Violent Circumstances Research Articles

Understanding Black and African American Grief Following Inclusion of Prolonged Grief Disorder in the DSM-5-TR.

Black and African Americans experience bereavement more frequently and earlier in life than White Americans and thus may be more impacted by prolonged grief disorder (PGD). With the revision of the DSM-5 and the inclusion of PGD as a recognized psychiatric syndrome, researchers have an opportunity to further the understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of PGD in Black grievers residing in the United States. Relatively little research has been devoted to the specific risks and resiliencies impacting bereavement-related mental health outcomes among these individuals. Participants in our study were invited to participate in a Qualtrics-based survey disseminated through Centiment. A total of 259 participants were included in the final sample. Overall findings suggest demographic factors such as educational attainment and gender were not significantly associated with PGD. Factors such as younger age, prior trauma exposure, and violent circumstances of the death were associated with PGD, though only PTSD and anxiety symptoms were associated with PGD after adjusting for co-occurring mental health symptoms. These findings point to identifiable risk factors and resilience factors that may contribute to grief trajectories among Black grievers.

Автопортрет на тлі жорстокої доби: Катерина Білокур в епістолярному, спогадовому та мистецькому дискурсах

Ukrainian history is once again experiencing increased interest in its past, namely the history of Ukrainian art and artists as seen through the lens of postcolonial studies and research of self-narrative. While reading autobiographical documents of artists, it is important to involve interdisciplinary practices and a broader context of documents from a specific era as well as the artistic discourse. A corpus of Kateryna Bilokur’s letters compiled and edited by Mykola Kaharlytskyi is a written testimony of self-narrative amid violent circumstances – the people’s artist was contemporary of the twentieth century, her life and creative biography have clearly overlapped with the dramatic events in the history of Ukraine, including two world wars, the Soviet government coming to power, Holodomor, German occupation, a famine of 1947, political repressions of Ukrainian artists. Kateryna Bilokur’s letters to Stepan Taranushenko and other prominent cultural figures of the time are compelling evidence of her resilience, willpower and internal opposition to the system. Memories about the artist record her multiple attempts to defend her right to paint, have her own view of creativity and protest against Soviet and German occupation. Th e article studies inter-art relations between letters, memoirs, and literary works about Kateryna Bilokur and her paintings.

Finding "Miss Canada"

During the First World War, many Canadian women served on the front lines as nurses, both as working professionals and volunteers. Although the experiences of Canadian women during WWI have been addressed by historians more frequently in recent decades, the experience of professional nurses has been overshadowed by that of Volunteer Aid Detachment nurses (VADs) and women on the home front and of course by studies on soldiers’ experiences. Many historians have found the personal narrative, diary, or journal to be an invaluable source to understanding the First World War. However, there is a gap in the study of the personal narratives, diaries, and journals of Canadian professional nurses specifically. This paper seeks to bridge this gap in WWI history through a specific focus on a selection of the surviving personal papers of Canadian professional nurses. Their personal writings reveal new insights into nursing experience on the front, nursing work, and how Canadian professional nurses sought and found meaning in extraordinary and violent circumstances. They made sense of the war through sociability, relationality, and through recording their time overseas both to cope with the experience itself, and to remember it upon their return home.

Gendered violence martyring Filipina environmental defenders

This article contributes to discussions of extractive violence by exploring how gender influences violent circumstances under which women were assassinated during environmental conflicts. Partnership with local activists facilitated the reporting of cases of martyred Filipina women environmental defenders on the Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas). Twenty cases from the EJAtlas involving thirty-one women environmental defenders martyred for their activism were analyzed qualitatively examining why and how differences and similarities emerge based on intersectional factors with special attention to gender. Findings suggest that 1) impoverished, rural, Indigenous, and otherwise multiply marginalized women were at high risk of vulnerability and retaliation in environmental conflicts because of their loss of agency and status; 2) mining and logging were deadliest partly because such industries institutionalize and exacerbate violent, gendered subordination 3) the circumstances of their murders were subtly gendered, including their exposure and vulnerability to conflicts, mobilization opportunities, and experienced violence.

