Organized Violence Research Articles

What we talk about when we talk about ‘human shields’: Reading international law through images

Abstract This article advocates a turn to the visual in legal scholarship. The phenomenon used to elucidate this methodological proposition is the figure of the ‘human shields’ under international humanitarian law, viewed from within the lived history of the peoples of the Global South. Today, the ‘human shields’ notion profoundly shapes how international law operates in scenes of intense organized violence. Once deployed, the human shields claim triggers a radical shift in the applicable international legal framework. After this point, harm to the civilian population and space can be legally authorized and justified. This article challenges the ways in which the ‘human shields’ notion continues to be debated in mainstream legal scholarship and discourse in terms of doctrinal interpretation, examination of evidence, or analyses of ‘asymmetricity’ and ‘urbanization’ as ‘challenges’ in ‘contemporary’ war. Before any such inquiries, I argue, it is crucial to pay attention to the visual and the lived history of the peoples of the Global South. Images that exist in the cultural realm – of and about war and crime, the human shielding spectacle and its actors, and Global South societies – structure and delimit the legal conversation and predetermine its possible outcomes. I propose, in sum, an attention to the visual as a site of the legal inquiry that can inform our understanding and critique of the law and politics of human shields. Images enable, rationalize and provoke the emotions necessary for an ‘exceptional’ operation of international law that authorizes massive violence against Global South spaces and peoples.

La publicitación de los feminicidios de madres buscadoras en México

This article analyzes the publicizing of the femicides of searching mothers from the perspective of sociology of critique. To this end, it tests an actantial model of complaints through a digital ethnography based on public texts, with the purpose of understanding the slow process of configuration of this social problem as a public problem. The work analyzes this type of feminicide, whose execution pattern is related to the field of organized violence, through a strategy focused on the justifications of the actors involved. In this logic, it reconstructs the stories and narratives of the political and social actors involved in the process, describes relationships between experts and victims in the complaint and access to justice, and provides elements for understanding the meaning that social and political actors give to their experiences of this borderline social problem. The article closes with some considerations about the challenges in researching the structural effects of this type of violence in the field of social sciences and multi-localized public action at a national and subnational scale.

Utilizing Marxist-Leninist Viewpoints to Construct the Vietnamese People's Army in the Present Era

The formation of the military is a historical and social occurrence that possesses significant class attributes. According to the Marxist-Leninist texts, the armed forces are considered as a tool of organized violence controlled by the ruling class. They are trained, taught, and utilized to fulfill the purposes and ideals of the ruling class. Following the October Revolution, the establishment of the socialist state gave rise to a new kind of military known as the socialist army or the army of the working class. This army possessed inherent distinctions from prior armed formations, since it operated in alignment with the objectives of the proletariat and the socialist state. In accordance with Marxist-Leninist ideas, the construction of the socialist army must encompass all aspects of politics, ideology, organization, discipline, weapons, technological equipment, and science. This complete approach is necessary to safeguard the revolutionary accomplishments and the socialist rule. The directives outlined by the 13th National Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam for developing a "streamlined, strong, and modern" army demonstrate the Party's ongoing adherence to Marxist-Leninist principles in establishing the Vietnamese People's Army at present. This study examines the essential elements and original aspects of applying these rules, which contribute to the protection of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

Organized violence 1989–2023, and the prevalence of organized crime groups

This article examines trends in organized violence based on new data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). In 2023, fatalities from organized violence decreased for the first time since the rapid increase observed in 2020, dropping from 310,000 in 2022 to 154,000 in 2023. Despite this decline, these figures represent some of the highest fatality rates recorded since the Rwandan genocide in 1994, surpassed only by those of 2022 and 2021. The decrease was primarily attributed to the end of the conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, which accounted for about 60% of battle-related deaths in both 2022 and 2021. Despite this positive development, the number of active state-based armed conflicts increased by three in 2023, reaching the highest level ever recorded by the UCDP, totaling 59. Non-state conflicts and one-sided violence decreased in 2023 when compared to 2022, evident in both the reduction of the active conflicts/actors and the decrease in fatalities attributed to these forms of violence. However, despite this overall decrease, fatalities resulting from non-state conflicts remained at historically high levels in 2023. Analysis of non-state conflict data spanning the past decade reveals that it comprises the ten most violent years on record. Organized crime groups have predominantly fueled this escalation. Unlike rebel groups, organized crime groups typically lack political goals and are primarily motivated by economic gain. Conflicts between these groups tend to intensify around drug smuggling routes and in urban areas, driven by shifts in alliances and leadership dynamics among the actors.

