Power Violence Research Articles

CAPITALIST STATE IN RADIOHEAD’S OK COMPUTER ALBUM: A MARXIST ANALYSIS

This research presented an album by alternative rock band Radiohead's "Ok Computer". The objective of this research was to analyse the capitalist state employed in Radiohead's Ok Computer album in relation to slavery and poverty. Therefore, as this study used literary marxism, the method used by researchers was the qualitative method to describe naturally occurring occurrences. Radiohead's song. Overall, this research argued that Radiohead's Ok Computer album presented a literary marxist critique of capitalist state slavery and poverty. The album depicts the lives of the poor as jobs that slowly kill them and expresses disappointment in a system that protects a form of slavery. The album suggests that the capitalist state's poverty is the result of a new crisis, with the state ignoring the voices of the proletariat and exploiting them for the state's benefit. The capitalist state is driven by profits and structural inequality, which cannot be abolished unless we address the violent power structures underlying it.

Obscene Activity: Rethinking Agency and Desire in Early Medieval England

ABSTRACT The Exeter Book, a tenth-century collection of Old English poetry, contains ninety-odd riddles describing human interactions with objects, abstract concepts, and the natural world. Significant recent criticism has focused on how these riddles attribute agency, movement, or power to the nonhuman entities they describe, thus apparently decentering the human in accordance with twenty-first-century posthuman ethics. Yet this article, focusing on the obscene riddles of the collection, argues that although these poems do indeed attribute agency to nonhuman actors, this attribution does not always elevate these nonhuman actors so much as devalue “agency” as we understand it today. After exploring the pitfalls of reading for agency in Riddle 12 (Ox), I turn to an alternative method of attributing intention used in six of the collection’s other obscene riddles: “willa.” This concept, best translated here as “desire,” is a quality that works—like agency or animacy today—to draw and redraw the lines of the human in these double entendre poems. Using the work of Mel Y. Chen and Eunjung Kim, this article argues that by contextualizing agency and its historical equivalents in our analysis, we are better able to track violent power dynamics at work in early medieval English texts.

Displacing the State of Nature: A Disagreement with Graeber and Wengrow

David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything offers a salutary corrective to modern political theory, with its choice between two forms of the “state of nature”: Hobbes’s negative vision of bloodthirsty humans held in check only by the violent power of the sovereign, and Rousseau’s apparently more positive vision of naturally equal humans corrupted by the introduction of agriculture and metallurgy. However, the alternative Graeber and Wengrow offer –a world of imaginative and experimental humans freely choosing different forms of society– excessively downplays the political mediating role of non-human things. This move, in turn, is overly dependent on a modernist ontology that opposes free human thought to mechanically deterministic things. Drawing on the insights of Actor-Network Theory in particular, this article argues for the central role of inanimate objects in the political sphere.

Structures of abandonment: Gender, statuslessness, and bare life

Abstract This article asks the question: What does the term status mean with regard to women without legal status in Israel? Ostensibly, status represents a sovereign state’s formal classification system. In practice, however—according to the accounts of statusless women, civil society activists, and welfare and health officials, as analyzed in this article—status, or its lack thereof, is not a one-off, absolute condition, but an ephemeral and vulnerable position. This article examines two concurrent processes: the blurring of boundaries between status and statuslessness; and the process of differentiating groups of racialized, undesired, and unwelcomed women foreigners: Palestinian women residents of the Occupied Palestinian Territories; asylum-seeking women from Africa; and women from the Former Soviet Union, who have either been trafficked by the sex industry, or separated from their Israeli-citizen spouse before completing their naturalization. Drawing on feminist and critical race renditions of bare life, we explore the ways in which statusless women are positioned in relation to violent power. Moving away from a polarized and emancipatory discussion of legality, we argue that in the absence of full access to legal status, the body may serve as a more fitting alternative in the analysis of abandonment and violence.

