Legacy Of Violence Research Articles

Wartime Experiences and Popular Support for Peace Agreements: Comparative Evidence from Three Cases

Peace agreements are negotiated and signed by representatives of the government and the rebels, often after many years of violent conflict, but their ability to transform a war-torn society hinges on the approval of ordinary people. Yet we have little systematic knowledge of what ordinary people think of peace agreements in the long run. This study begins to fill that gap, drawing on a set of comparative public opinion surveys from Guatemala, Nepal, and Northern Ireland, three cases where long civil wars were ended by peace agreements. The peace agreements in these countries have strong popular support, though there is variation across specific provisions. Across these cases, our findings suggest that legacies of violence are not generally associated with long-term support for peace agreements. However, when we look at provisions that grant concessions to the rebels, there is some evidence of lasting legacies.

"Show them how they treat us": Legal violence in the everyday lives of street vendors.

Since the 1930s, street vending in Los Angeles has been classified as a misdemeanor, punishable by jail time and fines. The Los Angeles Street Vendor Campaign (LASVC)—a coalition of Brown and Black street vendors and social justice organizations—succeeded in decriminalizing street vending. Drawing on data collected from 2013 to 2020 and utilizing ethnographic and digital humanities methods, this paper spotlights fifteen Black and Brown street-vendor leaders of the LASVC. Combined street-vendor leader narratives reveal how laws and enforcement practices undermined their ability to stay free, remain housed, and keep families and vending communities together. This paper differentiates between state-sanctioned legal violence, which led to dispossession and family separation, and community-sanctioned legal violence to demonstrate how laws that criminalize street vendors make them targets for other forms of violence, namely surveillance by co-ethnics. Legal violence often occurs simultaneously and cumulatively adds extra levels of precarity for street vendors.

Gender violence as genocide: the Rosa Lee Ingram case and We Charge Genocide petition

In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), under the leadership of William Patterson, submitted a 200+-page petition to the United Nations charging the United States with genocide against Black Americans. The meticulously researched petition documented hundreds of cases of assault, legal lynching (the use of the legal system to deny Black Americans justice) and death that all amounted to a system in which the federal government failed to protect Black Americans against injustice. Sexual assault figured prominently in the petition. This article looks specifically at the case of Rosa Lee Ingram as exemplary of both legal lynching and gender violence that were essential to the argument that the United States was guilty of genocide. For Patterson and the CRC, sexual violence and the threat of sexual assault, as in the Ingram case, was symptomatic of a larger terror campaign that focused on Black Americans, circumscribing their rights, their lives and safety, and confirming a white supremacist system that punished Black male sexuality and claimed Black women’s sexuality for its own.

“Our Community Is Filled with Experts”: The Critical Intergenerational Literacies of Latinx Immigrants that Facilitate a Communal Pedagogy of Resistance

Anti-immigrant legal violence and grassroots organizing against it have fundamentally shaped the lives of immigrant children and families in the US. This article inquires into the intergenerational literacy, teaching, and learning practices of Latinx immigrants’ political mobilization, drawing on qualitative data from a larger yearlong practitioner inquiry study that involved observant participant field notes, artifacts, photographs, and in-depth interviews with 11 undocumented and documented Latinx immigrants with whom I, a Latina immigrant, shared an organizing practice. Through analysis grounded on literacy as critical sociocultural practice, intergenerational learning, and Chicana/Latina education in everyday life, I argue that Latinx immigrants mobilize against oppression through critical literacy practices that facilitate what I theorize as a “communal pedagogy of resistance.” This is an intergenerational pedagogy enacted in communal spaces that grows from Latinx immigrants’ facultad, meaning the critical consciousness and epistemic privilege that results from living in the liminal space of the borderlands. This pedagogy views our community’s cultural, literacy, and linguistic practices as strengths and tools of resilience and resistance, and expands our definition of family and our sense of interdependence to fellow oppressed communities, teaching us to enact inclusive justice. A key takeaway is that Latinx immigrant students’ educational and literacy practices cannot be separated from those of their wider family/community, nor from their intergenerational sociopolitical struggles and expertise. Another is that intergenerational literacy and learning are bi/multidirectional. Implications include the need for educational institutions to learn from this pedagogy, and for additional literacy research into communal sociopolitical mobilization.

