Political Economy Of Violence Research Articles

Towards a political economy of violence: Property and revanchism in West Thessaloniki

Encompassing data from a year-long field-based work in the neighborhood of Ksiladika, Thessaloniki in Northern Greece, I divulge a campaign of vigilant evictions of migrant squatters by local property owners. To contextualize this vigilant violence historically, I point to the distinct trajectory of the Greek property regime, carved by the minimal involvement of the state in welfare provision, the role of the family as a welfare substitute and a valorized norm hybridizing familism with a laissez-faire ethos linked to the possession of (residential) assets. Geographically, I marry Wacquant’s conceptualization of advanced urban marginality with rent gap theory to unearth the specificity of Ksiladika, a space at once relegated yet loaded with the promise of revaluation. I suggest that this violence is linked with what local impoverished landholders perceive as an opened rent gap that is what drives their pursuit to reorganize space according to the dictates of the markets as a way to secure, valorize and restore their property with its attendant meanings vis-a-vis the social reproduction squeeze brought about the economic restructuring of the Greek economy. Advancing Wacquant’s conceptualization of advanced urban marginality as an effect of the neoliberal state crafting on a global scale I suggest (i) that the schematization of a neoliberal Janus-like centaur state that performs liberalism for the privileged and punitive paternalism for those at the social bottom needs due to the expanding zone of precarity is no longer reserved for the marginalized and (ii) that neoliberal governing is attained not merely by the penal apparatus of the state, but via a diversified repertoire of state responses, including the governing through the precarized subjects who internalize the postulates of the ideology of self-reliance mediated through possession of (residential) assets in times when the resource is scarce.

Why Decenter the “War on Terror” in Histories of the “War on Terror”?

When I first began my doctoral work on Afghanistan, and up until quite recently, I had never wanted to write about war. I began my PhD only a month before 11 September 2001, but already the field had been so overdetermined by war—by ideas of political Islam, by the political economy of violence—that I resolved to write a thesis about vital unanswered questions regarding Afghanistan's longer history. Of course I grew to regard this strategy of ignoring war as both naive and morally indefensible. For quite a while, this shaped my teaching more than my research. In my classes on Afghanistan's wars and on political Islam, for instance, we address the global structures of violence head on from a variety of directions, beginning with those that Yousef Baker outlines in his contribution to this roundtable, focusing on the generative forces in US politics amid a neoliberal global context and extending to the devastating ontological destruction that Kali Rubaii discusses in her contribution. In all of this, however, students in particular—especially at an institution like SOAS that is so directly tied to the Global South—repeatedly ask: “Where are we in this? We know that this is how global violence works, but this is surely in some way about us too. And our societies are more than what Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton call ‘War/Truth.’” Interlocutors in Pakistan and Afghanistan during my fieldwork there made these points even more strongly.

Women as Breadwinners in Maureen Sherry’s Opening Belle

There have been many popular fiction novels in the literature world that raise how women enter the economic aspect. One of them is the novel Opening Belle written by Maureen Sherry and published in 2016. Opening Belle represents women’s participation in the financial sector because they want a good life. This research is studied with the feminist political economy theory proposed by Jacqui True. In her book, The Political Economy of Violence against Women, True explains that economic globalization has changed women’s lives becoming financially independent. However, on the other hand, women involved in the public sphere are underappreciated and receive sexual harassment or violence, making it difficult for women to participate in the economic aspect. This research uses the descriptive qualitative method. With this method, the writer takes parts of the novel in the form of words, sentences, paragraphs which explain the economic aspect and women’s participation in it. This research is analyzed through the explanations and utterances of the characters. The results of this study are: first, the participation of women as breadwinners in this novel is started as part of her life experiences and is driven by the hardships of her family; second, women are highly motivated figures so that they implement several strategies to survive in their office, namely by proving their competence, joining the GCC women’s community and voicing equal rights in the workplace. In conclusions, economic globalization opens up women’s opportunity to become the sole breadwinner in the family.