The Right of Asylum Viewed from the Constitutional and International Viewpoints

This paper aims to address the forms of displacement/departure of the population that leaves its country of origin as a result of the violent circumstances created in the place of displacement or the place of escape. As well, this paper aims to deal with the provision of protection for people who flee in search of shelter and to study international obligations of the states based on the international norms including their laws . The purpose of this study is to consider treatment of refugees who leave their country of origin due to violence, war or any humanitarian reason. The main issues addressed in this study are causes of displacement, treatment of refugees according to the international law and their definition, international laws for refugees, and responsibilities of states regarding displacement and migration. During the research, we used several methods without which the research would not have been possible: the method of theoretical analysis, method of comparison, and quantitative method. This study identified the causes or triggers that lead to immigration, including violence and human rights abuses that are increasingly intertwined with ethnic and religious hostilities. Security, effects from international terrorism and the lack of border control can be the main causes. This study is applicable in the field of international relations, particularly to researchers who deal with global crises related to migration issues. Also, this study can be applied to categories that deal with refugees and people who deal with the issue of asylum at different levels. Furthermore, this study can also be used by representatives of civil society, workers of international organizations such as UNHCR, representatives of international organizations that protect the rights of refugees and persons seeking international protection. The novelty in this study is the treatment of the complex nature of migration and identification of the factors that lead to massive displacement, crisis management, states’ care and obligations in providing international protection to refugees, respecting international conventions and agreements, and the internal legislation of states where this movement of refugees can occur. Keywords: the right of asylum, constitutional and international norms of migration, displaced persons, refugees. DOI: https://doi.org/10.55463/hkjss.issn.1021-3619.60.87

Legacies of War: Violence, Ecologies, and Kin by Kimberly Theidon

Reviewed by: Legacies of War: Violence, Ecologies, and Kin by Kimberly Theidon Diana Pardo Pedraza Theidon, Kimberly. Legacies of War: Violence, Ecologies, and Kin. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2022. 114 pp. On February 21, 2022, the Colombian Constitutional Court decriminalized abortion within the first 24 weeks of pregnancy. This ruling is part of a vital wave of activism for greater reproductive rights in Latin America. The Colombian case follows important victories for the right to decide in Mexico (in the state of Coahuila, to be specific) and in Argentina, where abortion has been legalized for up to 14 weeks of pregnancy. In contrast to this reality are the recent Supreme Court opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade—the 1973 Court landmark decision that made access to safe and legal abortion a constitutional right—and the latest measures toward a near-total abortion ban by more than a dozen U.S. states, including Idaho, Texas, and Tennessee. These recent legal decisions have reignited crucial debates on reproductive justice, defined as the right to bodily autonomy—to decide whether to have children and raise them in a healthy, safe, and sustainable environment. As feminist activists have reminded us, these measures have historically, widely, and disproportionately impacted poor women and women of color, who experience more significant economic and logistical complications in accessing abortion, even in spaces where it is legal or regulated. This is the landscape of reproductive rights in the Americas that informed my reading of Kimberly Theidon's latest book, Legacies of War: Violence, Ecologies, and Kin, in which the anthropologist considers the "multiple environments in which conception, pregnancy, and childbirth unfold" (7) in times of war and postwar. A feminist ethnography of post-conflict based on three decades of fieldwork in Peru and Colombia, two countries embroiled in long-running internal armed conflicts, the book [End Page 915] explores the silenced and neglected outcomes of rape and sexual violence, the so-called "children born of war," and what these challenging conceptions may reveal about intergenerational and more-than-human markers and impacts of warfare. Through intriguing conceptual images such as "living legacies," "violent conceptions," and "situated biologies," Theidon offers a vocabulary for thinking about the harm caused by forced gestations, imposed parenthood, and toxic reproductive environments, highlighting the need for a framework of justice that attends to the different experiences, memories, and reproductive desires of women and moves beyond human exceptionalism. Building on a growing literature on the material and symbolic consequences of armed conflict in anthropology, feminist studies, and environmental humanities, Legacies of War contributes to a gendered theory of harm and reparation (for other studies on these issues, see Sánchez Parra and Lo Iacono 2020; Sánchez Parra 2018). The book draws attention to the competing rights regimes for children conceived in rape and their mothers, the oppressive weight of hegemonic maternal scripts and patriarchal biological and legal systems, and how warfare shapes and marks our more-than-human kin. Theidon's feminist and posthumanist analysis of violent circumstances of conception and childbearing in (post)war draws on Michelle Murphy's (2013) concept of "distributed reproduction." While Murphy is concerned with the diffuse spatial and temporal pathways of industrial chemicals that alter the reproduction of human and more-than-human lives, Theidon considers the harm and toxicity (re)produced by armed conflict in bodies, kinship networks, and rural landscapes. This distributed approach to reproduction, Theidon asserts, could help reduce "the efforts to govern maternal bodies" (81), as it attunes us instead to "the structural forces that shape reproductive outcomes" (81). It also "opens up the possibility of a politics of accountability and coexistence that is not grounded in an anthropocentric rights framework" (94). Theidon's gendered analysis of the human and more-than-human impacts of war and postwar places her manuscript in conversation with contemporary scholarship in anthropology interested in thinking about 1) the role of the ordinary and practices of care in the maintenance and interruption of cycles and repertoires of violence (Berman-Arévalo and Ojeda 2020, Terry 2017, Wool 2015, Das 2007), 2) the participation of natural environments in social and armed conflicts (Gordillo 2018, Kim 2017, Guarasci 2015, de Le...

