Limits Of Violence Research Articles

Концепция глобального упадка насилия Стивена Пинкера и реакция научного сообщества

Two widely discussed books on violence by Steven Pinker offer a grand metanarrative about the movement of humanity towards reason, progress, and humanism. The article briefly generalizes the main author’s methodological predispositions. The article also deals with the conceptual analysis of the theory. The scholar’s theory is based on several key ideas: the state, gentle commerce, the taming of manners, and the Enlightenment. The main point is that society, passing successively through such stages-ideas, moves in the direction of greater progress and limitation of violence. As for the criticisms, we illustrate the limitations of the method chosen and the inadequacy of its objectives. First, the author uses the criminological method of counting the number of murders per hundred thousand in a population, which can only characterize one segment of violence. Secondly, the measured violence does not always correlate with other violent crimes. We also point out objective difficulties in working with the available statistics. In particular, we are confronted with fragmented data and incomparable methodology of data collection from predecessors. In addition, we reveal many mistakes, inaccuracies, and in many cases even deliberate discrepancies within representative data. Steven Pinker often resorts to overly sweeping generalizations and comparisons of difficult-to-compare cases. Many scholars have also noted the author’s use of unprofessional literature. In terms of conceptual ideas, critics note the author’s ignorance of contemporary debates and disregard for differences in the works of those classics used in the work. We should also note the rather unfriendly tone of the discussion on the part of all the participants, since the dispute is about big ideas, which often leads to direct insults and labeling. In conclusion, we praise the communicative gesture of challenging the scientific community, but it seems clear that the main goal to give proof towards violence decline is inconclusive.

Феномен политического и границы насилия

Феномен политического и границы насилия

Violence and the Impotence of Violence According to Arendt

Şiddet, gerek bireysel hayatta gerekse toplumsal hayatta sistematik veya simgesel olarak uygulanmaktadır. Birçok farklı tanımı kapsayan şiddet olgusu bireye uygulanan fiziksel bir durumu içerdiği gibi ekonomik ve politik sistemler tarafından uygulanan her türlü zarar verici eylemleri de kapsamaktadır. Literatürde şiddet ile ilgili birçok farklı tanıma rastlamak mümkündür. Bu tanımların genel özelliği şiddeti ortaya çıkaran bireysel ve toplumsal nedenler üzerinden bir genellemeye vardıkları görülmüştür. Bu genellemelerin ortak özelliği şiddetin zarar verici negatif yönleri üzerinde yoğunlaşmış olmalarıdır. Şiddet üzerine yapılan literatür taramasında şiddet olgusunun birçok farklı yönlerinin ele alındığı ancak şiddetin keyfiliği üzerine bir boşluğun olduğu görülmüştür. Bu boşluk Arendt tarafından doldurulmuştur. Şiddetin herkesin gözü önünde ve ortalıkta olduğunu söyleyen Arendt’e göre şiddetin toplumsal ve kültürel bir tarihi vardır. Tarihte yaşanmış toplumsal olaylar üzerinden bir şiddet analizinde bulunan Arendt bu bağlamda diğer sosyal bilimcilerden farklı ve özgün bir şiddet analizi geliştirmiştir. Arendt’ın iktidar, güç ve kuvvet kavramları üzerinden geliştirdiği tanımlaması şiddetin toplumsallığına vurgu yapmaktadır. Ayrıca şiddet olgunun genişlemesi ve sistematikleşmesi için gücü elinde bulunduranların güçsüzler karşısında keyfiliğine dayandığını ortaya koymuştur. Dolayısıyla onun tanımında özellikle vurguladığı keyfilik diğer sosyal bilimcilerden ayrışmaktadır. İktidarların kendi otoritelerini ayakta tutabilmek içinde sıkça kullanılan şiddet ulus-devlet tanımlarında da devletin meşru araçlarından biri olarak kabul edilmiştir. Bu kapsamda makalede Arendt tarafından keyfilik ekseninde yeniden bir tanımlamaya gidilen şiddetin diğer sosyal bilimcilerden farklı vurguları üzerinde durulmuştur. Şiddetin biçimleri ve sınırları Arendt’in yorumları ile sınırlandırılmış ve diğer sosyal bilimcilerin tanımları ile karşılaştırılmıştır.

