Sociopolitical Violence Research Articles

Queer urban activism under state impunity: Encountering an LGBTTTI Pride archive in Chilpancingo, Mexico

While southern Mexico’s state of Guerrero has faced rising socio-political violence and impunity for over a decade, with particular consequences for sexual and gender minorities, an LGBTTTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, travesti and intersex) rights movement has simultaneously emerged in the state capital, Chilpancingo, and in other cities and towns. In 2002, activists organised the state’s first Pride march in this small, peripheral Latin American city, and each year since, people have gathered for what has become an annual event in this remote place nevertheless formed by what happens in distant centres of power. Also, LGBTTTI marches, parades, drag competitions and other events meant to orient the community and state institutions towards recognition of the rights of sexual and gender minorities have extended to public spaces across the state. This article examines this incongruous actuality through a study of the photos and videos in the private collection of a local activist and professional photographer, visual data that provide a unique record of how the local LGBTTTI movement has drawn on transnationally recognisable symbols and local cultural motifs to bring attention to violence experienced by its members. Building on a dense description of this archive, this paper argues that an identity-rights-based movement can coexist with a weak state that has abdicated its responsibility to guarantee basic human rights. Through its use of urban public spaces, such a movement can convey its message and draw people together, though given the limits of state-sanctioned impunity it may opt for strategic silence on wider socio-political issues in order to make specific advances.

The Violent Origins of Psychic Trauma: Frantz Fanon's Theory of Colonial Trauma and Catherine Malabou's Concept of the New Wounded

This paper contends that Catherine Malabou’s concepts of cerebrality and the new wounded extend Frantz Fanon’s theory of colonial trauma to illuminate the link between violent oppression and contemporary profile of psychic disorders, as they relate to the diagnostic measure of PTSD. It begins by demonstrating colonial psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni’s failure to engage psychoanalytic theory to negate the racial theses of French colonial psychiatry. Next, it explicates Fanon’s refutation of both Mannoni’s use of the idea of dependence and his theory of social evolutionism to describe the colonial relation. In brief, Fanon critiques Mannoni for neglecting to integrate the psychic effects of colonial violence into his analysis of unconscious complexes in the colonized. Finally, this paper shows that Malabou corelates violent ruptures with the PTSD diagnosis, in order to better understand the relation between sociopolitical violence and neuropsychiatric trauma. This paper proposes that both Fanon and Malabou be mobilized to theorize the violent origins of psychic trauma.

The pain of the social

ABSTRACT This article attempts to delineate social pain or the pain of the social – a suffering that comes from human relations as a collective. I attempt to find the word, the signifier, that can transmit this experience in clinical practice, including senses, affects and intuition. I also contribute my clinical work in times of sociopolitical violence to this pursuit.

The Dark Side of Morality – Neural Mechanisms Underpinning Moral Convictions and Support for Violence

People are motivated by shared social values that, when held with moral conviction, can serve as compelling mandates capable of facilitating support for ideological violence. The current study examined this dark side of morality by identifying specific cognitive and neural mechanisms associated with beliefs about the appropriateness of sociopolitical violence, and determining the extent to which the engagement of these mechanisms was predicted by moral convictions. Participants reported their moral convictions about a variety of sociopolitical issues prior to undergoing functional MRI scanning. During scanning, they were asked to evaluate the appropriateness of violent protests that were ostensibly congruent or incongruent with their views about sociopolitical issues. Complementary univariate and multivariate analytical strategies comparing neural responses to congruent and incongruent violence identified neural mechanisms implicated in processing salience and in the encoding of subjective value. As predicted, neuro-hemodynamic response was modulated parametrically by individuals’ beliefs about the appropriateness of congruent relative to incongruent sociopolitical violence in ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and by moral conviction in ventral striatum. Overall moral conviction was predicted by neural response to congruent relative to incongruent violence in amygdala. Together, these findings indicate that moral conviction about sociopolitical issues serves to increase their subjective value, overriding natural aversion to interpersonal harm.