Enabling or Subverting Legal Violence? Expert Witnesses in Immigration Proceedings

AbstractDo expert witnesses enable legal violence by participating in a repressive immigration system? Drawing from over 20 years of court watching, accompaniment, and expert witness testimony, this article discusses some of the complications, contradictions, and ethical dilemmas in applying anthropological knowledge to immigration proceedings particularly for child applicants. For example, how might we effectively support individual claims to limited forms of legal relief while not essentializing cultures and countries? How do we resist reductive claims that victimize children and pathologize their parents? This is profoundly challenging, yet also a powerful opportunity. As in fieldwork, engaging with these dilemmas in practice often yields productive insights into how we might educate attorneys and judges from within.

Overcoming the Wall: Educational Achievement and Growth in School Districts on the U.S.-Mexico Border

ABSTRACT This paper compares the educational achievement and growth of Latinx third through eighth-grade students attending school along the U.S.-Mexico Border and in the interior of the four Border states. The theories of structural and legal violence predict that powerful Anglos have created systems of social reproduction, concentrated disadvantage, and immigration law that reduce Latinx education close to the U.S.-Mexico Border. We test these theories with data from the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), which contains information on Latinx achievement and growth in all public school districts in the four Border states. We find that Latinx achievement and growth are similar along the Border and in the interior except in Texas, where concentrated disadvantage dramatically lowers Latinx achievement and growth. We also find that social reproduction is more beneficial for Latinx youth along the Border because, surprisingly, Latinx adults tend to be more educated near the border than in the interior. We find no evidence that immigration laws reduce education more near the Border than in the interior. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory and policy.

Data-Becoming: History, Violence, and Justice

In this paper, I offer a materialist perspective on data-becoming through a series of (non)living encasements. The living bodies included as examples here (Emmett Till, William T. Simpson, and LaVerne Turner) point to a historical legacy of violence and justice that continues, albeit differently, in different contexts, at different times, and from different social positions. These encasements show that any meanings imbued in data are dependent on when and where it arises, what is intra-acting with it, and in what context. Along these lines, I suggest data is always in-process of becoming something other at the level of material intra-action. This paper understands the movement of racialized, gendered, and sexualized bodies for justice and their coincidental, intra-active relations as a set of ongoing, changing conditions that re/de/construct (non)violent realities across time and space. I offer a way to reconsider data as always evolving and resistant to the confines of written research which may open up pathways for non-binary applications of historical fact, violent encounter, and political justice in critical qualitative research.

Play to Learn: Shakespeare games as decolonial praxis in South African schools

The place of Shakespeare in South African secondary education has become highly contested in light of calls to decolonise the English Home Language curriculum through intentional inclusion of indigenous authors and knowledge systems, and the removal of colonial impositions such as Shakespeare. Yet removing Shakespeare from the curriculum is not the only or even the best solution for countering the violent legacies of colonialism and apartheid. This article argues that a more effective decolonial approach would be to change the way Shakespeare is taught in schools by cultivating horizontal, instead of hierarchical, dialogue within classrooms and between secondary educators and Shakespeare scholars. The authors describe their own horizontal collaboration to produce “Blood will have Blood”, a series of lesson plans and assignments centred on scenes of violence in the Shakespeare set works. Using the digital theatre game Play the Knave, the programme engages secondary school students in creative experimentation and embodied play with Shakespeare’s texts. As learners access the curriculum from their own epistemological standpoints and through their own bodies, they come to understand gendered and racial forms of violence represented in the plays and manifested in their personal and historical contexts. The article contextualises the project in terms of Practice as Research (PAR) methodology while offering preliminary findings from the programme’s implementation in Cape Town schools.

