War Violence Research Articles

Beyond neutrality: Exploring how global media frame conflict in sub-Saharan African countries

Northern Ethiopia conflict has received huge attention from various media outlets in Ethiopia and around the world. Many thousands of people have died as a result of the violent conflict between the federal government of Ethiopia and Tigray forces. This study investigated how BBC and CNN have covered the conflict. It employed a combination of quantitative content analysis and textual analytic methods, using an exploratory sequential method. The findings revealed significant differences in framing techniques between BBC and CNN. BBC extensively employed a military conflict frame that emphasized government actions, whereas CNN focused on the violence of war and responsibility frames. Both media outlets mainly relied on information provided by the parties involved in the conflict. However, the media outlets showed a significant lack of balance in their reportage, raising questions about potential bias and its impact on public understanding of this complicated conflict.

지역의 공습 기억과 박물관에서의 재현 - 히라츠카시박물관(平塚市博物館)을 중심으로

Hiratsuka(平塚市, Hiratsuka-shi), located in south-central Kanagawa Prefecture, is a typical bedroom town in the Tokyo metropolitan area with a population of about 260,000. Hiratsuka City Museum, which opened in 1976 as a comprehensive museum for the city of Hiratsuka, aims to be a ‘Community Museum’ whose main users are local residents, and covers a wide range of subjects from local folklore to history, nature, and astronomy. This paper examines the role and limitations of museums and local residents as a place to inherit and share memories of war by following the process of representation local air raid memories in Japanese public museums, focusing on Hiratsuka City Museum's ‘Hiratsuka Air Raid and War Damage Recording Group’. The city of Hiratsuka, which underwent rapid industrialization in the early Showa period and later became a military-industrial city, was severely damaged by air raids conducted for about 100 minutes from midnight on July 16, 1945. As such succession of war memories emerged in earnest as a community task, the Hiratsuka City Museum established a ‘Hiratsuka Air Raid and War Damage Recording Group’ in June 1989 with members of the general public. Since then, the Recording Group has been active for more than 30 years, proactively identifying and collecting local air raid memories, participating in the creation of exhibitions based on the results of these activities, and creating a new civic culture that addresses the transmission of local war memories. However, there is a limitation that emphasizing the tragic air raid damage in the region leads to a sense of victimhood, making it difficult to subject war cooperation and war violence as a military city. This can be said to be a challenge faced by many public museums displaying local air raids.

‘A few regrettable cases’: Civil war violence and the recognition of the Russian Red Cross Society, 1918–21

‘A few regrettable cases’: Civil war violence and the recognition of the Russian Red Cross Society, 1918–21

‘What Frightful Children!’: The Disobedient and the Unruly in British Overseas Child Migration, 1939–45

This article examines the movement of British evacuee children and adolescents to Dominion countries during the Second World War. While these evacuees were spared from exposure to the violence of war, such as the bombing of major British cities, their move to safety came with certain demands on their behaviour. These young evacuees were expected to act with ‘ambassadorial dignity’ in all ways; they were to be polite, courteous, chaste, law-abiding and, above all, grateful to their host family and the country that took them in. But acting with ambassadorial dignity was a task beyond what many evacuees were willing or able to carry out. Their failure – or refusal – to act as expected was often interpreted as a form of disobedience. This article uses case studies of evacuee children and adolescents to illuminate the many ways that disobedience was conceptualized by adults in charge of these evacuees. Specifically, this article focusses on sexual disobedience, evacuees who rejected the standards of chaste heterosexuality expected of them, and bodily disobedience, where overweight bodies of pubescent girls were seen to pose a threat to the future of the ‘British race’ as envisioned by adult administrators of this evacuation.

Why Sexual Violence is a Weapon of War in Jacqui True’s Perspective : Learning from Sexual Violence in Congo’s Conflict 2021-2024

The use of sexual violence as a weapon of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has become one of the most widespread and destructive forms of gender-based violence. This article explores why sexual violence is used so extensively in the DRC. Using Jacqui True’s feminist perspective within a structural violence framework, it examines three main factors: gender norms and patriarchal structures, weak legal frameworks, and socio-economic disparities. A case study of the DRC shows how these factors work together to make sexual violence a strategic tool in war. The authors argue that sexual violence in war is not merely a consequence of conflict but also a symptom of deeper structural inequalities. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of addressing these inequalities to reduce the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and recommends policies focused on gender justice and survivor protection.

