State Violence Research Articles

Naming Argentina: The Subject of Torture and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Abstract: The concurrent diffusion of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Argentina and the state’s deployment of torture and disappearance during the most recent military dictatorship have led many critics to interpret the turn to Lacan as a cerebral substitute for political protest after the coup d’état. This essay examines how the ruling junta’s specific forms of violence provoked a crisis in the relationship between psychoanalysis and humanism, erupting in the literary field through the figure of the desaparecida . In tension with human rights discourses prevailing in the 1980s, Luisa Valenzuela’s experimental fiction explores the subject’s fragmentation under conditions of state terror and the ethical ambivalence of humanitarian efforts to repair the ego in the wake of torture.

With my last breath: a psychoanalytic theory of the respiratory drive and speech as a trauma-object in the face of state violence

With my last breath: a psychoanalytic theory of the respiratory drive and speech as a trauma-object in the face of state violence

Analisis Hukum Kasus Penembakan Pendeta Yeremia Zanambani dalam Perspektif Hak Asasi Manusia

This research aims to analyze in depth the shooting case of Pastor Jeremiah Zanambani from the perspective of law and human rights. In addition, the paper will also discuss the challenges in law enforcement in conflict areas, the social, political, and legal impacts of the shooting cases and provide policy recommendations to prevent the recurrence of state violence cases in the future. The research methods used in the legal analysis of the shooting case of Pastor Jeremiah Zanambani in a human rights perspective can include several key steps. First, the researcher will conduct a detailed case study related to the chronology of events, relevant facts, and social and political context in Papua. The social, political, and legal impact of the shooting of Pastor Jeremiah Zanambani is complex and multifaceted. From public trauma and mistrust, to rising political tensions, to major challenges in law enforcement, all of these aspects show the urgency of the need for reforms and new approaches to dealing with conflict in Papua.

Insurgent Conscription for Capacity and Control: State Violence and Coerced Recruitment in Civil War

Though previous research has recognized that armed groups do not always recruit fighters on a voluntary basis, varieties and determinants of insurgent forced recruitment are still poorly understood. What drives armed groups to employ certain methods of coercive recruitment? This article conceptualizes and studies a particular form of coerced recruitment—insurgent conscription—whereby rebel groups rely on their administrative capacity to compel civilians to fight. Building on scholarship that highlights the impact of state violence on rebel recruitment, I theorize that state violence incentivizes armed groups to employ insurgent conscription. Leveraging a novel, cross-national dataset of insurgent conscription in state-rebel dyads between 1946 and 2008, I find that state targeting of an armed group’s civilian support base increases the likelihood of insurgent conscription. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the relationship between state violence and insurgent recruitment, rebel-civilian relationships, and the transformation of institutions and networks in civil wars.

Median line: A century of border violence and the alluvial geopolitics of the Evros/Meriç/Maritsa River border

AbstractThe border river of the Evros/Meriç/Maritsa has been shaped during the century since its demarcation by the Lausanne peace treaty. Over this period, a dense overlap of environmental, geopolitical, legal and cultural actors has turned it into both a riverised border and a borderised river. The border regime appropriates the riverine characteristics of flow, erosion, mud, turbulence and fog as much as it is founded on military technology, international law, agricultural and conservation practices, resource logistics, border crossing and the denial thereof. Here, the river's movement of sand and alluvium has become an agent in the policing of the river border. Drawing on interviews with asylum seekers, locals, forensic pathologists, legal scholars and fish scientists, this paper weaves field research, primarily undertaken on the Greek side, with a historic and ecosystemic perspective of a century‐old border that has become a hotspot for violent practices. These practices themselves harness the uncertain physical conditions that the riverscape affords. In this article we argue that the disjunctures of the river's dynamic geomorphology and the history of demarcation of the median line frame the contemporary politics of mobility of those illegalised by the border regime. In the ambiguous territorial pockets produced by the movement of the river away from the median line of 1926, islands of hyperlegality have been produced where state violence takes place with impunity.

Tradition and Disruption in Latinx and Latin American Political Thought

Abstract This article presents Latinx political thought as a distinctive tradition in political theory that reworks central concepts in response to historical experiences of conquest, colonialism, migration, and transnational politics. In reconstructing this tradition, we argue that its problem space converges with US-based Latin American political thought. The article first traces a genealogy of Latinx political theory and then explores three realms of theorizing around which Latinx and Latin American political thought cluster: sovereignty and state violence, peoplehood, and transnationalism. We explain how the surveyed works disrupt and enrich political theory accounts of these problems. In arguing for the recognition of this field as a tradition, the article also aims to make it intelligible as an area of concentration for PhD students in political science.