Studying War in a Time of War: Russian Imperialism in the Seventeenth and Twenty-First Centuries

Abstract In the first two weeks of August, 535 Russian soldiers were seriously wounded in Eastern Ukraine. The year was 1678. 1678 saw some of the heaviest fighting in the Russo-Turkish of 1676–81, as the Ottoman and Russian Empires, alongside their local allies, struggled to gain control of the strategic location of Chyhyryn. In summer 2023, that town on the Dnipro was only around 300km from the front in the Russo-Ukraine war. To read about soldiers being injured and killed in service of imperial expansion three centuries ago as we watch the same empire engage in the same activities in the same location today brings home how history and the present are inescapably connected. Indeed, historians of violence have faced this problem before, as with a group at the University of Pittsburgh working on Gun Violence and Its Histories, who explicitly seek to use histories of violence to think about gun violence in the modern USA. Military histories have long been an established part of the study of Russian history, highlighting the technological, imperial, bureaucratic, and diplomatic aspects of organized state violence. The present moment demands a re-evaluation of histories of Russia at war, one that considers such issues as histories of disability and pain, and also engages with recent calls to decolonize Russian studies. Putting into dialogue these different perspectives on war and violence we can consider if, why, and how we can study the history of war during a time of war.

War Becoming Phantasmal: A Cognitive Shift in Organized Violence beyond Traditional Limits

The entirety of human existence suggests multiple war theories and competing belief systems on what war is and how it can or cannot be exercised, even if we often are preoccupied with the current framework. Premodern societies differed from modern ones on whether humans or something divine or supernatural control the contexts and outcomes of war. Collectively, our species retains a firm appreciation of the assumed limits of what constitutes organized violence for political, social, or cultural aims, depending on the group and context. Yet in the twenty-first century, we may finally have set into motion the seeds of an unfamiliar, potentially incomprehensible, and likely transformative pathway where artificial intelligence or transhuman modifications may reveal what is called a “phantasmal transformation of war.” Complexity science explains reality and war so that earlier attempts—particularly those of the classical or natural science period and earlier prescientific attempts—are illuminated as insufficient or irrelevant outside of narrow or contextual applications. Today, Western militaries remain wedded to what is explained as a “Newtonian-style worldview” for understanding war, with select terms assimilated from complexity science and others ignored entirely. Indeed, modern military theorists assume an almost ideological devotion to what is largely a pseudo-scientific, static mode of framing war. Humans paired with certain advanced technology may also redefine war beyond previous physical domain and kinetic circumstances, including new manifestations in space, in cyberspace, and through accelerated human-machine teaming arrangements. Such novel conflict may in some applications exceed both human design and comprehension, potentially existing in planes or manifestations that are either undetectable by humans, rendered incomprehensible by select human actors, or potentially in modes that exceed the witting participation and awareness of our species.

Farming in the shadow of violent organizations: understanding farmers’ relational place-making in socio-ecological crises

AbstractThis study investigates how farmers develop place-based relations when subject to structural conditions of violence and environmental crime. We particularly focus on environmental crimes perpetrated by the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia, at the expense of farming communities in the metropolitan areas of Naples and Caserta, in Italy. Farmers located in this area have struggled to mobilize collectively, with only a group of farmers enable to re-act to land exploitation, illegal burning or dumping, and more in general to the waste crisis. Stimulated by this rather puzzling empirical evidence, our research team engaged in a deeper investigation of the waste crisis, exploring how farmers located in the Land of Fires reacted to conditions of violence and environmental crime by developing a differentiated set of place-based narratives and practices. Using the Land of Fires and the waste crisis as an empirical context, in this study we focus particularly on conceptualizing place-based processes emerging in the context of organized violence and environmental crime. In our approach, these are structural conditions produced by the Camorra and the state, to which local agencies, such as farmers, respond.