Gender Intersectionality Representation in Boule de Suif by Guy de Maupassant

Boule de Suif is considered one of the best short stories written by Guy de Maupassant. This study is based on a feminist perspective applying a narrative approach to provide an overview of the intersectionality of gender in Guy de Maupassant's narrative work, The Boule de Suif. Specifically, the narrative model was chosen as an approach that focuses on the individual stories of the characters within the work. Narrative identification is important for unraveling issues of gender intersectionality that arise in unequal phenomena. From the process of analysis, it is clear that the character Boule de Suif experiences the phenomenon of intersectionality of gender in the categories of gender, social class and identity in a situation of mutual support, trying to protect themselves from a violent war.

Kārwān’s talking forest: Materiality, poetic imagination, and the metaphysics of war violence

ABSTRACT Pir Muhammad Karwan’s 2000 poetry collection Da Xāperey Werghowey traces a history of materiality, emotion, and imagination across human-environmental systems as they are militarized over twenty years in Afghanistan. At the same as it is a unique narration of the wars, this project is a cosmopolitical one. In dialog with other essays in this issue that point to the life of the immaterial in present-day traditions, I show how Kārwān’s bottom-up psycho-history draws on Persianate-classical, Pashto-popular, and embodied knowledges to critique both imperial and Islamist modernity on ontological grounds. It aims to undermine the borders of self and other that geopolitical violence embeds everywhere: barriers between human and other beings, humans and other humans, imagination and material.

Does civil war violence stimulate women's participation in politics? Examining election candidacies in post war Nepal

ABSTRACT How does wartime violence shape women's representation in post-civil war politics? Some scholars argue that civil war violence alters the gender roles in society, empowering women in post-war politics. Others suggest that experience with civil war violence may deter women's participation in politics as women are often victimized during wars and are perceived as less capable of preventing violence than men in countries vulnerable to political violence. We test the generalizability of the findings with micro-level data from Nepal. We find that civil war violence does not stimulate the proportion of women candidates in districts where civil war violence was high in Nepal. However, civil war violence appears to increase the proportion of women winning elections. Nonetheless, the stimulative effect of violence on women's success in electoral politics appears to diminish over time.

Later-life social network profiles of male war survivors in Vietnam: Implications for health behaviors

Emerging research emphasizes early-life war exposure as a key determinant of later-life health in older adults from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Yet, the linkages between war exposure, social networks, and later-life health behaviors have received little attention. Using data from the 2018 Vietnam Health and Aging Study, we investigate how early-life war experiences relate to the social networks and health behaviors of 1195 Vietnamese men aged 60+ who survived the Vietnam War (1965–1975). We utilize latent class analysis to identify men's network types and examine the associations between military service, war trauma, PTSD, and later-life network profiles. Furthermore, we assess the linkages between war experiences and risky health behaviors (physical inactivity, frequent alcohol and tobacco consumption) and the moderating effect of social networks on these behaviors. Our findings reveal that exposure to wartime malevolent living conditions, as opposed to direct war violence, and recent PTSD symptoms are linked to lower support levels in respondents' network profiles. Moreover, although diverse and supportive networks correspond to a reduced risk of physical inactivity, they are associated with higher risks of frequent alcohol consumption and are marginally associated with tobacco use. Importantly, social network profiles moderate the relationship between PTSD symptoms and the risk of frequent alcohol consumption. This evidence underscores the need for policymakers to consider the historical and social contexts of LMICs when deploying social support as a health intervention.

Classification of domestic violence Persian textual content in social media based on topic modeling and ensemble learning

ObjectiveDue to the importance of monitoring social networks to categorize domestic violence content and extract practical knowledge for conducting preventive interventions, as well as analyzing the extensive Persian textual content related to domestic violence generated in social networks following the COVID-19 pandemic, primarily, this research aims to create the best domestic violence Persian textual content classification model using topic modeling content at first and then combining algorithms using ensemble learning to achieve the best model performance. MethodBy collecting Persian textual data using hashtags related to domestic violence equally and randomly from Telegram, Twitter, and Instagram networks between April 2020 and April 2023, the content were considered for topic modeling using the LDA algorithm. By extracting the probabilities of each topic for each document in our dataset, we considered the topic that had the highest probability to be a label for that document. Following feature extraction from labeled datasets, the Stacking and Voting ensemble learning methods were applied. ResultThe analysis of 337,287 textual data revealed five topics: family crime news, war violence, women's rights, and violent reactions. Also, compared to the voting method, the stacking method performed better with 96.4577 precision, 96.4499 accuracy, 96.4499 recall, and 96.4475 F-score. ConclusionAccording to the study findings, practical knowledge of the extracted topics can assist mental health centers in making preventive decisions. Moreover, the built model has the most efficient performance among the built models for the multi-class classification of DV texts in the Persian language for social media monitoring.