LA FORMACIÓN ÉTICA DEL PSICOANALISTA

This paper deals with the ethical training of the psychoanalyst in regard to the role of transmission in psychoanalysis and the life of psychoanalytic institutions in this process. The metapsychological reformulations of Silvia Bleichmar are articulated, who views the construction of a psychotherapist as the construction of an ethical subject. The author contrasts the notion of an ethical subject to the idea of a disciplined subject and setting boundaries to construction of legalities. This paper establishes a differentiation between behaviors based on a normativity external to the subject and an intrinsic normativity, compatible with the ability to define, in the care of the other, the limits of violence itself.

From physical violence to online violation: Forms, structures and effects. A comparison of the cases of ‘domestic violence’ and ‘revenge pornography’

In this paper, we examine the nature and limits of violence by way of a comparison of the physical violence and online violation, in terms of their form, structure and effects. We explore similarities and dissimilarities in what precedes the event, perpetrator intentions and motivations, the forms and types of violence, the medium through which they are delivered, who they are directed towards, the technologies and processes deployed, and their impacts. We argue that it is problematic to restrict the concept of ‘violence’ to intended physical acts that cause harm, because non-physical, psychological, emotional and other forms of non-(directly)physical violence may be equally or even more impactful. Our discussion draws, illustratively, on research, including our own, on both ‘domestic violence’ and ‘revenge pornography’, with the latter an example of the growing numbers of relatively new forms of representational and psychological forms of violence. These are important political, policy and practical concerns, not only with the spread of violence, abuse and violation with and through digital technologies, but also as examples of differing ways in which these can be, and are, constructed, within academic, policy and popular media debates.

Security, Public Order and Paramilitarism in Poland and Czechoslovakia, 1918–1920: Comparative Considerations

This article investigates the struggle for control over the violence that the Second Polish Republic and the First Czechoslovak Republic fought during their early independence in 1918. As violence had spread throughout the European continent during World War I, it became a crucial post-war question to control its expansion throughout the societies, as different paramilitary groups started to take the law into their own hands, either to protect their co-citizen's interests, or to enforce their own political or economic ambitions, and very often both at the same time. Thus, the use and limitation of violence were ambivalent: the newcomer states often relied on paramilitary units as policing forces and instruments to expand their state power into contested, ethnically mixed border areas. On the other hand, these emerging states faced difficulties to control paramilitary groups, which challenged the state's authority and followed their own – often criminal – agenda. This article aspires to comparatively examine the use of violence and its attempted regulation in Poland and Czechoslovakia during the first years of their existence. Furthermore, presenting the Polish-Czech conflict over Cieszyn Silesia, it aims to show how, immediately after the Great War, ethnopolitical tugs-of-war, fought between regular soldiers and paramilitaries of neighbouring states over borderlands created civil war-like scenarios and put the ethnically mixed population in these regions between a proverbial rock and a hard place.

ISLAMIC FAMILY AND CHILD PROTECTION LAW’S PERSPECTIVE ON VIOLENCE AGAINST CHILDREN

The Indonesian Government guarantees the rights and protection of children by Act 35 of 2014 concerning Child Protection. The law provides absolute protection for children against physical and psychological violence that they may receive, but on the other hand there is an interest in Moslem’s families to educate their children according to Islamic law (fiqh), so that there is a contradiction both of them. This research was conducted to determine the view of Islamic family and positive law on the problem of handling and protecting children and the limits of violence against children. The researchers used a comparative approach and library research method. Based on the research conducted, it is found that Islamic family and positive law go in line to provide protection for children. The differences are in the perspective of “children”, violence against children, the application of physical and psychological punishment, and actions against perpetrators of violence. In addition, there are limits to acts of both physical and psychological violence as a preventive and repressive measure against children, according to the provisions of Islamic family law

How Does Institutional Change Coincide with Changes in the Quality of Life? An Exemplary Case Study