Measuring Grief in the Context of Traumatic Loss: A Systematic Review of Assessment Instruments

Following traumatic loss, defined as the death of a loved one due to unexpected or violent circumstances, adults may experience a myriad of grief-related problems. Given the addition of Prolonged Grief Disorders into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders Fifth Edition, Text-Revision and influx of unexpected deaths due to the global Coronavirus pandemic, there is heightened interest in the measurement of grief-related processes. We conducted a systematic review according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines to identify measures of grief used in studies of adults who experienced traumatic loss. Searches yielded 164 studies that used 31 unique measures of grief-related constructs. The most commonly used instrument was the Inventory of Complicated Grief-Revised. Half of the measures assessed constructs beyond diagnosable pathological grief responses. Given the wide variation and adaptations of measures reviewed, we recommend greater testing and uniformity of measurement across the field. Future research is needed to adapt and/or design measures to evaluate new criteria for Prolonged Grief Disorder.

Seasonal and Temporal Patterns of Homicides and Suicides in Cali and Manizales, Colombia: A Times-Series Analysis 2008–2015

Objective To identify seasonal and temporal variations in daily incidence of homicides and suicides in Cali and Manizales, Colombia during 2008–2015. Materials and methods An ecological time series study was performed using negative binomial regression models for daily incidence of homicides and suicides; analyses were controlled for yearly trends and temporal autocorrelations. Results Saturdays, Sundays, December holidays as well as New Year and New Year’s Eve were associated with an increased risk of homicides in both cities. Suicide risk increased during December holidays and New Year in both cities. In addition, the suicide risk increased on paydays, Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays in Cali, and it decreased during the Holy Week holidays in Manizales. December patterns of suicides and homicides are the opposite in each city, and between cities. Conclusions The incidences of homicides and suicides are not homogeneous over time. These patterns can be explained partially by alcohol consumption and changes in people’s routine activities which may modify exposure to violent circumstances.

Review Essay: “Free Radical: Music, Violence and Radicalism”

Review Essay: “Free Radical: Music, Violence and Radicalism”

Forensic cases of suspected dog and cat abuse in the Community of Madrid (Spain), 2014–2019