Wound: creativity, the military and a sculpture inspired by faces, minds, and landscapes scarred by the weapons of war

ABSTRACT In reference to Alice Cree’s observation that the words ‘creativity’ and ‘military’ do not seem to ‘fit together comfortably’, the first section of this autoethnographic article critically explores my personal experiences and motivations as an artist working in close proximity to military culture. This creative practice-military relationship is examined in a variety of contexts, including designing war memorials, exhibiting in military museums, and actively participating in military, commemorative rituals. The potential risks – being co-opted by military agendas – and benefits – having a platform to use my creative voice to express the consequences of martial violence – are discussed. Focusing on one of my artworks, Wound (2022), the second section demonstrates the capability of creative practice to interrogate consequences of military (and by implication, state) violence. Wound is a bronze sculpture cast from an original First World War British Brodie helmet and a German Mauser rifle cartridge. By means of moulding, casting, and modelling processes, I reconfigured the original sources of armour and ammunition as a narrative site to metaphorically explore the ‘wounding’ and ‘healing’ of landscapes and human faces and minds. Through the allegorical interpretation of this artwork and by recounting personal experiences related to its research and creation, I discuss my creative practice as a memory artist and explain my motivations for making artworks that explore human violence and warfare. The article surveys other examples of visual art and human violence in war from classical antiquity to the present, with particular emphasis on the First World War.

Do Experiences with Civil War Affect the Acceptance of the Use of Violence After War Ends? The Case of Post-War Nepal

ABSTRACT What are the effects of civil war violence on individual attitudes regarding the acceptability of the use of violence in politics after civil wars end? Using data from Nepal, we test several hypotheses about the relationship between the exposure to civil war violence and the acceptability of the use of violence for a variety of political goals after civil wars end (namely noble political causes, equal rights, and electoral advantage). Overall, we find that individuals more exposed to civil war violence are less likely to embrace the use of violence than the individuals who were less exposed to civil war violence.

EMDR therapy and treatment of child victims of violence in peace and war

The paper deals with the analysis of experiences in the application of EMDR therapy in working with children who were victims of trauma and violence in war and peace. The effectiveness of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) lies in the effect of bilateral stimulation on brain neurophysiological mechanisms of traumatized children. EMDR treatments, as well as CBT therapy, have shown success in working with children with PTSD based on several criteria. However, analyzes show that positive effects are achieved with the application of EMDR in a shorter time, and the results are more permanent and stable. Based on the results published in numerous clinical trials and meta-analyses, in 2013 the WHO (World Health Organization) recommended EMDR therapy for the treatment of PTSD in children, adolescents and adults. Exposure to war stress in all wars, in all areas, leaves severe consequences, especially for children. The increase in traumatic events in recent years creates a great need for preventive action and the application of EMDR to eliminate the consequences of children's exposure to trauma in war and peacetime conditions. The national EMDR associations of Russia and Serbia (https://www.emdrse-europe.org/) are increasingly focusing their activities on working with children who are victims of violence in war and peace. The mentioned advantages and facts were one of the reasons for the organized inclusion of EMDR therapy in work with trauma victims of mass murders that happened in May 2023 in Serbia. The treatment is very responsible and complex, but it shows significant effects. The evaluation is ongoing and will provide valuable experience in this area.

Humanitarianism as a tool of statecraft: contested authority, sovereign violence, and humanity in the Syrian civil war.

This research explores the dynamics of interaction between the sovereign state and international humanitarian organisations in alleviating human suffering in the Syrian civil war. Considering civil wars as a rupture in sovereignty, its focus is on the practices of the sovereign state within its social context and the resulting implications for aid organisations. I argue that the Syrian regime has employed state violence, in tandem with administrative and bureaucratic impediments, to reassert its sovereign authority in humanitarian decision-making processes. This exercise of sovereign power is intertwined with the actions of aid organisations, thereby reshaping power dynamics among the state, aid organisations, and vulnerable populations. Through a qualitative method, I show that the deployment of state violence concomitantly pushes aid organisations, specifically the United Nations, towards enforcing the state sovereignty defined by the regime. As an effect of assertive sovereignty, interpretations of humanitarian principles and practices are continuously negotiated and constructed differently by aid organisations, even though they share a common overarching goal.