CARTOONS AND THE AUTOCRATIC CREEDS OF THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: VIOLENT AFFECTS AND EFFECTS IN CHILDREN’S ENTERTAINMENT

This paper asserts that operations and patterns of violence are present in Hanna-Barbera’s Tom and Jerry, Butch Hartman’s The Fairly Oddparents, Thomas Edward Warburton’s Codename: Kids Next Door, and John Kricfalusi’s Ren and Stimpy. Cartoons are meant to be enjoyed by children. However, the incorporation of violence in cartoons can leave imprints in the impressionable minds of the children. With the media and reception of the children's audience in the foreground, the notion of false happiness can be deduced as the comedic and entertaining modes of representation in the cartoons do not just make the audience laugh but can also possibly penetrate their attitudes and behaviors. The cartoons and their violent features can be a springboard to engage media effects which can include aggression, agenda-building, and cultivation. As a framework, the discourses on violence and false happiness are supported by the critical claims of Adorno and Horkheimer on the culture industry and offshoots of immersing oneself in television. The analysis of the cartoons presented a typology of violence affirming that organized entertainment becomes synonymous with the displays of organized violence. These include blatant and forceful physical violence, subtle familial violence, violence of structural differences and tensions, and the aestheticization of violence.

Empathy and attitudes toward protecting migrants from criminal violence

AbstractMigrants in Latin America are increasingly vulnerable to organized crime violence while en route to their destination. Public opinion regarding how to address this problem varies. While many residents of countries along migration routes support policies protecting migrants from organized crime, others oppose them. What explains this variation? To investigate this situation, we draw on nationally representative survey data from one of Latin America's most important migrant corridors, Mexico, where sustained criminal violence makes migrants vulnerable to criminal predation en route. We integrate insight from theories about helping refugees amid political violence with studies about aiding migrants amid peace to develop and test hypotheses about an understudied research phenomenon, protecting migrants amid large‐scale criminal violence. We argue that attitudes toward protecting migrants are influenced by feelings of empathy. We test hypotheses related to two conduits of empathic perspective taking—crime victimization and imagining one could become a victim in the future. We find these channels of perspective taking are positively associated with support for migrant protective policies among crime victims and nonvictims alike. Our research reveals new information about attitudes toward immigration policy in criminally violent contexts and advances knowledge about the public endorsement of policies to preserve migrant rights and dignity.

Violence, Predation, and FDI Entry

AbstractI present a theoretical framework that links different configurations of organized violence to global patterns in foreign direct investment (FDI). Insurgents, states, and rogue government agents all use violence for political purposes (i.e., incapacitating rivals), but they vary in how they use violence for economic purposes (i.e., generating income). Applying Olson’s (1993) concepts of “roving” and “stationary” banditry, I hypothesize that violence perpetrated by rebels and rogue agents indeed depresses a host country’s commercial appeal, but that violence perpetrated willfully by the state doesn’t. This claim is tested against data on FDI “entry” by several thousand multinational corporations between 1994 and 2018.

Trajectories of Forced Migration: Central American Migrants on Their Way Toward the USA

Executive Summary Mexico is increasingly important as a country of transit migration between the Global South and the Global North. Migration dynamics from Central America to and through Mexico are mainly considered as economic or mixed migration of people looking for work and a better life in the USA. Nevertheless, since the 2010s the number of asylum applications in Mexico has sky rocketed. Based on a survey of Central American migrants in Mexico we demonstrate that some kind of (organized) violence was a crucial driver for leaving and a constant companion during their journey. After contextualizing the migration route from the Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) toward Mexico, we present the design of the study, describe sociodemographic and general contexts of the 350 interviewees, and present the migration trajectories as long-lasting sequences of events and stays, where violence in quite different forms always is at play.

Organized crime, violence and support for the state

Citizens’ support is crucial to effectively combat organized crime, a substantial threat to many countries. Contrary to prior studies identifying a negative correlation between crime and trust in the state, studying a representative sample of 5374 individuals in Italy we find that exposing the participants to journalistic images of organized crime-related violence increases trust towards institutions and state performance (measured by donations to a governmental as opposed to a non-governmental organization), perceived institutional quality, and trust in political institutions. This is remarkable considering that the participants are overly pessimistic about trends in violence: About two-thirds believe that mafia-related homicides and total homicides increased in Italy over the last two decades, and half believe that they increased by over 20%, while in reality both types of homicides declined by over 60%. These findings are relevant for governments and organizations interested in non-repressive methods to fight criminal organizations, as they underscore the potential impact of media narratives on shaping public attitudes toward crime and state authorities.