Companion animal abuse is an issue that concerns not only veterinarians and law enforcement agencies but also society in general. Animals that die under suspicious or violent circumstances should be submitted to reference laboratories for a postmortem examination by veterinary forensic pathologists trained to recognize animal abuse. Nevertheless, the low notification rate of such cases in Spain may explain the country’s lag in the development of veterinary forensics and the limited information available on animal abuse epidemiology in comparison with other countries. By sharing information among the entities involved in recognizing animal abuse, we can better address these issues, thus improving veterinary forensics in Spain (and elsewhere). In this study, we analysed the cause and manner of death of 96 dog and cat carcasses suspected of animal abuse. These cases were submitted to our diagnostic laboratory for forensic postmortem examination by public agencies and animal protection centres. To our knowledge, this is the first study to focus on the postmortem analysis of forensic cases of suspected dog and cat abuse in Spain. On the basis of gross and histopathological findings, we distinguished between natural and non-natural abuse-related deaths, classifying the latter. We confirmed that most of the dog deaths were related with abuse, though the suspected abuse and the cause of death did not always coincide. In contrast, cause of death was determined to be natural in many of the cat suspected abuse cases. The most frequent non-natural abuse-related cause of death in dogs was blunt force trauma (n=24, 43.64%), followed by firearm injuries (n=10, 18.18%), asphyxia (n=5, 9.09%), heatstroke (n=3, 5.45%), starvation (n=2, 3.64%), bite injury (n=1, 1.82%), and sharp force trauma (n=1, 1.82%). In cats, the most common cause of death was blunt force trauma (n=9, 21.95%), followed by firearm injuries (n=3, 7.32%) and bite injury (n=2, 4.88%). The main goal of our study is to share our results with the scientific community to advance the field of veterinary forensics in Spain, which will lead to more successful prosecutions by law enforcement agencies. Finally, we highlight that veterinarians who can accurately recognize signs of animal abuse may be able to better respond to cases of companion animal cruelty, which in turn, may prevent possible escalation to interpersonal violence.

"Business as Usual": Child Protective Services Workers' Perceptions and Experiences of and Responses to Client-Perpetrated Violence.

Client-perpetrated violence (CPV) against child protective services (CPS) workers is prevalent and problematic for workers and clients leading to psychological distress, physical injury, and compromised service delivery. With accumulating evidence of prevalence and detrimental consequences, few studies examine the characteristics of violent incidents among CPS workers. This study explores how CPS workers perceive CPV through exploring characteristics of incidents that they experienced. We applied components of the stress process model to consider the importance of workers' perspectives when interpreting violence and its effects. We used inductive, thematic analysis to analyze interview data focused on workers' experiences with CPV during their first 3 years as CPS workers. The qualitative subsample (N = 34) was drawn from the Florida Study of Professionals for Safe Families (FSPSF), a statewide, longitudinal sample of recently hired frontline child welfare workers. With few exceptions, workers experienced a variety of physical and nonphysical violence. Some experienced more frequent exposure than others, particularly those who defined yelling as violent. Workers identified predictable patterns of violent circumstances and people, and commonly felt that their agencies treated violence as "business as usual." The high prevalence of violence, often predictable, indicates the importance of promoting a violence-free workplace through agency culture and responding to workers' reports of CPV with empathy and support. In addition, given workers' diverse perceptions of CPV, a manual could provide definitions of CPV, procedures to increase worker safety, and procedures to respond effectively to violence. Skill-based trainings can support workers at all levels to minimize, yet prepare for and handle, violence.

Honor-based violence and coercive control among Asian youth in Auckland, New Zealand

ABSTRACTHonor-based violence (HBV) is a type of intimate partner and family violence that rests on patriarchal norms which fall under the parameters of coercive control. However, research has not examined the ways that HBV operates as a form of coercive control. Utilizing small group interviews conducted with 27 adolescent girls and young women, predominantly of Asian backgrounds from Auckland, New Zealand, this study will illustrate how HBV functions as a form of culturally driven coercive control, but one that cuts across multiple ecological or environmental levels, ranging from interpersonal relationships to state systems. Stark’s work (2007) on coercive control has been significant for providing a conceptual framework that captures how patriarchal norms perpetuate intimate partner violence (IPV). Policy suggestions include educational programming with migrant Asian youth that explore the positive and negative dimensions of culture, and encourage youth to perpetuate those aspects of their cultures which they view as positive while critiquing cultural practices tied to HBV. For young adult marriage migrants caught in violent relationships, policy suggestions include bolstering of state resources to help legal aid practitioners, social workers and law enforcement recognize the cumulative power of coercive control in families that practice HBV and help young women exit the violent circumstances.

Community engagement with refugee-background communities around health: the experience of the Group of 11.

There is a growing population of people from refugee backgrounds settling in Australia. They have often been forced to flee from their homes in violent circumstances and may have spent many years in refugee camps with poor health support. There are multiple barriers to their effective access to health services. Community engagement with this community can be tokenistic and difficult to effect. This paper highlights the importance of developing a meaningful strategy for community engagement that is not 'one-size-fits-all', which is achieved over time. There is a rich resource available to health practitioners if engagement with refugee-background communities is managed according to the set of trauma-informed and structural principles outlined in this paper.