Processing violence: the continuum between fear, doubt, and joy among German soldiers in Afghanistan

Violence in war and the emotions and meanings connected to it can only be understood through a broad social science research approach to tackle the complexity of human reactions to extraordinary experiences in theatres of war. This article looks at the significance of the continuum of emotions from fear, to doubt, to joy for German military personnel in Afghanistan when processing experiences of war-related violence. For a long time, this question of the significance of emotions connected to war and violence was of little interest to military research. The emotional dimension of the human element of war thus remained understudied. Acts of violence, both suffered and committed, however, can be processed socially and culturally in very different ways. They can trigger a plurality of emotions along the continuum between fear, doubt, and joy and between acts of desperation and acts of enjoyment and fun. I want to contribute to a new and more nuanced understanding of the multidimensionality of war and soldiering through a study of the role and implications of violent experiences for soldiers. To gain a more nuanced understanding of these experiences of violence, this article discusses various and shifting emotions among German soldiers who have been deployed to Afghanistan, ranging from fear and joy to relief, doubt, and moral conflict.

Correction: Gender-Based Violence and Women Reproductive Health in War Affected Area.

Correction: Gender-Based Violence and Women Reproductive Health in War Affected Area.

Virginia Woolf, David Jones, and the Parenthetical Space of War

Abstract Home and war seem to be spaces set apart, one defined by the rules and order of society and the other by the absolute, order-undoing destruction of battle. Yet for those families who endure war even from afar, and for those who return from war, its violence continues to fester unseen. Through a reading of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and David Jones’s World War I epic In Parenthesis, this essay interrogates that duality through the way in which the parenthetical, repressed violence of World War I steals into the home, threatening to undermine its foundations. These works, each with its emphasis on either home or front, present a complex view of that war as well as its dark, lingering influence. Ranging from the home to the trenches, Woolf and Jones unfurl a scene of violence, composed of countless parentheticals, that presents the Great War not as a space apart but as an invasive event.

“It Wasn’t Because of Human Rights:” Exploring the Limited Use of Landmines by Colombian Paramilitary Groups

What explains the choice of means and methods of warfare by armed groups? Conversely, why would some groups choose not to use certain weapons? Beyond the legitimacy- and reputation-based explanations common in existing literature, this article highlights the role of tactical utility, inherent costs, and normative biases of specific means and methods in shaping these decisions. Through a combination of congruence analysis and comparative methods, the article examines why the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), while employing a wide range of brutal forms of violence, generally avoided using landmines, contrasting this restraint with the behavior of other Colombian armed groups. Although the lack of tactical utility seems to be the primary driver of the non-use of landmines, the costs and stigma associated with using mines influence how the AUC perceived their utility. The findings underscore the importance of context-specific factors in the decision-making processes of non-state armed groups and contribute to broader discussions on the disaggregation of violence in civil wars.

Arming to fight: Rebel-government militarization and the escalation of violence in civil wars

Do more weapons in the hands of rebel groups escalate civil wars? We address this question using a recently published dataset on the armaments of 270 non-state actors. We provide a comprehensive overview of their arsenals and utilize this information in a dyadic analysis that also considers the effects of governments’ weapons stock. We show that better-armed rebel groups are involved in higher-intensity conflicts only if they receive no external support. Moreover, conventional warfare is related to higher casualty numbers and the impact of arms provision to governments is conditional on the relative military strength of the opposing rebels.

Shapes of hatred and violence in Shakespeare

I use five Shakespearean plays to discuss how the meaning of the shapes of hatred and violence depend on individual character traits. In this sense, hatred and violence can either make comic characters meet some sort of reconciliation or self-destruction in the case of tragic characters. In The Comedy of Errors, the Dromio brothers, who are subject to violence from their master’s part, are the ones who can find redemption nonetheless. In The Merchant of Venice, the structural hatred between Shylock and Antonio seems to configure a form of meaning to them. In King Henry V, the enablement of violence during war time seems to suggest that the capacity for violence is inherent to every human being. This suggestion is carried over through Titus Andronicus, in which Shakespeare explores the traumatic effects of violence within a mythical realm. Finally, in Macbeth, we see how the protagonist, who is accustomed to the violence of war, can have his own nature changed when he is forced to unwillingly commit a murder outside the context of war.