This paper provides a framework to assess correlations between the change of institutional functions (political centralization, plurality, rule of law, security of property, economic liberty, measured by 12 indicators) and improvements in human development (income, education, health) and violence limitations (conflict-related death tolls) to separate effective from ineffective institutional change. We apply this framework to a low-end institutional environment and provide a century case study of today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Major results are threefold: first, we provide a thick description of institutional development in the Congo in a colonial and post-colonial and hence long-run setting; secondly, we identify periods of institutional change with distinctly different degrees of effectiveness; and thirdly, we are able to provide qualitative information on the questions of perspective (we follow a non-elitist approach), institutional connections, and timing of effects. Finally we propose extension of the framework, especially with respect to in-depth studies of critical transition periods, and its application to comparative case studies.

On the Limits of Violence

In February 1970, a twenty-eight-year-old Giorgio Agamben sends a letter to Hannah Ar endt. After introducing himself as a friend of Dominique Fourcade, with whom Agamben attended Martin Heidegger's 1966 and 1968 seminars in Provence, Agamben proceeds to express his gratitude to Arendt: her books, he writes, provided him with a decisive experience. He then indicates his intention to join with others in gap between past and future, and to work within the horizon that Arendt herself had opened up. He signs the letter, Cordially Yours, Giorgio Agamben. But these are not his final words to her. In a postscript Agamben adds: You will excuse if I take the liberty of enclosing an essay on violence which I should have been unable to wright [sic] without the guide of your books.1 A 1985 interview, Un'idea di Giorgio Agamben, in the Roman newspaper Reporter sheds some light on the essay that Agamben sent to Arendt in 1970.2 Respond ing to a question about his involvement with 1968 social movements—posed by Adriano Sofri, one of the cofounders of the extra-parliamentary leftist movement Lotta Con tinua—Agamben answers that he never really felt at ease with 1968. He was reading Arendt at the time, an author whom his friends in the movement considered a reactionary, someone absolutely not to be discussed. In fact, the essay on the limits of violence in which Agamben was coming to terms with Arendt's thought was rejected by a political review and was ultimately published in a literary journal. While an oeuvre sometimes functions as a historical detonator [detonatore storico] accelerating revolutionary mo ments, that was not the case with Arendt. Agamben concludes that such a missed appoint ment with history is one of the most humiliating experiences that time itself affords us. Here then for the first time in English is the essay in which Agamben first attempted to come to terms with Arendt's philosophy of history, the essay that he sent to Arendt and that she referred to in the German edition of On Violence? The original essay, Sui limiti della violenza, appeared in Nuovi argomenti in the winter of 1970.4

Dialogue and the limits of violence: some thoughts on responsible action

In this article I explore some of the limitations of violence, in particular focusing on how it can possibly be undermined by dialogical action. Firstly, I argue that, although violence is at times justified by some people, its disrespectful use against innocent others, makes it illegitimate and therefore un‐dialogical. Secondly, the use of violence is considered by some as circumstantial and restricted to the achievement of short‐term goals. However, I argue that such action would lead to more violence and therefore should at all times be abandoned and conditions be established which are more favourable for dialogical action. Thirdly, violence ought to be prevented through the practice of responsible (respectful) action—action which takes into account non‐instrumentality, impartiality and deliberation.