Fifty Years of Secrecy: The Politics of Oblivion and Perpetuation of the Dictatorship’s Impunity in Contemporary Uruguay

This article explores the long duration of posttransitional authoritarian discourses of “national security” in Uruguay, in the five decades since the coup that led to a State terrorist regime. We posit that the current deployment of Cold war era discourses justifying state terrorism constitute foundational master tools that enable modern-day military and alt-right autocrats to conceal human rights violations and appropriate the liberal human rights discourse for illiberal political ends. Authoritarians of this new type use these resignified democratic discourses to perpetuate their power, gain influence, and legitimize their repressive illiberal practices. The article uses three public debates relating to the military’s illicit actions in the dictatorship and their involvement in contemporary politics via the new military political party, Cabildo Abierto, to show how these authoritarian tools are deployed in political discourse. We analyze a corpus of texts from recent judicial documents with military “confessions,” official withholding of secret archives, and law proposals presented in Congress. Our findings show that dictatorship-era discourses of “national security” are employed by contemporary military and right-wing political actors for the purpose of sustaining their power. We reveal continuities in dictatorship era discourse practices and strategies that contribute to the emergence of new autocratic social actors who enter the political sphere to capture state resources and protect their group interests. Our findings contribute to the exploration of discursive uses of the past in the present resulting in increased political polarization and autocratic tendencies in contemporary Uruguay.

Seeking environmental justice through the state: Insider allies in U.S. state and federal government agencies

Geographers and political ecologists have demonstrated settler-colonial states’ longstanding key roles in producing environmental injustice through colonialism, racial capitalism, neoliberalism, and other mechanisms. Such studies tend to conclude, implicitly or explicitly, that environmental justice (EJ) movements’ pursuits of more sustainable and just futures must therefore antagonistically confront the state or work beyond it entirely to create alternative futures that do not reinforce state hegemony and violence. However, other scholars in recent years have critiqued such characterizations of the state as unilaterally and fundamentally oppressive, arguing instead that states are terrains of struggle whose contradictory programs and practices reflect not only the interests of capital but also actions of movements. They demonstrate that movements pursuing more just and sustainable futures find purchase working both through and beyond the state. Here, we follow these scholars but depart from them in one respect – namely, they frame movements as pressuring the state only from outside of it. We argue that conceptualizing the state and movements as ontologically overlapping and permeable realms in which some actors move back and forth illuminates additional movement influence on state practice and additional factors that mediate their efforts. We make this case by following a group of U.S. EJ activists who pursue EJ movements’ goals by taking formal positions inside the government agencies they seek to change. We show that they accomplish meaningful change in these roles and that their work is mediated not only by industry power over state agencies, as other scholars have rightly identified, but also by elements of regulatory workplace culture, insider allies’ skills honed in external EJ advocacy, and solidarity among EJ advocates within and beyond the state. By more fully identifying such mediating factors and showing how they shape insider allies’ work, we hope to highlight new fronts of struggle as former EJ movement activists use their insider ally positions to wrest more control over the state from capital and for liberatory ends.

‘The Body Carries the Border’ – A Somatechnical Approach to Borderscape Violence

In bio-/necropolitical accounts, the border penetrates and insists on, that is, transforms, the bodies of people on the move, marking the constitutive violence of sovereignty-based hospitality or hostility. What is largely conceptually neglected in such accounts, however, is the subversive and risky activity of people on the move who themselves are insisting on the border by outsmarting and transgressing it. Extensions of bio-/necropolitics focusing on the debilitating aspects of state violence show how the border extends beyond a liminal status that reproduces binaries – such as exclusion/inclusion, (non-)citizenship, and (il-)legality) – thereby enabling a recentring of people on the move as agents. This paper seeks to (re-)formulate the idea of a ‘border-as-assemblage’ by offering a somatechnical reading of border transgression. The body on the move forms part of this assemblage as it challenges and reproduces the border across different technoscapes. In particular, I focus on the scene of the forensic examination room where people on the move must prove their deservingness by exposing their bodies to a medicalising-moralising gaze. This scene forms the entrance point to a consideration of the somatechnical entanglements giving shape to the assemblage of the migrant body. I reflect also on how somatechnics could be mobilised to think the body as a potential site of struggle against this (physically and epistemically) violent objectification and, in so doing, offer new perspectives on border resistance through refusal and as claim to opacity.