Everyday peace in a ‘post‐conflict’ African metropolis: Radio encounters, indeterminacy, fugitivity

AbstractDrawing on the ethnography of a multi‐ethnic local radio listeners' club in post‐war Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, the article provides an original account of everyday peace in an African metropolis. It bridges peace geographies and African urban studies to document the informal and often invisibilised practices through which residents re‐make the city in the wake of war. In doing so, the article expands existing understandings of everyday peace while reaffirming the concept's radical, decolonial proposition: to seek peace in subaltern lifeworlds, rather than in institutional and interventionist programmes that too often reproduce violent power asymmetries. Through the story of the UFARA listeners' club, emerging out of radio encounters, the article shows how everyday peace articulates a response to different forms of conjunctural and structural violence, including precarity and territorial control. It also points to indeterminacy and fugitivity as lived, affective and political figurations of peace which, while eschewing the trappings of resistance, nonetheless point to the need to imagine peace otherwise.

The “ages” of civilization as the structures of political representation

The aim of this article is to delineate a comprehensive account of the development of human civilization in terms of increasingly representative structures of governance, structures that make people more and more present on the upper echelons of decision-making. I hypothesize that there are three essential dimensions of this development: first, media of communication becoming increasingly abstract makes society increasingly conscious of itself because it gets the ability of self-reflection and self-critique from increasingly complex perspectives that do increasing justice to the society; second, the anthropomorphizing/relativizing of the increasingly creative forms of life; third, if the law-making is conducted within the exchange of perspectives in which the being and the people are properly represented, the laws thus issued make societies increasingly free (1) from the dictate of violent power (2) and to practiсe the art of interdependence, that is, to create new models of cooperation. The basic narrative is that of a balancing between the dependence on the outside force and self-dependence; growth occurs when we are able to relativize the force that creates our life on this particular stage, that is, to establish communication with it. If we are too reliant upon it or upon our own power, we stop participating in the exchange of perspectives, in politics that creates new, wider and deeper, contexts for social life. In this sense, humans are “called” to representational politics, to make themselves and each other present on the upper levels of law-making, so that the laws by which people live do justice both to their own desires and to the reality outside of them. The possibility of this representational activity is grounded in the icon of the Trinity where persons make themselves present to each other to the extent of full transparency but without any erasure of the difference.

식민지기 醫生을 둘러싼 식민권력의 통치 기술과 전략

This article aims to understand the characteristics of Japanese colonial rule by examining the governing strategy and technologies of colonial power to subsume Uisaeng under the modern medical system during the Japanese colonial period. To that end, this article urg es to recog nize colonial power as disciplinary power, which reproduces ruling orders through strategy and technologies of inhumane and constant surveillance and control instead of personal and violent power. Moreover, this study examines Uisaeng, the oriental medical doctors in charge of low-level administration and medical care in the modern medical system, to investigate how Japanese colonial power used the new disciplinary power to rule their colony. Also, with criticism of Gyeongseong-centric disparity in the study of Uisaeng , this study seeks to reproduces the differences among regions. As the oriental medical doctors, Uisaeng was heterogeneous to be subsumed under the Western-centric modern medical system. However, due to poor medical conditions, the colonial power attempted to utilize Uisaeng. Accordingly, colonial power recreated them as modern medical practitioners by selecting, educating, evaluating, and censoring them. Meanwhile, diverse strategies to use and mobilize Uisaeng were implemented depending on regional circumstances as local public health authorities gained more autonomy due to the reorg anized local system in the 1920’s.

Hizballah: Between Iran and Lebanon

Hizballah: Between Iran and Lebanon

Research on adaptive segmented control strategy used in direct-drive wave power generation systems

The problem of unstable output power in direct-drive wave power generation systems (DDWPGS) caused by violent power variation in one cycle of wave is common. The wave power fluctuates violently in a short time, and the lower the frequency, the higher the amplitude. Energy storage devices are usually applied to smooth the power and stabilize the system. This paper proposed an adaptive segmented control strategy (ASCS). It adaptively divided the system voltage into five symmetrical segments and regulated the reference power based on the VMD decompose results according to the different segments. The impedance analysis method (IAM) is implemented to verify its stability. The simulation results confirmed that it can not only automatically adjust the output of the energy storage device to adapt to the frequency and amplitude of wave power signal, but also ensure the safe operation of the system under the impact of charging load and wave power.