A Strategy for Functional Health and Well-Being in Cambodian University Faculty and Staff

The range of outcomes and published record on the Transcendental Meditation technique across 50 years of research in education, business, and government makes its application unique. Its association with health and relation to an individual’s quality-of-life have also made the technique useful in some developing countries.
 Data related to application of the technique to higher education in Cambodia have been accruing since the early 1990s. The 26-year research program begun by these authors associated with Transcendental Meditation and non-verbal intelligence, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, learning, memory, and personality in university students, as well as its collective effects on economic and social indicators and reductions in socio-political violence and crime, makes for an uncommonly rich body of knowledge in a country where empirical research has been rare. Indeed, the early studies in this research program represented among the first published research on higher education since the 1960s, after which Cambodia was plunged into civil war, genocide, and ongoing social turmoil and political conflict until 1993.
 The present study, which is a modified version of a study previously published in ASEAN Journal of Education, extends this research program to include a preliminary investigation of the practice of Transcendental Meditation by faculty and staff in three regional Cambodian universities and examines its impact on health and well-being. Findings generated by a concurrent, quasi-experimental mixed methods design suggest the practice may be of benefit to university personnel as measured by physical mental and social health, perceived health, self-esteem, anxiety, and depression, among other quality-of-life variables, thereby adding to previous results associated with higher education in this increasingly important south-east Asian nation.
 

Prácticas narrativas: entre la estrategia y la poesía social

El propósito de este artículo, producto de la reflexión de sus autoras sobre experiencias de investigación e intervención desarrolladas en distintos escenarios, es poner en consideración algunas posibilidades de intervención psicosocial que ofrecen las prácticas narrativas en contextos de violencia sociopolítica. Para esto, se ubica metafóricamente la tensión entre la estrategia y la poesía social, como un marco conversacional; este constituye, a su vez, un escenario de intervención estético posibilitador de la emergencia de nuevas historias y la construcción de identidades enriquecidas con las víctimas del conflicto armado, que les acerquen a futuros posibles y que promuevan una cultura de paz y reconciliación.

Implicit processing of emotional words by children with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: An fMRI investigation

Background/ObjectiveIn the last decade, socio-political violence in Colombia (South America) has created an environment of extreme/chronic stress. In this study, brain imaging technology (fMRI) and behavioral task performance were used to measure potential deficits in executive functioning for emotional processing in Colombian children. MethodParticipants (22 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD and 22 neurotypical, NT) were asked to perform a word task with implicit emotional salience, which required them to report the color of the ink in which a positive, negative or neutral word was printed. ResultsMixed design analysis of variance showed no group differences in accuracy for determining ink color when presented as a positive or neutral word. However, PTSD children were significantly less accurate (negative words) and notably slower (both positive and negative words) at determining ink color when presented in the context of an emotional word. PTSD processing of positive and negative words was associated with hypoactivation in the superior and middle frontal gyri of the right hemisphere in comparison to NT children. ConclusionsThese results may reflect a deficit in executive functioning for emotionally laden stimuli, perhaps induced as a by-product of their traumatic experiences.

Experiences of sexual and gender minorities in an urban enclave of Haiti: despised, beaten, stoned, stabbed, shot and raped

Studies of sexual and gender minorities in Haiti and globally typically involve HIV research and programming with men who have sex with men. We conducted focus groups with individuals in Haiti’s Cité Soleil slum whose assigned gender at birth matched neither their gender identity nor contextual heteronormative constructions of gender roles, i.e. transwomen and transmen. The Yogyakarta Principles provided the study framework. Focus group participants offered emic perspectives on overall well-being, identities, biopsychosocial strengths and HIV-protective and risk factors. We found that gender expression that conflicts with contextual norms evoked recurring, humiliating and intentionally injurious sexual assaults against participants, heightening their HIV risk; participants endured beatings, shootings, stabbings, stonings and socio-political violence. Lack of confidentiality and stigma hinder participants’ access to scarce HIV resources. Indistinct boundaries between sexuality, gender identity and gender expression merged with traditional gender-based roles to perpetuate sexual violence towards transwomen by cisgender heterosexual men and by transmen towards cisgender heterosexual women. Despite resignation to omnipresent violence, participants showed resilience regarding gender identity. Needed are integrated socio-behavioural and health programmes to challenge existing gender inequities while providing training on human rights and HIV risk reduction for Haitian sexual and gender minorities.