Examining Mine Action�s �peaceability� potential through everyday narratives and practices in Somaliland

The way in which societies conceptualise peace, and therefore peacebuilding, is dependent on various factors, including the society itself, its history, cultural and social foundations, the legacies of violence and peacebuilding initiatives. Drawing on interviews with various constituents in Somaliland, this article will demonstrate how bottom-up narratives and understandings of peace and peacebuilding have been shaped by the legacy of war and shared history of the reconciliation process, which was led by the elders. Similarly, this conceptualisation of peace defines what activities are considered as peacebuilding. However, the extent of this conceptualisation does not extend to mine action; an activity that was initiated by the elders during the post-war reconciliation process, and whose outcomes, such as facilitating mobility, safety and security, were outlined as peace indicators by those interviewed. Thus, while mine action has intrinsic peacebuilding potential, it is not conceptualised as peacebuilding by either international or local peacebuilders. This paper therefore seeks to critically examine this limitation. It employs Goodhand & Hulme�s (2000) concept of a peace audit, an approach to critically look at the way in which an intervention is undertaken to assess how this has raised or lowered the probability of peace. Beyond the history, using the peaceability approach, the article analyses the extent to which there are endowments of �peace capital� accrued or undermined by the sector�s everyday activities. It concludes that the �everyday� actions of the mine action actors contribute to the way in which local communities comprehended mine action interventions through the daily activities of the actors on the ground, their contrasting lifestyles, values and behaviour.

Immigrant Children in a Pol(ICE) State

Guided by the following questions: (1) What are the experiences of immigrant children attending schools in communities experiencing police brutality and anti-immigrant sentiments? (2) How do middle school children of immigrants visually represent their experiences with legal violence? and (3) What are children’s visions of freedom and community safety in this context?, this article highlights the understudied preadolescent children of immigrants through a 2-year study of a multidisciplinary theater class at a local elementary school in South Central Los Angeles. Data includes child interviews, class observations, artwork, and performance videos, from recently arrived Mexican and Central American children aged 10 to 13 years. Findings reveal how children come to understand policing, reinforcing concepts like “good cop/bad cop,” conflating local police and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents, but also imagining alternatives for community safety outside of police systems. This work contributes to the fields of immigration, abolitionist education, and ethnic studies, among others, offering new ways of supporting immigrant children through the use of arts-based tools.

Understanding and Interpreting Women in Domestic Violence and Its Multiple Dimensions by Van Manmann's Phenomenological Approach (Case Study: Women at Risk of Divorce Referred to Family Court of Shahid Bahonar Judicial Complex)

The aim of this study was to understand and interpret women's domestic violence and its multiple dimensions with a qualitative method and interpretive phenomenological approach, using in-depth interview tools. The statistical population of this study was all referring to the family court of Shahid Bahonar Judicial Complex in Tehran who were selected using purposive sampling and after interviewing 25 women who were abused. Saturation arrived. The research results showed; From the perspective of the women surveyed, violence has been used against them in three ways; Physical violence, institutional / legal violence and economic violence. In physical violence, the perpetrators, most of whom were husbands, inflicted bodily harm on the women under investigation by hitting or throwing something. In institutional or legal violence, the legislature eliminates some of women's rights and legally uses some form of legal violence. In economic violence, the third type of violence is the lack of decision-making by women or the permission of women to participate in economic affairs and the right to encroach on property.

Violence Here and Violence There: How Compound Violence Drives Undocumented Mexicans’ Migration to and Settlement in the United States

Contemporary Mexican migration to the United States is conventionally interpreted as voluntary economic migration, which obscures violence as a driver of migration and settlement. This shortcoming reflects the post-World War II distinction between voluntary and forced border crossers. With interviews from 145 undocumented Mexican adults in the US, we examine experiences of violence across communities of origin, transit, and destination. We develop the theoretical framework of compound violence, conceptualizing that an arc of physical, legal, and anticipatory violence contributes to migration decisions and permanent settlement. This study offers an updated, more holistic account of US-Mexico migration flows and complicates the voluntary-forced migration binary.