Esorcizzare lo spettro

This paper enquires into the political and juridical themes underlying Giacomo Puccini’s opera Tosca (1900). Through the comparison of Puccini’s score, the libretto by Giacosa and Illica, and the original play by Sardou, I will present a twofold reading of the intertwinement between politics, religion, and law in this musical work. On the one hand, I will show that the police power represented by the character of Scarpia can be interpreted, from a Benjaminian standpoint, as a violent power that shapes the legal and religious order. On the other hand, I will argue that the artistic couple made by Cavaradossi and Tosca is politically significant in so far as their art represents an attempt to deactivate Scarpia’s pervading and oppressive force. The conclusion will contend that the aesthetics in this opera subtends the aspiration for an “inoperative”-wise revolution in religious institutions as well as in legal and political relations.

The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora by Felipe Valencia

Reviewed by: The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora by Felipe Valencia Andrés Olmedo Orejuela Felipe Valencia, The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora ( Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021), 335 pp. Lope de Vega (1562–1635), dramatic innovator, prolific poet, author of multiple epics, began a great controversy toward the end of his phenomenally productive career. Criticizing the style of poetry popularized by Luis de Góngora's Soledades (1613–17), Lope ridiculed it in one of the most extended and extraordinary contemplations on poetry in the early modern period. Lope had seen the writing on the wall: soon enough Góngora's imitators were legion, and in his final dramatic work, La Dorotea (1632), Lope himself imitates "the new poetry" in such poems as "A mis soledades voy" and "¡Pobre barquilla mía…!" Contrary to this longstanding crisis in the historiography of Spanish literature, Felipe Valencia's erudite and provocative The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora tells another story that places Góngora not at the height of stylistic or poetic achievement, but at the crux of a quarrelsome literary competition between prestigious epic and lyric poetry, for which "melancholy is central" (19). Two main observations emerge: first, that the success of epic poetry swayed Spanish writers of lyric in the second half of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, including Alonso de Ercilla, Fernando de Herrera, Miguel de Cervantes, Juan de Arguijo, and Góngora; and second, that theories of melancholy define lyric poetry as masculine by representing erotic love as an illness that exalts the violent and creative capacities of melancholic men who fail to consummate their erotic longings. Valencia's monograph is a first-rate contribution to the study of early modern lyric poetry, especially as it developed in Spain. This study builds upon important works in the field—Leah Middlebrook's Imperial Lyric: New Poetry and New Subjects in Early Modern Spain (2009) and Isabel Torres's Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age: Eros, Eris and Empire (2013)—through a novel emphasis on the relationship between epic and lyric, and an examination of the influence of melancholy. Valencia deploys a range of critical approaches, grounding close readings in philology, elucidating cultural developments in medicine, and explicating theories of lyric with clear references to critical theory and historical treatises. The theoretical arguments can be difficult, but specialists and non-specialists alike will discover in this monograph deft discussions of melancholy across historical periods, the development of ancient and modern theories of lyric, and the reception of the classics during the Renaissance. The Melancholy Void consists of an introduction and five chapters. Each chapter is divided into sections that separate its historical, ideological, and theoretical components. The introduction establishes the connection between the arrival of Italianate poetic forms in Spain and accusations of lyric effeminacy. Representations of "the suffering of a beautiful woman"—such as Daphne in Garcilaso de la Vega's sonnet "A Dafne ya los brazos le crecían" (1533) or Dido in his imperial sonnet "Boscán, las armas y el furor de Marte" (1535)—respond to accusations of lyric effeminacy by displaying the creative and violent power of the melancholic and masculine poetic speaker, shifting the focus of the poem [End Page 282] from the experience of the suffering woman to that of the suffering male. Valencia contends that silenced feminine voices, the perspectives of mythical heroes such as Apollo and Orpheus, and the "spoilation of symbolic practices traditionally associated with women and femininity" are masculinist practices through which male artistic prowess is shown (40), transforming women's suffering into great art and tending "to derive aesthetic pleasure from spectacles of female suffering" (14). The masculine speakers of the poems appear as frustrated melancholic lovers. Valencia traces their connection to the gendered theories of melancholy that attribute creativity and violence to frustrated male lovers in works by Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), Alonso de Santa Cruz (d. 1576), Juan Huarte de San Juan (1529–88), and others. Valencia charts the development of this "melancholy and masculinist poetics" (53). Alonso de Ercilla's epic, La Araucana...