VIOLENCIA SOCIOPOLÍTICA CONTRA LÍDERES SOCIALES Y DEFENSORES DE DERECHOS HUMANOS EN EL POSTCONFLICTO: DIFICULTADES Y RETOS PARA LA IMPLEMENTACIÓN DE UNA PAZ ESTABLE Y DURADERA EN COLOMBIA

El presente artículo aborda la reflexión acerca de las dificultades y los retos que se evidencian frente a la construcción de la paz territorial en Colombia, ante la creciente violencia sociopolítica contra líderes sociales y defensores de derechos humanos, en el periodo posterior a la firma del acuerdo de paz suscrito entre las Farc y el gobierno de Juan Manuel Santos. Para ello, se abordan algunos de los factores que dan cuenta de la sistematicidad en la comisión de estos hechos, a partir del análisis de las dinámicas de los poderes locales que contribuyen a la criminalidad y la vulneración de los derechos de quienes realizan el ejercicio de defensa de estos; para, posteriormente, dar lugar a la reflexión sobre la creciente polarización política y social que promueve, a partir de la incitación al odio y la persecución contra los contradictores políticos, el uso de la violencia y la permanencia de prácticas institucionales e irregulares ligadas a la doctrina del “enemigo interno”.

Socio-political Violence in Cambodia Between 1990 and 2008: An Explanatory Mixed Methods Study of Social Coherence

The relationship between individual and group practice of the Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi program andreductions in social stress, tension, and violence has been the topic of systematic exploration since the 1970s in Canada,India, Israel, Lebanon, New Zealand, Norway, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, United Kingdom, and United States.Findings from these quantitative studies have been published in leading international conflict resolution and peacestudies journals. However, research in Cambodia has to date only been of a descriptive and qualitative nature with afocus on economic and social variables not violence or crime.The purpose of the present study is therefore to examine socio-political violence in Cambodia between January 1990and December 1992 (the baseline period) and the possible influence of group practice of the Transcendental Meditationand TM-Sidhi program at Maharishi Vedic University (MVU) by 550 undergraduate students beginning in January1993 through December 2008 (the impact-assessment period). This study uses an explanatory mixed methods designto examine socio-political violence using time series analysis of machine-coded news reports (quantitative data) anddocument analysis of national and international media reports, personal statements, and public documents (qualitativedata).Results indicate that beginning in January 1993, when meditating students at MVU began their group practice, amarked downward shift occurred in the trends of socio-political violence and other forms of violent crime in Cambodia,contrary to predicted baseline trends and contrary to widespread community and media expectations. Such aconclusion can be drawn from both the quantitative and qualitative evidence when comparing baseline andimpact-assessment periods, suggesting that the observed decline in socio-political violence during this time wasassociated with an increase in peace, order, and harmony—that is, a rise of social coherence—in the collectiveconsciousness of Cambodia generated by the group of meditating students at MVU.

Propiedades psicométricas de la adaptación para Colombia del inventario de experiencias traumáticas en la infancia (ETI-SRCol)

Objective: Traumatic experiences during childhood are considered a risk factor for mental disorders in adulthood. There are difficulties to reliably and validly measure these experiences in the adult population. The purpose of this study was to develop the Colombian version of the Early Trauma Inventory Self-Report (ETI-SRCol) and to examine its psychometric properties. Methodology: 452 people (53.8% women) between 18 and 60 years of age from different social strata participated. The internal consistency of the instrument was analyzed, and the construct validity was estimated through factorial methods. Results: the final version of the Colombian adaptation of the ETI-SRCol is an 81-item, self-applied instrument, which measures the frequency, age of onset, emotional impact, and the severity of childhood traumatic events in five factors: sociopolitical violence, sexual abuse, physical and emotional abuse, general traumatic events, and poverty. This version showed an adequate internal consistency (α = 0.795) as well as the severity index of the trauma (α = 0.832). Conclusions: The ETI-SRCol is reliable to measure traumatic experiences in childhood, and may be applied at both the clinical and investigative level within the Colombian population.