Grenfell, Austerity, and Institutional Violence

The complex chains of decisions that produce disasters like the Grenfell Tower fire are not readily described as ‘violence’. ‘Violence’ is something that remains largely understood in popular consciousness, and in sociology, as an interpersonal phenomenon, and as the result of a deliberate attempt to cause harm. This is largely because our understanding of violence is always somehow connected to legal concepts and principles. In this article, we argue that the Grenfell fire was produced by a form of collective decision-making that we describe as institutional violence; it reflects the routine order and detached administration of a form of violence that is intimately connected to a more insidious targeting of subject groups and populations in ways that produce and increase the likelihood of other, ongoing, violent circumstances occurring.

Informed Gatekeepers and Transnational Violence: Using Perceptions of Safety of Latino/a Youth in Determining Legal Cases

From 2013 to 2017, thousands of unaccompanied children (UCs) arrived in Louisiana from Latin America. This research aims to increase understanding of experiences of Latino/a youth who came to New Orleans during that migratory peak. This study offers additional background information on the violent circumstances that forced youth to migrate and insight into youth perceptions of public safety for stakeholders in law and public policy. By triangulating secondary data on crime in Mexico, Central America, and New Orleans with primary survey data ( N = 52), this study found that the majority of surveyed youth (79.2 %) consider New Orleans safer than their country of origin. This finding, among other significant findings related to violence and perceived effectiveness of law enforcement, can be used to advise stakeholders when considering legal options for youth. Moreover, this study generates applied research that contextualizes immigrant youth experiences and their perceptions of safety, offering a methodology for future scholarship.

Contesting family-based violence: sole parenting possibilities and alternatives

ABSTRACTThis paper considers problematic recognisability and deficit constructions of sole parent families which I suggest contribute to conditions that can perpetuate family-based violence. Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s safety (ANROWS) state that one in four women in Australia have experienced at least one incident of violence by an intimate partner, equating to 2.2 million women who, since the age of 15, have experienced male intimate partner violence. A proliferation of discourses constructing the deficit ‘single mother’ tends to reinscribe the centrality and normative power of the hetero-nuclear family. When we obscure and restrict choice and alternatives to familial forms we restrict the possibilities of these alternatives becoming liveable lives. When deficit constructions of sole parenting are reinforced, people in dangerous and untenable violent family circumstances are less likely to view sole parenting as a possibility for constituting an alternative and happy family life.

Losing a Family Member in an Act of Terror: A Review from the Qualitative Grey Literature on the Long-Term Affects of September 11, 2001

Nearly 15 years following the attacks on September 11, 2001, much learning has been acquired regarding the psychological affects of mass violence. Less is known, however, about the long-term impact of 9/11 on those with family members who died in the attacks. A few quantitative studies were conducted specific to grief and terrorism and these findings suggest that symptoms may be more severe and persist over a longer period than for those facing death due to other violent circumstances. While only a few studies examined the long-term experiences of family members aggrieved by 9/11, several qualitative studies were conducted years following the attacks but these investigations are found in the grey literature. Therefore, this review included a sample of five qualitative studies, which met inclusion criteria, and had not been published in the peer-review literature. The purpose of this review was to understand if any common themes existed between investigations that were conducted from 3 to 12 years after 9/11/01. Ten noteworthy themes were found that were common across investigations. Several themes were endorsed by participants in three to four studies, and included, sharing the tragedy and personal grief publicly, taking action, and financial compensation. The remaining themes were endorsed by family members across all five studies and included discussions about bodily remains, persistent and comparative grief, relationship changes, support groups and services, remembering their family member, and healing and growth after loss. While the findings in this review cannot be generalized to all families affected by 9/11, given the nature of the data, there are a number of important implications from this review discussed that are relevant for shaping future research and having clinical awareness about the long-term affects of mass violence.