When Wikipedia met Tor: trials of legitimacy at a key moment in internet history

In 2005, the paths of Wikipedia and The Tor Project crossed publicly and ferociously. Tired of trolls and vandals, Wikipedia decided to block all Tor users from editing encyclopaedia articles. The Tor Project protested, arguing that such a block was not only ineffective, but constituted a form of censorship. This conflict came at a time when both projects were fighting to establish, maintain, and expand their perceived legitimacy. Using a threefold definition of “legitimacy,” this essay explores the Wikipedia/Tor conflict as a legitimacy conflict. We argue that Wikipedia was heavily invested in a conception of legitimacy as authenticity, focusing on who should be counted as a Wikipedian and who should be excluded. In contrast, the Tor Project was more concerned with Weberian legitimacy, challenging states’ claims to the monopoly of violent power. However, both projects shared an interest in acquiring resources and respect, or legitimacy as propriety. To explain this conflict, we draw on an archive of primary source emails and historical documents focusing on the early days (2001–2005) of both projects.

Black and Blue: Black Women, ‘Law and Order,’ and the Church’s Silence on Police Violence

During the mid-twentieth century, many southern White religious leaders proudly championed police brutality and other forms of state-sanctioned violence against Black citizens. In Martin Luther King, Jr’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, he defends direct-action non-violent protests as he responds to criticisms and offers his own critique of the clergymen who gave commendations to “the police force for keeping ‘order’ and ‘preventing violence,’” while ignoring the “ugly and inhumane treatment” that the police exerted on non-violent Black protestors who sought to stand up for their rights. King intentionally includes examples of violence against older Black women and girls in his critique. In this article, the historical grounding in King’s critique is expanded to reflect longstanding support of police violence in White communities and a form of sanction through silence in Black communities centered around communal survival in the face of violent White power structures. This article highlights religious communities which ignored at best and sanctioned at worst police violence against Black women and girls and identifies the need for change in the twenty-first century. Ultimately, it calls for leaders to be in proximate location to police violence so when they see it, they can be moved ethically to address it.

Urbanism of exception: camps and inhabitation

Writing on camps is dangerous as they are never constrained to the architectural scale and form, we might firstly perceive them. If examined as singular objects, even in their multiple diverse morphological aspects and their contested historiography, they seem incapable of mobilizing architectural and spatial reflection beside an aesthetic of precarity, the makeshift of resistance or the violent power of control, surveillance, exclusion, and death. But when imbricated with infrastructures, territories, materials, border regimes, migration policies, activism, and network of solidarity they become active part in a larger reality-making apparatus enhancing different temporal and spatial articulations without recomposition. in this short contribution I want to reflect on what I consider a central tension and ambivalence of the camp in political theory and architectural and urban thinking: the tension between the camp and the possibility (or impossibility) of inhabitation.

An alleged murder due to blunt head injury from a viewpoint of forensic investigation: a case report

Background: Blunt violence on the head often occurs in the community, which often causes fatal conditions and even death. Death due to blunt force on the head can be caused by intracranial bleeding or destruction of brain tissue. Case description: A case of suspected murder was reported due to blunt violence on the victim's head with the initials RA, 16 years old, a student at an official school. On forensic medical examination found signs of blunt violence in the form of bruises on the forehead and face, and the results of an autopsy found the destruction of the bones forming the face, fracture of the skull with the release of brain tissue. In the police investigation, the suspect admitted to committing violence with a kick on the head of the victim using shoes without other tools. There was a mismatch between the strength of the violence recognized by the suspect and the autopsy findings so that the forensic examination focused on seeing whether blunt violence that occurred on the victim could result in death or not. Conclusion: It is necessary to deepen police checks on suspects about how violence was carried out, how the power of violence was carried out, and what were the motives for violence. During the trial, the panel of judges stated that there was a possibility that the perpetrators would use hard objects to attack the victim.