Morality in the Aesthetics of Violence: Political Denunciation in La Virgen de los Sicarios (1994, 2000) by Fernando Vallejo

This article analyzes the aesthetic shift between the novel and the movie, La Virgen de los Sicarios, as Fernando Vallejo was both the author of the novel and the screenwriter of the movie. Each text follows the same general plot, yet there is a marked change in tone as the bloodthirsty city of Medellín overshadows the novel, while two love stories dominate the movie. Highlighting that both texts were created to denounce widespread sociopolitical violence in Colombia, I use the aesthetics of rupture and the sublime to determine which art form was more effective in perpetuating Vallejo’s message. This article concludes that the movie adaptation was the initial catalyst in the culture shift Vallejo hoped for within the Colombian public due to its adherence to the sublime, and that his novel prolonged his message through the aesthetics of rupture.

Too dangerous for fieldwork? The challenge of institutional risk-management in primary research on conflict, violence and ‘Terrorism’

ABSTRACTResearch on conflict and ‘terrorism’ is confronted by an expanding range of daunting ethical, methodological, and institutional challenges. One of these is the increasing involvement of university ethics and fieldwork safety committees in ‘managing’ researcher safety and security as an issue which requires institutional oversight, control, and approval. This paper contributes to contemporary reflection on and conversations about social sciences fieldwork in what is deemed to be an increasingly dangerous world. It focuses specifically on the increasing application of institutional ethics and safety review processes to ‘dangerous’ fieldwork on socio-political violence. While these new restrictions are clothed in the language or idiom of ethics and worker safety and security, a political analysis suggests that these committees represent powerful institutions of censorship and control, a serious challenge to academic freedom, and even movement towards the recolonisation of social science research. This paper describes and addresses this threat, and offers a constructive proposal for potentially responding by the development of risk assessment and management protocols which may contribute both to researcher survival in perilous field sites and help researchers to negotiate the necessary approval by university ethics and safety committees.

Investigación para la acción, acción para la investigación en población víctima del conflicto armado.

Este documento producto de investigación sigue el paradigma crítico social con un enfoque cualitativo. El tipo de investigación es Investigación Acción. A partir de un diagnóstico participativo, se proponen cinco sublíneas que configuran la acción: planteamiento, desarrollo y alcance, así como su reflexión, presentándose los principales hallazgos y conclusiones. Se revisan algunos elementos epistemológicos, teóricos, conceptuales y metodológicos de la Investigación Acción, en relación con el voluntariado, la familia, las Ciencias Sociales y la convivencia en la cotidianidad de la organización. Se concluye que la violencia sociopolítica se suma a las violencias cotidianas que deben incluirse en los distintos procesos que se adelanten con la población beneficiaria y se llama la atención sobre las lógicas de campo en la investigación y las que el sistema exige a la Academia.

IDPs in Colombia: The necessary step towards effective protection

The modern history of Colombia has been tied up to conflict and socio-political violence, directly linked to struggles over land and power, and the economic marginalisation of small farmers. The conflict is composed by a patchwork of guerrilla groups, paramilitary groups, poor farmers, drug cartels, and the regular army, which engage in criminal activities such as massacres against communities, selective assassinations and forced disappearances or use of anti-personal landmines, resulting in thousands of civilian victims and humanitarian catastrophes. The most notorious outcome of this catastrophe is the continuing phenomenon of Forced Displacement. This article is aimed at outlining the steps that need to be taken in order to effectively protect Internally Displaced People (IDPs).Published online: 11 December 2017

The Vanishing Vanishing-Point: Violence prevention through civil imagination

In their video The Vanishing Vanishing-Point (2015), contemporary artists Effi & Amir depict the death of a mundane yet exceptional olive tree. Utilizing Google Street View and Google Earth, the video highlights temporal ruptures in the tree’s photographic documentation in order to expose a field of socio-political violence surrounding the tree’s demise. In this essay, I demonstrate how the artwork adopts a lens of ‘forensic aesthetics’ both to interrogate this complex field of culpability and to advocate an approach of violence prevention through civil imagination. The Vanishing Vanishing-Point emphasizes the need for a plural, ‘civil gaze’ (Azoulay, 2012) in order to understand the composite, multiple ‘events of photography’ surrounding the tree’s untimely death and to prevent such future acts of aggression.