Moral reasoning and support for punitive violence after crime

In contexts marked by high violence and widespread impunity, how do citizens articulate and justify their preferences about crime and punishment? What kind of moral logic and reasoning do they employ when discussing punishments? Does support for punitive punishment derive from moralistic and deontological concerns that perpetrators need to be punished because it is right and proper? Or do people support punitive punishments because they feel they are effective? To address this question, we document and analyze stated preferences for punishment in response to crime from 62 in-depth qualitative interviews with individuals affected by violence in the Mexican state of Michoacán. We conduct a quantitative analysis of how different forms of moral justifications are related to preferred punishments for specific crime events, and a qualitative content analysis to investigate possible mechanisms. We find that two types of moral reasoning are more likely to be used to justify punitive violence: (1) consequentialist reasoning which involves weighing the costs and benefits of an action; (2) and reasoning that dehumanizes accused criminals. Deontological justifications about the right or just action, while extremely common, are used fairly equally across arguments for and against punitive violence. Our study sheds light on the diverse moral frames employed to justify the endorsement of punitive violence.

Surviving domestic and state violence: Women's prison organising and the gendered politics of solidarity

AbstractTracing the organising efforts of criminalised survivors inside the California Institution for Women during the 1990s, this article explores the social and political history of Convicted Women Against Abuse (CWAA). Members built communities of self‐affirmation and care within institutions designed to stamp out their humanity during an age otherwise marked by punitive legislation, prison expansion and growing incapacitation. How these women fostered collectivity and became political advocates fighting for joint clemency complicates conventional and gendered understandings of the punitive 1990s as a low point in the American prison movement. Narrated from the perspective of incarcerated women organisers who stewarded elaborate care networks and undertook significant political organising, this article restores women's prison organising during the 1990s to the prison movement record, while also showcasing the limits and harms of mainstream anti‐violence policies in the lives of incarcerated survivors. Drawing upon incarcerated women's writings, testimonies and oral histories, I examine the politics of mutual care, solidarity and resistance that incarcerated women developed in response to a prison regime that was and remains actively hostile to collectivity of any kind. I argue that care work nurtured sustained political engagement from inside prison.

Caravanas in Tijuana: A Qualitative Account of Women in the 2018 Central American Migrant Caravans

Social conditions force migrants to pursue mass mobilization and transit through Latin America to the Mexico-United States border. Mainstream media continues to sensationalize the migrant caravans. Research concerning the experiences of individuals in caravans remains underdeveloped. A question remains about how women experience transit in a mass caravan migration. This study uses a migrant feminist standpoint to capture women's perspectives within the 2018 Central American migrant caravans. In 2019, a qualitative analysis of 15 semi-structured interviews with migrant participants primarily from Central America and fieldwork observation was conducted in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico. Caravans provide a realistic alternative avenue for migration. Migration is a gendered process where women resist state violence. Reaching the Tijuana border is a success, but it comes at a detrimental cost for women, including experiencing deception, social class inequalities, and distrust. Humanitarian responses to the migrant caravans benefit from adopting a gender-conscious action-based practice.

Book Review: Carceral liberalism: Feminist voices against state violence by Pillai, S.

Book Review: <i>Carceral liberalism: Feminist voices against state violence</i> by Pillai, S.

Beyond the discipline gap: the role of spectacular state violence in the discipline and punishment of Black and Indigenous children in US public schools

ABSTRACT Education research frequently measures and calls for an end to racial disparities in rates of US school discipline practices such as office referrals, suspension, and expulsion. This paper asks what a more expansive understanding of discipline can demonstrate about how schools discipline different students differently. Tracing the history of corporal punishment from Native boarding schools, through Ingraham v. Wright, to violent school policing and arrests today, the author finds that, because Black and Indigenous children can never be ‘normalized’ within white supremacist US schooling, the shift in disciplinary tactics that Foucault described never took place for these students and in fact, the functioning of normalizing school discipline for all depends on extraordinary, spectacular violence against the most marginalized. Rather than focusing on the discipline gap, education research must attend to the violence inherent in US schooling and seek to abolish it.

At Ansha's: Life in the Spirit Mosque of a Healer in Mozambique

At Ansha's is a world that speaks for itself, a place-based ethnography that travels in and out of binaries of extension - spatial and idiomatic antonyms that converge in the making of history and the human. Trentini locates her main protagonist, Ansha, as a migrant from Mueda, Cabo Delgado in Nampula, and offers a rich descriptive landscape that tells many stories; notably, Ansha's passage from being under the control of majini (spirits) to becoming a healer - a transition from illness to healing. The ethnography, through Ansha's memory, is situated at the conjuncture of Mozambique's socialist era, FRELIMO and RENAMO's confrontation, and the anti-colonial war. It recognises the aftermath of dispossession and state violence as an open wound.