Drug-Trafficking in Colombia: The New Civil War Against Democracy and Peacebuilding

Drug-trafficking in Colombia has been a widely researched phenomenon, especially now, as the country undergoes a transition process with its older guerrilla. Now more than ever it is fundamental to examine how drug-trafficking organizations violent activities affect the consolidation of peace. This article considers different approaches to study violence derived from drug-trafficking, in order to advance towards the objectives of transitional justice. For that matter, this work is based on the idea that drug-trafficking directly generates and reproduces violence which is fueled by the structural violence present in the Colombian context. My thesis is that this phenomenon deters non-repetition guarantees and weakens democracy, which is why there will be three main arguments presented that will revolve around the lack of consensus and the implications of considering drug wars as civil wars, how decisions related to the conceptual apprehension limit the competence of international humanitarian law, and the need for holistic strategies capable of facing drug-trafficking’s political and violent power. Later, alternatives will be explored around the possibilities that each argument offers, as well as which aspects could contribute to a more appropriate approach to combat drug-trafficking. Lastly, I will defend why implementing bottom-up oriented actions can advance towards transitional justice’s intermediate and final objectives, as it is the only alternative that escapes fatalist, utopian or interventionist scenarios.

Restoring the Past, Forging the Present: Scapegoating and Redemption in Calvaire and These Are The Names

This article is a comparison of two works of fiction, a film and a novel, that both address the question of how people deal with intense memories of tragic events from their past. Both works are characterized by crucial references to religious phenomena. In the Belgian cult horror film Calvaire and the bestselling Dutch novel These Are The Names, stories are told about the desire to restore what was lost. In order to deal with past realities, the characters in these works of fiction impose the past, in an imaginative form, upon the present, which inevitably seems to create violence and conflict. The introduction of violence, and the way this violence destroys identities as a means to restore a lost world, calls the possibility and credibility of restoration into question. In order to explore the phenomenon of restoration, we introduce a concept of substitution (inspired by René Girard) to investigate the power of violence in these two narratives. In Calvaire, violence leads to the perversion of identity, ultimately leading to the latter’s destruction, yet at the same time it can be understood to result in love and absolution. In These Are The Names, sacrificing acts first seem to bring a new beginning but in the end redemption is substituted by accusations of severe crimes. However, in this novel the past is also present in such a way that lost identities could be restored. How both stories look at the relation between past and present and in which way they present the possibility of restoring painful events, will be our main questions.

Travel Beyond Stars: Trauma and Future in Mojisola Adebayo’s STARS

Abstract The article explores Mojisola Adebayo’s two-hander STARS (preliminary workshop performance, Ovalhouse, 2018) through the lens of Afrofuturism. The play will be discussed in regard to future-making technologies. By analysing the overt as well as subtle references to science fiction and its tropes, this article lays out how Afrofuturism informs the play and how it is formative in liberating the main character. Furthermore, questions of violence against women, forms of resistance, and the function of the imagination will be examined. Adebayo deftly weaves Afrofuturist concerns into the everyday experiences of marginalised groups who face discrimination and exclusion, irrespective of whether their marginalisation is based on culture, gender, or age. Through this, the play offers ways of dealing with bodily and historical trauma and exclusion, while simultaneously addressing violent and harmful practices and power relations. The play may be set in the present and deals with current issues, but its performance of the future – in regard to resistance and liberation – proves to be its central feature.

Against Whitewashing

This article is an account of recent activity in the U.K. archives sector against white supremacy which is written by a number of people active in the work. Through our work, we are aware of previous initiatives in this area, but written sources about the history of this work are patchy at best. This account offers a description of recent activity so that it is “on record”. We recognise that a historical account of previous efforts would be valuable, but that is not our objective here. This article offers a statement of the problem of white supremacy in the U.K.’s archives sector. It then provides an overview of the work of organisations such as the Black Cultural Archives (BCA), The National Archives (TNA), and the Archives and Records Association (ARA). This is background for more grassroots activities and networks, which are described in the article. The article discusses the events at the ARA 2019 conference, which was a flashpoint for resistance to white supremacy in the profession, before discussing a number of subsequent activities that sought to define a vision for the profession in which white supremacy and other violent power structures are abolished. The article concludes by offering some thoughts about the future of this work.

영화 ｢나의 아들에게｣에서 재현된 폭력적 국가 권력과 비극적 개인의 삶

영화 ｢나의 아들에게｣에서 재현된 폭력적 국가 권력과 비극적 개인의 삶