The Notion of Power and Liberalism Evolution

The author of the article makes the attempt to explain the evolution of liberalism and even broader, of human history not through the evolution of the notion of freedom, that became the philosophic mainstream already at the time of Hegel and was convenient for liberalism itself, but on the basis of the notion of power analysis that is interpreted by the liberals as opposite to freedom. Proceeding from the linguistic and political history data, the author demonstrates the multi-components character of the notion of power that is interpreted as: 1) some intriguing and “charming” authority ensuring harmony and order; 2) the source of legal violence; 3) the promise of advantages that leads to voluntary assuming certain responsibilities; 4) dependence on the source of want satisfaction; 5) passion, irrational dependence. The present notion of power structure is coherent to the Varna system specific for Indo-European nations; each Varna has its own, specific only for it, understanding of power. In various epochs and in various societies we find a specific governing notion of power. So, in Russia since ancient times the worldview of Kshatriyas prevailed and it still determines to a large extent its civilizational specifics. The classic western liberalism was characterized by the Vaishyas ideology dominance, i.e. the bourgeois class; on the contrary modern liberalism, libertarianism share the world view of the “classless society” of the Dalits (“gone astray”), whose dominance deprives the world of controllability and destructs all vertical hierarchy. The way out of the universal crisis is possible only on the basis of new historical grounds that will become, according to Heidegger, “the new beginning of history”.

Learning to be Legal: Transition Narratives of Joy and Survivor Guilt of Previously Undocumented 1.5-Generation Latinx Immigrants in the United States

ABSTRACT Relying on in-depth interviews and ethnographic research in California (2011–2018), this article theorizes the experiences of politicized, 1.5-generation Latinx immigrants who have transitioned out of undocumented status. It shows that transitioning out of undocumented status comes with feelings of joy and privilege, as well as with feelings of survivor guilt, ontological fragmentation, and wanting to take up new responsibilities as a way of repaying, and standing in solidarity with, undocumented family and community members. I argue that the transitioning experiences of previously undocumented immigrants relate to (1) their mixed-status families in the context of uneven penalization of undocumented immigrants, (2) the immigrant narrative of struggle and sacrifice, (3) politicization, pressure, and social control within the immigrant rights movement, and (4) their durably embodied undocumented subjectivities. This paper thereby advances more relational understandings of citizenship, (political) subjectivity, and the profound effects of legal violence caused by the citizenship regime.

Review of Jacked Up and Unjust: Pacific Islander Teens Confront Violent Legacies, by Katherine Irwin and Karen Umemoto

No abstract available.

Mixed-status Families in Northern Arizona: An Inductive Analysis of Legal Clinic Participation and the Gendered Dynamics of Emotional Care Work

Fear of deportation and consequent separation of “mixed-status families” (those with citizen and non-citizen members) is a central issue facing immigrants today. Yet, there is a gap in sociological explorations of legal clinics designed to assist these families. Here, we examine parents of mixed-status families in danger of deportation who visited one such clinic: what factors drove them to seek legal help? While we explore theoretical implications related to legal violence, we also highlight ways to better reach these families and provide free legal services, particularly to women who seem to be primarily tasked with this work. Research was conducted through Northern Arizona Immigration Legal Services (NAILS). Using in-depth interviews with nine undocumented Mexican-born parents, mostly mothers, our findings reveal patterns that could aid NAILS and other legal support services in providing assistance to these families. Issues such as traditional gendered labor division within the family and the role of social workers were the most relevant themes in seeking legal help. These findings not only contribute to the growing sociological research on immigration and gender dynamics but can also help NAILS and other similar community organizations connect with immigrants in more efficient ways, particularly as it relates to the emotional care work of mothers in mixed-status families.