Troubling organizational violence with Judith Butler: Surviving whistleblower reprisals

AbstractHow do workers who encounter violence by deviating from organizational norms make sense of their experiences? Our article engages with Judith Butler's work on vulnerability and troubling to address this. Inspired by these concepts while analyzing empirical data gathered from whistleblowers in financial services, we propose a framing termed “aggression‐troubling”. Aggression‐troubling encompasses an awareness of: the vulnerability and relationality attending scenes of organizational violence; how imposing ideals of what is “normal” come into play as part of that violence; and how these structures might be destabilized and disrupted—or troubled. Our second contribution is analytic: we find that the singular and immediate presence of the individual other‐in‐relation—the “you” responsible for exerting violence—is a critical part of how people make sense of the scene of violence. We adopt a methodological approach focused on how individuals’ retrospective accounts of experiences of violence, and we analyze cases of whistleblowing in financial services to develop our arguments. Aggression‐troubling by no means downplays the injury and pain that normative organizational violence can cause, nor does it suggest that power relations can easily be overturned. This framing does however offer a deeper exploration of experiences of normative violence. It provides insights into how it can be survived and potentially overcome, with contributions for research and practice.

Преодоление социально-эволюционного парадокса насилия как «точка роста» современных обществ

The problems of social evolution of organized violence are discussed. The barrier to the use of violence as well as the notions of moral progress in history and progress toward a more humane order is difficult to reconcile with the steady increase in the scale and efficiency of the power structures. There are serious arguments against the thesis of a global trend toward less violence and fewer military casualties. The contradiction between trends in the evolution of violence and a humanistic understanding of the meaning of history requires a practical overcoming, a complex and profound scientific and philosophical analysis. A corresponding intellectual and practical challenge confronts contemporary societies, including Russian ones. A successful response to it can become a "growth point" for social, legal, and moral development, the growth of authority, and influence in the international arena.

Corruption and Its Impact on Society: Recognizing the Role of Whistleblowing

Corruption has become a social phenomenon causing various societal problems such as maladministration, poverty, inefficiency, crimes, and limited access to education and healthcare, among several others. It can also exacerbate social inequalities and contribute to the rise of organized crime and violence. The effects of corruption can be seen in the administrative set-up, thus leading to citizen’s increase in mistrust towards government officials and departments. This study explores the impacts of corruption on various aspects of society, particularly young people and discusses efforts on anti-corruption. Addressing the above-referred challenges, the importance of transparency, accountability, and citizen participation in anti-corruption efforts is highlighted. Furthermore, the confidentiality measures to encourage reporting of maladministration and corruption have been highlighted, and a draft policy framework has been put forward.

(Un)Earthing violence: Ecologies of remembering, forgetting and reckoning

ABSTRACT This article and the special issue it introduces contribute to existing debates on forgetting, remembering, and reckoning with past violence by bringing them up to date with violence's materially and spatially expansive workings that recent scholarship on sovereignty and ecology has highlighted. Thinking with scholars who have considered organized violence as the maker of ‘weathers', ‘atmospheres' and ‘ecologies', we engage critically with how the Earth in all its relationally constituted expansiveness has become central to remembering, forgetting and reckoning with violent histories. We conceptualize practices that evidence this centrality as ‘(un)earthing'. The concept has both empirical and methodological implications. It obliges us to reconsider longstanding methodological tendencies to privilege either the earthly (i.e., the secular, the positivist and the rational) or the unearthly (i.e., the spiritual, the supernatural and the irrational) over the other. We reconsider these tendencies critically by using the concept of (un)earthing to interweave empirical analyses of magic, haunting and ufology with those of farming, exhumation and burial. The special issue spans various contemporary contexts where practices of ‘(un)earthing’ address – whether directly or indirectly – the legacy of political (especially colonial and racial) violence, ranging from the United States, Colombia and Chile to South Africa, Turkey and Austria.

