ABSTRACT This study draws on framing theory and agenda-setting theory to examine how both state-owned and independent media outlets in Kazakhstan presented the Bloody January event in 2022. In particular, the study seeks to answer the question: ‘How did Kazakhstan’s state and independent media frame the key flashpoints of Bloody January, and what narratives did they promote?’ To address this, the paper employs a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative and qualitative content analysis of four prominent media outlets. The state-owned sources include Qazaqstan TV (Kaztelradio Corporation) and the Kazakh-language newspaper Egemen Qazaqstan, while the independent outlets analysed are Azattyq.org and Channel 31. Findings show that state media produced nearly twice as much content as independent media during the crisis, contributing to the dominance of official narratives. While state outlets framed protestors as threats to public order, independent media offered more diverse accounts, highlighting issues such as state violence and the government’s use of force.

This article examines how Australia's approach to domestic and family violence (DFV) social service delivery impacts First Nations community-controlled DFV services and theorizes how administrative techniques used by the state in this context can be considered a form of state violence. Analyzing data from a multi-stage qualitative study involving 22 interviews alongside analysis of 98 DFV-related intimate partner homicides involving First Nations women, this article argues that the state's approach to funding and managing DFV service delivery sustains a contiguous colonial logic that threatens and undermines the strength and resilience of community-controlled service delivery and, as a consequence, harms First Nations women.

The study examines diplomatic defense policies and counter insurgency operations in North- Eastern Nigeria. The general objective of the study is to examine diplomatic defense policies in ensuring effective counter insurgency operations in North Eastern Nigeria. The study employed mixed research design and data were generated using qualitative and quantitative that involves both primary and secondary sources. The study is guided by Counter insurgency theory. The study revealed that the diplomatic strategies used in securing external defense arrangements were desirable but less impactful due to not only external problem of trust but due to failure to internally address the root causes of terrorism in states. The study concluded that Nigeria has in spite of her diplomatic posturing still lack steam in the quest to fulfill her desire to end the intractable Boko Haram terrorism even when it has diplomatically committed itself to regional stabilization and other multilateral strategies to boost defense arrangements. The study recommended that Nigerian state must intentionally be seen to be addressing poverty, unemployment and porous borders which were among the key root causes of the domestic terrorism in Nigeria that has spiraled out of control into a regional issue, in order for the diplomatic strategies used to remain impactful.

"Never mind, my dear, endure it, bear it": Responses to and interpretations of intrafamilial physical child abuse among Palestinian Muslim survivors in Israel.

ABSTRACT The Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM), a grassroots civil rights collective, accuses the Pakistan Army of instrumentalizing Islamist militancy in the Pak-Afghan borderlands to extract lucrative “counterterrorism rents” at the catastrophic expense of local populations. To support its claims, PTM mobilises a series of confessions issued by top-ranking military and civilian officials, which acknowledge the state’s longstanding patronage of terrorist outfits. While the confessing state remains unaccountable, PTM faces intensified repression. To unpack this paradox, the paper employs Michel Foucault’s theorisation of confession as a technology of statecraft while engaging PTM’s counter-discourse as an empirical entry point. Analysing seven state confessions gathered during two years of fieldwork, the essay challenges the liberal assumption that confession constitutes a gesture of moral reckoning that leads to accountability and justice. Instead, it demonstrates how confessions are deployed to perpetuate the state’s geopolitical utility and rent-seeking diplomacy abroad, while pre-empting and neutralising dissent at home. Yet these confessions also create unintended discursive openings that PTM seizes to rearticulate counterterrorism apparatus as a profitable political economy. By attending to insurgent discourses from a militarised periphery, the article deepens our understanding of how truth-telling, rather than undermining state violence and impunity, can be co-opted to reproduce it.

This paper historically traces how the concept of brain death was constructed in Korean society. It examines the social establishment process of the brain death concept by focusing on the confirmation time—a seemingly technical yet symbolic indicator. The prevailing account explains the establishment and diffusion of the brain death concept as a smooth history of institutionalization without resistance. However, this study includes the earlier period of the 1960s–1970s in its analysis, noting that the brain death concept actually faced numerous forms of resistance. The first Korean brain death criteria, presented by the Korean Medical Association’s Committee for the Definition of Death in 1983, set the confirmation time at 12 hours. This was a longer duration compared to other countries, representing a choice that prioritized alleviating social opposition over the efficiency of organ transplantation. However, as brain-dead patients resulting from state violence occurred repeatedly in the late 1980s and the first brain-dead liver transplant was performed, brain death gained new political and moral legitimacy. Based on this shift in atmosphere, the Korean Medical Association issued a second set of criteria in 1989, reducing the confirmation time to 6 hours. These criteria functioned as de facto legal norms during the legal vacuum period until their codification in 1999. This series of processes demonstrates that brain death criteria, including confirmation time, are not pure medical facts but rather constructs of negotiation and tension surrounding the meaning of death and the legitimacy of organ transplantation.