Power, poverty and peacebuilding: the violence that sustains inequalities and undermines peace in Colombia

ABSTRACT Despite the promise of the 2016 Colombian peace agreement, this paper argues that the intersection of poverty, insecurity and exclusion threatens sustainable peace in Colombia. In asserting this argument, the paper advances two case studies: the false positives scandal, which demonstrates the vulnerability of the poor to various security threats, and the coca eradication programme, which has fuelled further violence and economic insecurity on impoverished rural people. This paper uses these cases to highlight how poverty is used to legitimise, and is intertwined with, structural and physical violence in Colombia. These cases further shed light on the political economy of violence in Colombia, which legitimises the unequal distribution of wealth, exposes the poor to violence, and disguises crimes of the powerful through the narrative of the deviant or underserving poor and the rhetoric of maintaining security or advancing development. Fundamentally, this article posits that although the post-conflict moment presents a profound opportunity for transformational change, continued socio-economic inequalities and violence against the poor in Colombia will affect the ability to create a sustainable and meaningful peace.

From Depletion to Regeneration: Addressing Structural and Physical Violence in Post-Conflict Economies

AbstractDrawing on depletion through social reproduction and political economy of violence against women (PEVAW) approaches, we show how the context of violence intensifies the depletion of women’s lives as they labor to meet their household needs; and how this depletion heightens their vulnerability to violence in conflict-affected contexts and inhibits their roles in peacebuilding. We propose the concept of the “regenerative state,” as a post-conflict moment of openness when state policy underpinned by attention to issues of depletion, social reproduction, and violence against women can help reshape gendered power relations in post-conflict transitions.

Prosthetic Debts

Following the neoliberal restructuration of the Turkish welfare and banking systems in the 2000s, many veterans of Turkey’s Kurdish war faced debt enforcement due to failed payments for prosthetic limbs. Veterans responded to debt collection by turning their own bodies into spectacles of debt and sacrifice by publicly removing and showcasing their debt-ridden prostheses. The media interest in these prosthetic spectacles further amplified the visceral threat of dismemberment evoked by veterans’ embodied performances. The public debates surrounding “prosthesis repossession” cases extended well beyond veteran welfare issues, inscribing all sorts of social and political anxieties on the amputee veteran body, such as anxieties around the incommensurability between the value regimes of nationalism and neoliberalism or around the Syrian refugees. Providing a window into larger questions about the interconnections between disability, gender, nationalism, and neoliberal capitalism, prosthesis repossession cases show us how debt and disability coproduce each other at the nexus of consumer debt and nationalist welfare in Turkey. By homing in on the prosthetic re-membering and dismembering of veteran bodies in a rapidly changing health milieu, we see how the political economy of violence and the violence of political economy become complicit in the production of debt, dismemberment, and prosthetic rehabilitation.

Gendered states of punishment and welfare meets the political economy of violence against women

Gendered states of punishment and welfare meets the political economy of violence against women

Real estate, banking and war: The construction and reconstructions of Beirut

In urban studies scholarship, Beirut is often theorized on the frontiers of sectarian conflict as well as on the frontlines of neoliberalism. Entangling real estate, banking and transnational financial circulations, managed by the Banque du Liban, its political economy was – and still is – swayed by the fortunes of war. According to literature on the political economy of violence, profits are often made in times of conflict, a context appropriate to the civil war and postwar eras, during which the spoils of war enriched the pockets of warlords-turned-politicians. Yet as the fighting in Syria spills over the border, encumbering Lebanon's long paralyzed politics and straining Beirut's already deteriorated infrastructure, its political economy prospers – if only for a few – not because of violence but in spite of it. Beirut's skyline is covered in construction cranes erecting affluent, if empty, apartments; the banks are infused with deposits invested in the debt of a sovereign bankrupt in ways not simply financial. Both sectors are said to be resilient, a discourse so often repeated that resilience has become the dominant mode by which Beirut is understood. Excavating these discourses, this article presents Beirut's political economy as an assemblage of real estate investment, sovereign debt and emigration, and in so doing theorizes the Banque du Liban as a city builder fusing the political and the economic into an apparatus of transnational investment.