Why We Need a Long View of Abolition to End the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Drawing on experiential, literary and historical narratives, this article connects the long history shaping the school-to-prison-pipeline to the contemporary experiences of Black youth in today’s educational system. It maps abolitionism from its origins as a movement to end slavery through the ongoing Black freedom struggles that have challenged state and vigilante violence throughout the eras of Jim Crow and Civil Rights to today’s efforts to dismantle the prison state. By situating the criminalization of African American education from our nation’s founding until the present with particular focus on the post Brown years, the article stresses how policies that funded policing over education persisted through liberal and conservative administrations. This longer and broader historical approach to school discipline should help teachers, school administrators and policy makers devise anti-racist teaching practices that can resist the seemingly unyielding and ever adaptable strictures of white supremacy, most recently evidenced in the attacks on “Critical Race Theory,” “Diversity Equity and Inclusion” initiatives and so-called “wokism.” By listening to how those who have been enslaved and incarcerated regarded education, I join a chorus of voices suggesting how we might structure our pedagogical choices as a fugitive practice that looks for solutions outside the institution and imagines as yet unthought of alternatives to the ways punishment is incorporated into today’s public education.

Making sense of state violence: understanding public inquiries as political devices

ABSTRACT Whenever a political scandal or controversy erupts, one is likely to hear a familiar demand: ‘There must be a public inquiry!’. Inquiries are institutions of last resort, instigated only when something has gone wrong or must be urgently done, where the usual mechanisms of the state are found wanting. Often the focus of inquiries has been that which the state claims as its monopoly: the use of violence. There is a long and chequered history of inquiries appointed to investigate the state’s use of violence in (post)colonial contexts, military interventions and police actions. This special issue interrogates this history, contributing to wider debates in Critical Military Studies on war and violence. Inquiries are acts of epistemic sovereignty that seek to establish authoritative interpretations of events, and this has sometimes led to a dichotomous representation of inquiries as either promising fora for democratic accountability or tools for elite interests. This special issue seeks to overcome this dichotomy through interdisciplinary dialogue and a granular examination of the political cultures and epistemic practices of inquiries into state violence. In so doing, these articles offer a nuanced analysis of the political functions of inquiries and their potential for democratic accountability and justice.

The specter and postmemory of 1984 in western diasporic Sikh advocacy

ABSTRACT I examine US and Canadian Sikh diasporic politics through the lens of 1984 postmemory, or the collective memory of traumas not directly experienced but felt as such. I use interview data with US and Canadian Sikh community leaders to make the case that 1984 has been a crucial impetus for the majority of Sikh advocacy today, even that which does not directly engage the Indian state. Rather than craft a fresh political imagination, violence of the Indian state upon the Sikh body acts as a spectral force through which all continuing advocacy projects for Sikh belonging are filtered. I

Resistance to Repression and Back Again: The Movement for Palestinian Liberation in US Academia

In 2023–2024, US academia witnessed the largest ever protests condemning Israeli state violence against Palestinians and the most vociferous repression of these protests and other criticisms of that violence. This article situates this moment within the longer history of support for Palestinian liberation in US colleges and universities, as well as the decades-long rise of organizations to combat this support and critical analysis of the Israeli state. We do so to make two arguments. First, there has been a continuous interrelationship between resistance and repression, with one feeding the other, and always in relationship to events in the Middle East and the US. Second, and using analysis of our experience with academic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) as an example, we argue that understanding this history is necessary for building a more broad-based, international, and intersectional movement for liberation.

Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo and Frames of Personhood

ABSTRACT Leonora Sansay’s Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808), which recounts the culmination of the Haitian revolution against French colonialism (1791–1804), evokes a nostalgia for colonial order even though colonialism would remain in the Caribbean for decades. The epistolary novel’s narrator, an American visiting Saint Domingue (colonial Haiti), yearns for the “paradise” that she imagines has been destroyed by the revolution, aligning Sansay with Paul Gilroy’s notion of postcolonial melancholia. More insidiously, in Secret History, the longing for the reinstatement of the colonial system in Saint Domingue positions people of African descent outside “frames of recognition,” as Judith Butler in Frames of War conceptualizes the way in which biopolitical forces constitute personhood. I argue that for Sansay, the norms that constitute a living being as recognizable as a life are the ideologies of Romantic settler colonialism, as well as American exceptionalism. As such, within Secret History, Sansay reifies a stratified racial and national hierarchy while also actively denying the state violence that sustains it.