ABSTRACT From pushbacks to shipwrecks, spectacular forms of state violence at the EU’s borders are well documented. In this article, we trace a continuum of racialised violence that exists between these spectacular instances of state border controls, as well as more mundane practices that discourage arrival, integration and settlement. Following Rob Nixon, we conceptualise these latter practices as a slow violence that precludes finding a ‘liveable life’, echoing the experiences of the working poor and other racialised communities. Using the Maltese Islands as a case study, we argue that these two forms of violence occur at sea and on land, and are intimately linked, working to reinforce each other. This continuum of violence both encourages onward mobility and creates barriers to that same mobility – a mobility that remains shackled to the state violence that shapes it. Finally, the paper turns to how people resist this spectacular and slow violence, reflecting on the different strategies adopted by people on the move and their allies.

Much of Kentucky's agricultural history is not well-known, especially for its Appalachian counties. Relatedly, Blackness in Appalachia has been understudied by scholars and written out of popular representations of the region, though many scholars have worked to address this shortcoming over the past several years. However, these theorizations have not extended to agriculture in Appalachia, which this study seeks to do through an analysis of Black-led extension as a site of Black history, agency, and possibilities while also serving as a site of discrimination and state violence. Utilizing the archival materials of a Black agent in Appalachian Kentucky, this paper makes three contributions to Black food and agrarian geographies through examining Black extension through a geographical lens rather than simply a historical lens, siting this study in Appalachia, a region that has received limited attention within these fields and Black geographies broadly, and demonstrating how Black extension served as a site of agency and opportunity for Black rural residents through the critical infrastructure that it provided while also inscribing the state and capital onto Black farmers and rural residents through the implementation of scientized agriculture and human development.

ABSTRACT This article interrogates how “right-wing extremism” is problematised in German federal-level policies to prevent and counter violent extremism (P/CVE). While scholarship has critiqued European P/CVE for its disproportionate focus on “Islamist extremism” and its “blind spot” regarding “right-wing extremism”, comparatively little work has examined how the latter is problematised once it enters the policy agenda. Employing Carol Bacchi’s What’s the Problem Represented to Be? (WPR) policy analysis method alongside a critical race theoretical framework, I analyse 15 German federal-level P/CVE and anti-racism policy documents published between 2016 and 2024. I identify three dominant problem representations of “right-wing extremism”: 1) as a threat to the democratic order, 2) as ideological vulnerability and 3) as institutional failure. These representations, I argue, depoliticise racial violence, obscure structural white supremacy and reproduce Cold War–era logics of anti-left and anti-totalitarian governance, rendering “right-wing extremism” an external aberration rather than entangled with a shifting “societal centre”. The article takes up the metaphor of “filling-in” - used to describe how the visual system compensates for blind spots – to analyse how German P/CVE policy “fills in” its blind spot on “right-wing extremism” using conceptual tools drawn from its history of countering “left-wing extremism”. Drawing on Charles W. Mills’ concept of the Racial Contract, I propose moving beyond the “extremism” frame to theorise this phenomenon as a historically grounded form of racial violence arising from structural white supremacy. Such a rethinking offers a sharper analytical lens and opens space for an emancipatory politics that centres those most harmed by both state and non-state racial violence.

Use of lethal weapons to kill protesters by Bangladesh police: A discussion analyzing 253 deaths of July 24 revolution

Accountability as Self-Determination: Abolitionist conceptions of health, wellbeing, and safety.

This article explores theoretical elements and connections for an abolitionism rooted in the Global South, specifically Brazil. It posits that penal abolitionism has historically suffered from theoretical dependence on European and Scandinavian models, creating a disconnect from the region’s unique social and historical contexts. The central hypothesis is that effective abolitionist models for conflict resolution in Brazil must directly confront the country’s deep-seated legacy of slavery, colonialism, structural racism, and state violence. The paper distinguishes between transitional and restorative justice, highlighting their limitations in adequately addressing profound structural issues. It proposes “transformative justice” as a more fitting framework, defining it as a community-based approach aimed at fostering broader social, political, and economic change by transforming relationships, practices, and systems of oppression, rather than solely focusing on individual conflicts or restoring a previous state. Ultimately, it advocates for a locally driven, participatory transformative justice that dismantles punitive imaginaries and fosters new forms of solidarity to overcome historical traumas and prevent recurrent violence.