The Political Economy of Violence in Egypt

This article examines the political economy drivers of the uprisings in Egypt in 2011 and 2013. It shows that there was a continuity in neoliberal economic policy from the rule of Hosni Mubarak through to that of Mohamed Morsi, accompanied by an increase in poverty and unemployment. However, it was Egyptian citizens’ perception of the political dynamics behind the economic situation that drove them to revolt. In 2011, a sense of intolerable levels of corruption and the prospect of their continuation under Mubarak’s son, Gamal, made people responsive to calls for revolution; in 2013, it was the scale of their disappointment at the unmet promises for economic betterment. In both cases, economic conditions were crucial, but political grievances and mobilisation ultimately determined and shaped the revolts.

Cambodia’s Political Economy of Violence: Space, Time, and Genocide Under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79

Between 1975 and 1979, approximately two million Cambodians died from exposure, disease, starvation, and execution under the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), also known as the Khmer Rouge. The standard narrative interprets these murders as the brutal acts of a cadre of radical communist ideologues, bent on establishing a pure, despotic, and autarkic state. Using a Marxist approach to political economy, this paper challenges the standard narrative, finding that these killings were a consequence of the CPK’s attempt to establish a system of state capitalism that exploited workers through the production of increasing surpluses. This analysis reveals the particular and deliberate structural arrangements that made the deaths of millions a justifiable consequence. In so doing, we seek to highlight the broader benefits of a Marxist analysis of political economy in the study of genocide; notably its emphasis on the materiality of violence and its ability to expose the forms of social organization that produce mass violence.

The Political Economy of Violence Against Women

The Political Economy of Violence Against Women

Political Economy of Violence: Interpreting the Nigerian Boko Haram

This paper characterizes the extant Boko Haram phenomenon as a reflection of the very dependent and weak character of the Nigerian State. Employing the Marxian political economy approach it draws a sharp signal from the manner in which the state’s indifference to the contradictions of social materialism is generating constant centrifugal forces against its autonomy. It anchors on a very basic fundamental hypothesis, that Boko Haram is symptomatic of not only a weak state, but also a desperate and marginalized class whose only source of drawing the state’s attention is through organized violence. We argue further that, what is described as Boko Haram in an empirical form is merely a coincidence between serious private accumulation of the state’s GDP and lack of Focused Civil Empowerment (FCE). Consequently, the study recommends, inter-alia, the accommodation of the lumpen -proletarian Boko Haram membership in the state economic planning machinery together with a decentralization or restructuring of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to critically monitor the appropriation of Local Government councils’ allocations to ensure a domestication of human capacity development at the rural level, thus making Boko Haram members less susceptible to violence and more sympathetic to peace. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n10p528

The Political Economy of Violence against Women. By Jacqui True. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 256p. $99.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The Political Economy of Violence against Women. By Jacqui True. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 256p. $99.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Women's Security and the Global Economy: Broadening the Research Agenda of Violence Against Women

The Political Economy of Violence Against Women. By True Jacqui. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 256 pp., $24.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-199-75591-2). From Lesotho to Pakistan, New Zealand to Thailand, violence against women in the form of domestic violence, trafficking, sexual assault, and gender-based economic marginalization is all too prevalent. Feminist security-studies scholars have argued for decades that traditional (and even more critical) ways of theorizing war and security ignore these threats to women's security (see inter alia Enloe 1989, 1993, 2000; Tickner 1992; Hansen 2000; Shepherd 2008; Sjoberg 2010; Wibben 2011; Sylvester 2012). Jacqui True provides a sympathetic challenge to this literature and argues that scholars and institutions such as the United Nations have largely failed to understand the systemic causes of this violence in their emphasis on conflict and legal remedies to punishing violators and protecting victims. In this broad-ranging book, True challenges scholars of international studies as well as practitioners to shift their focus to include an analysis of both global economic trends and local economic policies in shaping women's vulnerability to violence. In so doing, True provides the blueprint for a revitalization of feminist and critical imaginations that seeks to trace the global and multifaceted roots of women's victimization and marginalization. True argues that gendered social and economic inequalities between men and women make women vulnerable to violence, regardless of the context, and furthermore, these gendered inequalities “are rooted in structures and processes of political economy that are increasingly globalized” (p. 5). Her feminist political-economy approach locates the source of women's vulnerability to violence not in terms of rich or poor countries, but in material gender inequalities with respect to income, property, employment, and land (p. 18). …

Theoretical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Violence

Violence results in great costs to communities throughout the world. This literature review examines how political economists have used political economy theory to understand violence. A brief history of economies and community governance in the Western world illustrates the interactions between economics and politics. Three sets of theories of political economy are described: classical theories, neo-classical theories, and radical theories, with case examples of collective violence and race riots. The review concludes with a conceptual framework designed to inform educators and practitioners.

