-apartheid democracy. Importantly this is not just a retrospective and, anachronistic projection of current norms and values onto the past. Rather, in one way or another something like this master narrative of democratic inclusion long informed the mainstream of anti-apartheid opposition and resistance during the modern period, both in its initial commitment to non-violent and constitutional politics and in its later turn to political violence and the armed struggle. However, this master arrative of violence and democracy is cast at a high level of abstraction and by no means subsumes or replaces more particular and micro-narratives of political violence at regional or communal levels. In local contexts and at different times not only rival versions of violent events and conflicts, but different understandings of the significance of political violence were sustained in communal memories and oral histories. Some of these were taken up in the larger narratives of the colonial state or incipient nationalist movements during the modern period of centralised state formation. Others, more especially those from precolonial and pre-modern contexts, have effectively been forgotten, though some also remain available for retrieval in later contexts, sometimes with surprising potency and force. In either case these narratives of political violence may be re-read and interpreted for what they reveal of the implicit understandings of the significance of violence by such precolonial and pre-modern communities. The following paper is concerned with two case studies of this kind, first with the stories of Tshawe and Shaka as the respective founding myths of the Xhosa and Zulu peoples, and then with the narrative understanding of the Mfecane.