These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890 to the Present by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Thomas J. Sugrue

Reviewed by: These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890 to the Present by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Thomas J. Sugrue Patricia A. Schechter These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890 to the Present. by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Thomas J. Sugrue. ( New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2015. Pp. xxiv, 712. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-393-23952-2.) These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890 to the Present is a lively, readable, and up-to-date narrative history of the United States from 1890 through the election of Barack Obama. The book's title and framing device come from a remark by Franklin Delano Roosevelt made during a 1936 fireside chat: that "these United States" comprised a people and a nation "still in the making" (p. xv). The reader is thus primed for a story about process, contingency, and, in the authors' words, "individual lives … who join together to make history" (p. xxii). Award-winning scholars of African American history, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Thomas J. Sugrue would be well prepared to recast textbook nation-state history with the black experience at its center. Such is not the book they wrote, however, and in 625 pages of relatively familiar events, the authors instead try to chip away at the triumphalist construction of "the American century," which posits the United States as the synecdoche of twentieth-century history. Chapter 1 crystallizes their effort. It is titled "Origins of the American Century" and purports to root Time magazine editor Henry Luce's 1941 statement in an earlier generation's assumptions and ambitions. Rather than parse the numerous debates about proliferating empire at the turn of the twentieth century, however, the authors mostly report on the rather shrugging consensus about the industrial power and abundance on display at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. They make some acute observations along the way, namely that "empire became a fact before most Americans had time to reckon with its implications," and that the entrenchment of and protests against Jim Crow segregation at the fair were harbingers of the era's discontents (p. 49). At this and other key junctures, however, the individuals whom Gilmore and Sugrue bring on stage mostly accommodated the overwhelming reality around them while attempting to turn it to their advantage. At the Chicago fair, for example, a young man named Friend Pitts Williams of New York remained hopeful that "industrial might" and "global greatness" could redound to individuals' benefit despite severe violence and social exclusion facing his fellow African Americans at the event and beyond (p. 7). During World War II, Stan Igawa enlisted in the military, nobly enthusiastic in his faith in the United States' ideal of democracy, even as protest quietly but firmly rolled out in the camps and in the courts against Japanese internment. With these voices the authors capture the steadfastness and commitment of everyday citizens as they weighed choices in daunting and often violent circumstances. While imperialism was mortally wounded by Wilsonianism and killed off during World War II, this book offers no obituary. Some of imperialism's offspring, ideas like missionary capitalism (later called free enterprise), rarely made the newspapers per se or filtered into the reform and protest activities that did show up in the headlines. The authors flag telling ideas like "international humanitarianism" that were the postwar spawn of earlier imperialism, but it is [End Page 722] the story of "militant anti-Communism" that gripped the nation's political parties and takes hold of Gilmore and Sugrue's narrative as the authors relate the Cold War maneuverings of the John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon administrations (p. 289). The word imperialism does not appear in the book's index, and like most U.S. history textbooks, These United States traces the republican-flavored individualism by which most modern citizens locate and orient themselves but which consistently benefits the wealthy few. The text's chapter on the 1950s invokes the implicit bargain, tying the political structure of representative democracy to a highly unequal private economy. Paradigmatic among social movements are suffrage and school equality, stories well told by the authors through...

“Two stories at the same time”: Silent Narratives of Enslavement in Pudd'nhead Wilson

Abstract This article offers a rereading of Pudd'nhead Wilson's enslaved character Roxy. It analyzes Twain's language of textual creation, revision, and violence in Those Extraordinary Twins, and describes how it pertains to Roxy's storyline. These physical descriptions connect directly to Roxy's violent circumstances and continuous efforts to enact change—or “revision”—in her life. Pudd'nhead Wilson, in turn, refers to the language of textual creation to illustrate the deeply embedded narratives of enslavement against which Roxy struggles. This article also contends that Roxy's fingerprint is an important text that embodies the haunting presence of slavery, in both her life and in the antebellum South as a whole. Finally, it discusses how this critical reading of Twain's language of textual and physical violence can also be applied to Jim's enforced acts of “inscription” in the concluding chapters of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Taking liberties and making liberty: religious bounding and political violence in Sri Lanka

This paper argues that the relationship between religion and violent politics is best understood through a focus on religious practice. The case study of the Tamil Catholic Church within Sri Lanka's civil war is presented against a backdrop of Buddhist monk participation in violent insurgency decades earlier. The discrete cases evidence a common preoccupation with management of physical borders and discursive boundaries as actors seek to reproduce themselves and their work as legitimately ‘religious’. Despite relying on remaining ‘pure’ from the dirty political realm, in practice religion is bound to social action and reproduced through the violent circumstances it engages.