Media Portrayal of Street Violence Against Egyptian Women: Women, Socio-Political Violence, Ineffective Laws and Limited Role of NGOs

Media Portrayal of Street Violence Against Egyptian Women: Women, Socio-Political Violence, Ineffective Laws and Limited Role of NGOs

Involvement of a Capitalist Crisis in the 1900-30 Inequality Trend Reversal

This paper proposes a supplemental secular cycle formulation for a modern capitalist society that employs financial, economic, and political metrics in place of population and sociopolitical violence. It makes use of Thomas Piketty’s (2014) hypothesis that excess investment return relative to economic growth causes inequality. In a capitalist society, the investing class can be considered as a proxy for elites. Inequality as measured by the ratio of financial to wage gains over time agrees with other economic measures. Rising inequality led to a reduction in capital productivity (output per person per unit of capital). This created instability in financial markets that generated the 1929 stock market crash. Application of a simplified version of the demographic structural theory to inequality trends shows political stress peaking in 1929. The depression that began with the stock market crash in that year resulted in a devastating political defeat for the ruling party in 1932 which brought in the political coalition that engineered the inequality trend reversal. This series of events can be considered as a modern version of the state collapse and reconstitution that was typically a key feature of premodern secular cycles.

Capacidades del estado y de la población víctima de violencia sociopolítica para la construcción de paz: una mirada en regiones de Sucre

El artículo es producto de la investigación “Diagnóstico de las capacidades técnicas, administrativas y humanas de las instituciones que atienden población víctima de violencia sociopolítica en las regiones golfo de Morrosquillo y Sabanas, departamento de Sucre, año 2014 -2015”. Las manifestaciones de este fenómeno sociopolítico se configuraron en amenazas, reclutamientos, desapariciones forzadas, masacres por incursión de grupos al margen de la ley, lo que generó daños psicológicos, sociales, económicos y desplazamiento de la población civil a lugares ajenos con pérdida sustancial de sus bienes materiales, sociales y espirituales. Estos hechos llevaron al gobierno a tomar la decisión política de conocer el conflicto armado, la violación de derechos humanos, la existencia del estado de cosas inconstitucionales y la necesidad de reparar a las víctimas sancionando varias leyes, entre ellas la 387 de 1997 y la 975 de 2005, las que al no surtir los efectos esperados dieron origen a la Ley 1448 de 2011, que en Colombia se constituye en el marco conceptual, metodológico y jurídico que guía la operatividad de la política pública y se dictan “medidas de asistencia, atención y reparación integral a las víctimas del conflicto armado interno y se establecen otras disposiciones”. La investigación se enmarcó en un enfoque mixto de tipo descriptivo - interpretativo, las técnicas utilizadas fueron la entrevista semiestructurada y la observación participante en contextos de atención a víctimas. Los resultados muestran fortalezas y debilidades en el cumplimiento de las funciones institucionales que determina la Ley 1448, no obstante, se enfatiza en las debilidades técnico-administrativas y humanas dada la relevancia política y social que esta información reviste, para redimensionar el actuar del Estado y la institucionalidad, en procura a garantizar el restablecimiento de derechos y la atención integral de las víctimas, para aportar a la construcción de paz desde lo regional y socio comunitario.

Shifting identities:

Guatemala is one of the first countries in the Americas to establish community health worker (CHW) programs, and CHWs have served a central role in both large‐scale national programs and small‐scale nongovernmental organization (NGO) projects. The role of CHWs, including their training, responsibilities, and idealized identities, has never been uniform, and has fluctuated over time in response to changing international health paradigms, national socioeconomic and political processes, and local‐level power structures and expectations of the position. In this paper, I examine the changing nature of CHWs in the Central Highlands of Guatemala by focusing on the case of the Behrhorst Clinic in Chimaltenango, Guatemala. The Behrhorst Clinic was one of the first to implement a CHW program in Guatemala, and is one of the few NGOs in the region to operate continuously since the 1960s, providing a unique case study to examine the history and transformation of CHWs in three distinct sociopolitical periods: the Primary Health Care era (1960s–1970s); the sociopolitical violence (1970s–1980s); and the aftermath of the violence (1980s–2000s). This longitudinal analysis of the Behrhorst health promoter program highlights central, ongoing issues facing CHW programs in Guatemala and beyond including: the political susceptibility of community participation and empowerment programs; community participation and representation; and the long‐term and intergenerational impact of CHW positions that function as a mechanism for socioeconomic advancement through the provision of curative services.