Performance and the Transnational Public Sphere in Rwanda: An Ethnographic Encounter with Silence

This article considers the relationship between performance and the transnational public sphere, understood as a space in which a range of international actors come together to discuss, debate and advance ideas on topics which are mutually important. It suggests that performance in Rwanda has an important role in terms of reflecting, and facilitating, emerging conversations around the legacies of violence. As evidenced by the Ubumuntu Arts Festival, held annually in Kigali, it is not only at the national level that these conversations are significant. Global publics, including artists, audiences and researchers are all travelling to Rwanda to participate in events which have broader, international, significance.

Legal Violence and (In)Visible Families: How Law Shapes and Erases Family Life in SOGI Asylum in Europe

Abstract Studies on the Refugee Convention have paid very limited attention to the notion of family and family rights of asylum claimants in connection with asylum claims based on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI). Drawing on the notion of ‘legal violence’, this article demonstrates the injurious cumulative effect that a heteronormative, homonormative and Western-centered formulation and implementation of asylum and refugee law has on SOGI claimants when it comes to intimate and family relationships. By relying on a solid body of primary and secondary data, it explores the invisibility of SOGI claimants and refugees’ families and how that invisibility is normalized by European legal frameworks, such as the Dublin (III) Regulation and Family Reunification Directive. To end this ‘legal violence’ and reconnect asylum systems with the lived experiences of SOGI claimants, a principled approach based on human rights and specifically the right to respect for family life is suggested.

Tales of (Self-)Destruction

Narconarratives often portray drug-trafficking culture through an “us versus them” or “friend versus enemy” Manicheism. This dichotomy erases the role of the government in the history of narcoviolence and reproduces a formulaic and a marketable “good versus evil” distinction commonly found throughout the Mexican literary field. In this article, I analyze two short stories that deconstruct this narrative, “Z” (Julián Herbert) and “Hombres armados” (Daniel Espartaco Sánchez), from the collection Narcocuentos. I approach these stories through the concept of biopolitics, emphasizing the relationship between state and (il)legal violence(s), as well as the authors’ positions in the literary field. These stories reframe the friend-versus-enemy rhetoric, offering unidentifiable perpetrators and victims instead. Moreover, they challenge the hegemonic discourse by using two figures that thrive at the boundaries between life and death: the zombie and the homo sacer. However, the anthology’s failure to attract a wide readership reveals that Herbert’s and Espartaco Sánchez’s attempts to subvert the traditional drug-trafficking “grand narrative” has not been commercially successful in challenging the deeply engrained us-versus-them Manicheism.

Undocumented in the time of pandemic: exploring legal violence, health care and human rights of irregular Filipino migrants in Italy and the UK

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of states’ pandemic responses to the conditions and vulnerabilities of undocumented Filipino migrants in Italy and the UK. It also explores the role and strategies of migrant organisations in addressing the issues and concerns of undocumented workers.Design/methodology/approachQualitative approaches are used to collect and analyse the narratives of the migrants and migrant organisations. This paper used government reports, policy briefs and documents from international organisations in analysing the socio-political vulnerabilities of undocumented migrants in the context of the global pandemic. In addition, we interviewed leaders of migrant organisations, which are involved in supporting irregular migrants.FindingsThe study reveals that states have exercised a regime of legitimate violence against undocumented workers in Italy and the UK. This regime is imposed not only by the stringent laws and policies that directly and indirectly cause economic, social and even cultural suffering to the migrants but also by the “symbolic violence” manifested in structural and social inequalities, and the exploitative economic order amid the pandemic. Responding to the “regime of fear”, migrant organisations provide immediate relief and “safe spaces” for the undocumented workers.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the ongoing conversation on state practices in regulating migration by framing the conditions of undocumentation as legal violence that structurally deprives irregular migrants access to health care and human rights amid global health crisis.