Contextualizing Petro-Sexual Politics

Petro-violence is a feminist issue. Through the examination of U.S. mainstream narratives of gender violence and petroleum violence within Nigeria, the author reveals how gender and sexuality are central to representations of terrorism and ethnic-gang conflict within petroleum politics. Through a framework of petro-sexual politics, which links histories of gender and petroleum violence together, the author considers how petro-violence materializes in multiple forms that have always been gendered and systemically violent. By demonstrating that gender violence is not merely an effect of petro-violence, the author argues it is the necessary condition for such violence to even take place. Understanding petro-politics means recognizing that gender violence is part of a larger political economy of violence that creates the conditions fostering and facilitating petro-politics in the first place.

The Political Economy of Violence Against Women: A Feminist International Relations Perspective

The important and crucial question of the relationship between women's poor access to productive resources such as land, property, income, employment, technology, credit, and education, and their likelihood of experiencing gender based violence and abuse is discussed. The role played by global processes such as neoliberal economic policies, armed conflict, natural disasters and other crises in reinforcing existing gender inequalities and creating new forms of marginalization are highlighted.

The Maoist Insurgency in Nepal and the Political Economy of Violence

This paper studies the incidence of political violence associated with the Maoist insurgency in Nepal. I take a cross-sectional approach where the unit of analysis is the district, and dependent variable is total killings by state and Maoists normalized by district population. I find no evidence that political and economic grievances are linked to the incidence of political violence. There is also very little evidence that district prosperity or political ideology are associated with the incidence of violence. On the other hand, I find that the intensity of violence was greatest in the Midwestern districts and in districts with low road density. Historical evidence suggests that the dummy variable for Midwestern districts that appears robust and significant reflects the political entrepreneurship of leftist leaders more than half a century ago. The results support a theory of conflict that treats an insurgency as analogous to a profit maximizing firm.

Slum Wars of the 21st Century: Gangs, Mano Dura and the New Urban Geography of Conflict in Central America

ABSTRACTThe political economy of violence in Central America is widely perceived as having undergone a critical shift during the past two decades, often pithily summarized as a movement from ‘political’ to ‘social’ violence. Although such an analysis is plausible, it also offers a depoliticized vision of the contemporary Central American panorama of violence. Basing itself principally on the example of Nicaragua, the country in the region that is historically perhaps most paradigmatically associated with violence, this article offers an alternative interpretation of the changes that the regional landscape of violence has undergone. It suggests that these are better understood as a movement from ‘peasant wars of the twentieth century’ (Wolf, 1969) to ‘urban wars of the twenty‐first century’ (Beall, 2006), thereby highlighting how present‐day urban violence can in many ways be seen as representing a structural continuation of past political conflicts, albeit in new spatial contexts. At the same time, however, there are certain key differences between past and present violence, as a result of which contemporary conflict has intensified. This is most visible in relation to the changing forms of urban spatial organization in Central American cities, the heavy‐handed mano dura response to gangs by governments, and the dystopian evolutionary trajectory of gangs. Taken together, these processes point to a critical shift in the balance of power between rich and poor in the region, as the new ‘urban wars of the twenty‐first century’ are increasingly giving way to more circumscribed ‘slum wars’ that effectively signal the defeat of the poor.

Coffee and Genocide:a political economy of violence in Rwanda

The 1994 genocide in Rwanda shocked the Western world, but most wrote it off as an extreme expression of ethnic rivalry—a peculiarly African problem. Isaac A. Kamola offers another version of the story, starring corporate capitalism’s second-favorite fuel: black gold.