Gangs: the nationalization of organized crime in Fortaleza and some reflections on the war for territories

This article aims to analyze how the violence practiced by organized crime is daily deepening urban spaces and territories. The consolidation of the nationalization of criminal factions has further sharpened the structural problems of the urban environment, coupled with the lack of social policies, and the violence practiced by poor young people in the peripheries has become the main problem in recent years, further weakening the few existing public safety policies. In its contextualization, this research analyzed the relationship between the consolidation of gangs in the peripheral neighborhoods of Fortaleza and the lack of public policies, as well as how this new mode of organized violence causes many people to change their habits, making the urban crisis even more complex to understand and making it difficult for government agents to reorganize it. The analysis to carry out this article is based on the historical knowledge of its origins and its formation, as well as analyzing its current conjuncture, its recruitment tactics, and its geographical positioning, where the dispute for new territories has raised violence to the extreme in poor neighborhoods. The research approach will be qualitative because there was an arduous attempt to understand and interpret the theme, assigning emphatic meaning to the data collected.

Pakistani military’s rhetorical construction of an Indigenous civil rights movement

For the last four decades, Pakistan’s northwestern Pashtun tribal areas have been in a constant state of imperialist wars. In reaction to this organized violence, a local civil rights movement, the PTM, emerged in 2014 which powerfully challenged the military’s discursive regime that legitimates these US-led wars. However, the military challenged the movement’s call for justice by launching a concerted discursive drive to construct an enemy image of the PTM. This study aims to discover how the military constructs the identity, as well as the cultural and political meanings of the movement. The authors found that the military strategically organizes its discourse to first build a symbolic order in which an enemy other, less than human, is created, and then its oppression is normalized and made invisible. They hope that the article contributes to the current critical scholarship on the increasing militarization of contemporary public spaces and democratic cultures, particularly in the context of South Asia.

Organized violence 1989–2022, and the return of conflict between states

This article reports on trends in organized violence, building on new data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). In 2022, fatalities from organized violence increased by a staggering 97%, compared to the previous year, from 120,000 in 2021 to 237,000 in 2022, making 2022 the deadliest year since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The increase was driven by two, particularly deadly, state-based armed conflicts: the Russia–Ukraine war, and the war in Ethiopia against TPLF (Tigray People’s Liberation Front). With more than 81,500 and 101,000 fatalities respectively, these are the two most deadly state-based conflict-years recorded in the post-1989 period. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is the first large-scale interstate war in 20 years, and the first interstate armed conflict since World War II where a major power in the international system seeks both territorial gains for itself and the subjugation of another state through regime change. We have witnessed an emerging trend of increased conflict between states in the last decade, including cases where major powers support opposite sides in internationalized intrastate conflict. UCDP recorded 55 active state-based armed conflicts in 2022, an increase of one compared to the previous year. Eight of these conflicts reached the level of war. While the fatalities caused by non-state conflict decreased somewhat when compared to 2021, the number of non-state conflicts, as well as both the number of civilians killed in one-sided violence and the number of actors carrying out such violence, increased in 2022.

Organized Care as Antidote to Organized Violence: An Engaged Clinical Ethnography of the Los Angeles County Jail System.

The field of medical action extends beyond the clinical encounter. Rather, clinical encounters are organized by wider regimes of governance and expertise, and broader geographies of care, abandonment and violence. Clinical encounters in penal institutions condense and render visible the fundamental situatedness of all clinical care. This article considers the complexity of clinical action in carceral institutions and their wider geographies through an examination of the crisis of mental health care in jails, an issue of significant public concern in the United States and much of the world. We present findings from our engaged, collaborative clinical ethnography, which was informed by and seeking to inform already existing collective struggles. Revisiting the concept of "pragmatic solidarity" (Farmer in Partner to the poor: a Paul Farmer reader, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2010) in an era of "carceral humanitarianism" (Gilmore in Futures of Black Radicalism, Verso, New York, 2017, see also Kilgore in Repackaging mass incarceration, Counterpunch, June 6-8, http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/06/06/repackaging-mass-incarceration/ , 2014), we draw on theorists who consider prisons to be institutions of "organized violence" (Gilmore and Gilmore in: Heatherton and Camp (eds) Policing the planet: why the policing crisis led to Black lives matter, Verso, New York, 2016). We argue that clinicians may have an important role in joining struggles for "organized care" that can counter institutions of organized violence.