This article examines how Holocaust memory enters into productive interplay with other historical and cultural memories, focusing specifically on its relationship to representations of the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–1985) in Chico Buarque’s novel The German Brother (2014). I argue that the novel mobilizes Holocaust memory not merely as a distant historical reference but as a framework through which Brazil’s unresolved dictatorial past can be narrated and confronted. To illuminate this dynamic, the article brings together Sigmund Freud’s concept of screen memory and Michael Rothberg’s theory of multidirectional memory. While screen memory is often understood as a mechanism that obscures access to repressed experiences, I propose that it can also function as an enabling structure that opens pathways to engage difficult or silenced histories through mediated or displaced representations. This does not imply a harmonious relationship between memories; rather, it acknowledges ongoing political disputes and tensions in the field of remembrance. Drawing on multidirectional memory, I explore how such displacement may not only produce competition for space among traumatic pasts but may also generate new, overlapping interpretive possibilities. The article unfolds across three interconnected sections. First, I define screen memory and analyze its relevance for understanding the often indirect and fragmentary nature of Holocaust representations. Second, I consider the theoretical convergences between screen memory and multidirectional memory, showing how both concepts challenge linear or hierarchical models of historical remembrance. Finally, I demonstrate how the novel deploys Holocaust memory as a metaphorical and narrative tool for grappling with the dictatorship’s legacy of state violence, institutionalized torture, and persistent national memory disputes within Brazil’s contested historical landscape.

Operation Sindoor (2025) stands as one of the most significant counter-terrorism actions undertaken by India in the 21st century. Launched in response to escalating cross-border terrorism and a series of coordinated attacks on Indian soil, the operation showcased a level of precision, speed, and technological sophistication that narrates a deeper evolution in India’s counter-terrorism doctrine. This research paper analyses how Operation Sindoor reflects India’s transformation from a primarily reactive security posture to a proactive, pre-emptive, intelligence-driven, and multi-domain counter-terrorism strategy. The study examines India’s counter-terrorism trajectory across three phases: the period of strategic restraint (pre-2016), the stage of calibrated cross-border responses (2016–2020), and the era of technology-enabled, integrated warfare (2020–2025). Operation Sindoor embodies the culmination of these phases, revealing substantial doctrinal advancements, including real-time intelligence fusion, expanded roles for drones and precision-guided munitions, coordinated operations across air, cyber, and electronic domains, and the strategic use of diplomatic messaging to maintain escalation control. The paper argues that Operation Sindoor marks a doctrinal shift grounded in five pillars: pre-emptive neutralisation of threats, technological integration, multi-domain coordination, indigenisation of defence capabilities, and the use of international legal frameworks to justify limited, precise action. Together, these principles underscore India’s growing confidence and autonomy in conducting high-risk counter-terrorism missions without sliding into full-scale conflict. At the same time, the paper acknowledges ongoing debates concerning escalation risks, transparency limitations, political interpretations, and the long-term impact on regional military dynamics. Despite these challenges, Operation Sindoor remains a watershed moment that signals India’s arrival in a new era of assertive, strategically coherent, and technologically empowered counter-terrorism doctrine.

This paper examines how street theatre was co-developed and implemented as a form of resistance and community empowerment in collaboration with the transgender community in Chennai, India. Rooted in the community’s longstanding cultural practices of dance and performance, this project mobilized street theatre not only to elevate marginalized voices, but to challenge the enduring legacies of colonial and gendered state violence. Drawing on a community-based action research approach and Freirean pedagogy, the first author, an Indian diasporic social worker and emerging scholar, reflects on their role as facilitator and co-learner in this process. The paper presents street theatre as a culturally grounded, transformative practice that reclaims public space, asserts agency, and creates dialogic encounters with the broader public. It further explores how such research-community partnerships can disrupt dominant knowledge production and catalyze social and personal transformation.

Abstract This article provides reflections on the political implications of what the author describes as “mothering in plural” as part of the struggles for justice in the case of the 43 teachers' college students from Ayotzinapa, victims of forced disappearance the night of September 26th, 2014, in the town of Iguala, Guerrrero in Mexico. Based on an embodied ethnography since 2015, the article traces the racialized and gendered implications of state violence and impunity in the case of Ayotzinapa so as to identify how state‐sanctioned racialized violence impacts the mothers of the disappeared as well as their extended families. It then goes on to critically engage with the political implications of “mothering in plural”, not only to circumvent dominant narratives based on the social disposability of the families and communities where the 43 students originate, but to expand terrains of justice in their restorative and transformative potential. The article contributes to critical kinship studies by seeking to understand how the pluralizing of motherhood and its transformation into a verb, rather than a noun, opens conversations on political social relations that extend beyond acts of solidarity and empathy in contexts of extreme violence.