BOOK REVIEW: Elizabeth Foyster.MARITAL VIOLENCE: AN ENGLISH FAMILY HISTORY, 1660-1857. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Reviewed by: From William Morris: Building Conservation and the Arts and Crafts Cult of Authenticity, 1877–1939 Peter Stansky (bio) Marital Violence: An English Family History, 1660–1857, by Elizabeth Foyster; pp. 283. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005, £40.00, £15.99 paper, $70.00, $27.99 paper. Perhaps surprisingly, this is the first book to examine seriously the history of marital violence in England over the nearly two-century period preceding, and running into, the somewhat better-charted Victorian era. More precisely, this book examines not marital violence per se, but attitudes and arguments about it, as recorded not only in books, sermons, pamphlets, and literary works but in the legal cases generated by conflicts over violence in marriage. Given the difficulty of establishing anything firm about past private activity "in itself," Elizabeth Foyster's "cultural" approach makes much sense; virtually excluding questions about behavior as opposed to how behavior was understood, however, raises problems, to which I will return later. Following other recent scholars, Foyster finds the records left by suits for marriage separation or restitution in church courts, suits for child custody at King's Bench, and criminal prosecutions for assault at petty and quarter sessions to provide a rich source for charting contemporary understandings, popular as well as elite, of marital and gender roles. She reasonably puts the relatively exceptional cases of homicide aside, preferring to deal with "everyday" violence. She also seeks to widen the understanding of violence beyond the purely physical, to embrace an entire spectrum of cruelty and mistreatment. She is thus able to place physical violence in a context of ongoing social relations; doing so, however, also blurs the book's focus: "mistreatment" is a far more subjective concept than physical violence, and it is not always clear what the precise subject of an argument about it is. Further, while physical violence was highly one-sided, employed far more often, and with more serious consequences, by men, "mistreatment," even "cruelty," was something women could, and were, taxed with almost as much as were men. In admirably clear and organized prose, Foyster traces over this long period the discourse surrounding marital violence, a discourse that, as she stresses, in some ways changed very little and in other ways changed markedly. Discussion during these centuries revolved more around the proper employment and limitation of violence in marriage, normally by the husband, than its existence as such. Another striking difference from more recent times was the lack of concern shown for the consequences for children of growing up in a violent household. Wives could and did resist violence, of course, and some of the strategies they employed are carefully examined. Crucial in such resistance was appeal to others outside the marital couple—kin, neighbors, and "professionals" such as clergy or police. Foyster emphasizes that contrary to frequent assertions, family life was not undergoing "privatization" in this period, but remained as embedded as ever in wider social networks, which often served to arbitrate marital disputes, violent and otherwise. One growing form of intervention in family life, she points out, particularly in the latter part of the period, was the secular law. Increasingly, wives and their friends or kin appealed to police constables and magistrates for aid against violent husbands. Foyster particularly seeks to make two major points. The first is that marital violence was seen as a problem long before the Victorian era, and that many of the Victorian notions of "true manliness," such as self-control, and of "companionate marriage" were frequently articulated in the eighteenth and even the late-seventeenth centuries. The second major point is that, if criticism of husbandly violence was long-standing, what [End Page 375] did change was the social localization of such violence: "class became the main interpretive framework through which marital violence was understood and represented" (32). Increasingly, she emphasizes, marital violence came to be seen as something found almost exclusively among the working classes. Both points are true, though in the way put by Foyster they can easily lead to misunderstanding. First, although many moralists were prone to lecture husbands on their violent inclinations long before the Victorians, it was only in the course...

The Limits of Violence: Camus’s Tragic View of the Rebel

When Camus became a culture hero of the young in the 1950's, his impact on their political imagination was bracing, but it was impractical, remote from the actualities of public and private life in this country. The Rebel (L'Homme Revolte, 1951) was the most interesting textbook of modern history and political and moral philosophy to pass through the hands of the student generation. It was the first book in the post-war years to begin the process of politicizing the more intelligent and activist minds among them, and on the whole the effect was salutary at that time. Still, Camus's lessons on the development of state terrorism and individual nihilism were only textbook situations for his American readers, to be earnestly discussed but hardly touching them as terrifying possibilities. Later, when his plays became available in English translation, the idea of the absurd and the different responses to it, the images of man caught in attitudes of despair in an irrational universe, were exhibited in concrete dramatic situations. But what were his youthful readers to make of these fables of violence, produced during the 1940's, The Misunderstanding (Le Malentendu) and Caligula, or the political allegory, State of Siege (L'Etat de siege)? The very popular novel The Stranger (L'Etranger) had found its young audience at once because of the vivid evocation of a life of sheer sensation devoid of any values beyond those which its hero, or anti-hero, could immediately feel. But the tortured lives depicted in the plays were simply too improbable, the stories too intellectual in their implications, to serve as objective correlative of what it felt like to live in mid-twentieth century America. The change has come very rapidly. The current student