This paper critiques the enforced neutrality of the American nursing profession, and positions it’s neutrality as a mechanism of institutional power that sustains structural violence. Drawing on theoretical concepts of comfort, parrhesia, and biopower, the paper examines how professional norms, framed as “objectivity” and “civility”, discipline nurses into silence in the face of fascism, racism, state violence, and global injustice. Institutional responses to dissent are analyzed as affective and biopolitical strategies that prioritize comfort in protection of dominant power structures, and render parrhesia, or political truth speaking, deviant. In light of the suppression of abolitionist and anti-colonial discourse in professional spaces, the paper argues that silence is not passive, it is death-making. This paper calls for a reimagining of nursing as a site of collective care, resistance, and ethical refusal aligned with movements for mutual aid, healing justice, and abolitionist praxis. In doing so, it insists that nursing’s future lies not in neutrality, but in the healing practice of discomfort and resistance.

This article introduces a special issue marking the fiftieth anniversary of Argentina's 24 March 1976 coup, which inaugurated a brutal civic-military dictatorship and a program to reshape the state, economy, and society. Situating the coup within Argentina's long history of cycles of authoritarianism and democracy, escalating political violence, and regional patterns of military intervention, the special issue highlights both continuities and ruptures. The last dictatorship was exceptional in its systematic repression and state terrorism, as well as in its ambitious economic neoliberalization. Bringing together contributions from political, social, economic, and transnational history, this special issue contributes to the historiography on the interaction between domestic struggles and global forces: the regime's evolving relationship with Washington, the role of international financial institutions, the activism of exiles and human rights organizations, and the Cold War in Latin America. It revisits the dictatorship's ideological foundations, institutional reforms, social transformations, and strategies of international legitimization, while tracing the emergence of resistance and the eventual transition to democracy. Together, the essays underscore the long-term legacies of the dictatorship, including persistent tensions in civil–military relations, debates over memory and justice, and the question of the link between authoritarianism and neoliberalism.

Abstract: This article studies a stringent criticism of the Western feminism theory with an argument that the main ideas of this theory often have a limitation and theoretical incompatibility when applied to the social, political, and literary context of the South Asian. By examining the "Big Three" schools of thought liberal, radical, and post-structuralist feminism the paper highlights their universalizing tendencies and inherent biases. It then contrasts these frameworks with a nuanced exploration of South Asian feminist thought, which is inextricably linked to localized struggles against a postcolonial legacy of intersecting oppressions, including caste, class, religion, and state violence. Through the interaction with the theoretical frameworks of Chandra Mohanty and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and the incorporation of political and literary works by Mahasweta Devi and Ismat Chughtai, the current study explains how the South Asian feminist discourse develops both distinctive and effective models of resistance. The analysis reveals that the female body becomes a site of political subversion, and literature serves as a critical tool for "speaking" the subaltern voice. The paper concludes that a truly global and effective feminist praxis necessitates a decolonized approach that respects heterogeneity and moves beyond the Western theoretical binary. Methodologically, the study employs comparative discourse analysis and close literary text readings to set Western thought in conversation with South Asian practice. Consulted canonical thinkers and online activism and cyber campaigns by feminists like #MeToo India and Pinjra Tod, the paper illustrates the continued relevance of a Decolonized Feminist Praxis in the Twenty-First Century. Keywords: Postcolonial Feminism, South Asian Feminism, Intersectionality, Subalternity, Literary Criticism, Political Analysis

This article examines capitalist exception regimes in the Americas from a Marxist and Gramscian perspective, focusing on structural conditions, relations of force, and state transformations in contexts of hegemonic crisis. It begins with a critique of the liberal “transition to democracy” approach, which reduces political change to a linear process of institutional evolution, while neglecting class contradictions, the reconfiguration of state forms, and the pressures of the imperialist system. Drawing on the concept of the capitalist state as both a condensation of social relations and a strategic field of struggle, the analysis explores how the state of exception emerges as a form of direct domination in the face of the collapse of bourgeois consensus, expressing both the fracture of the historical bloc and the attempt to reorganize it through state violence. The study demonstrates that these regimes are not anomalies but rather specific forms of power organization under conditions of dependency and structural crisis. Their overcoming does not entail a rupture with class power, but rather its reconfiguration under liberal-democratic forms that incorporate exceptional practices as part of the normalized order. In this sense, regime change should be understood as a hegemonic reconfiguration rather than as a simple democratic restoration. The article concludes that the category of capitalist exception regimes provides a more rigorous framework for analyzing the continuity between dictatorship and democracy in peripheral capitalism, while also offering tools for a critical interpretation of contemporary Latin American politics.