Violence Crisis Research Articles

A Corpus - Critical Discourse Analysis of the Representation of the Yemeni Violent Crisis in the Press

A Corpus - Critical Discourse Analysis of the Representation of the Yemeni Violent Crisis in the Press

Community self‐protection, public authority and the safety of strangers in Bor and Ler, South Sudan

AbstractProtection is not simply something done or delivered to people by states, humanitarian organisations and armed peacekeepers. Instead, a growing literature has begun to examine the self‐protection strategies of people and communities in protracted violent crises. Its authors suggest that nuanced understandings of how people retain a measure of agency in the face of violence is an important first step for those seeking to reduce their levels of threat and vulnerability. We use interview data from communities in Bor and Ler, South Sudan, long affected by conflict, to show how attention to the relationship between public authority and the safety of strangers can reveal the skills, resources and conditions under which protection is successfully provided. This also helps to re‐root ‘protection’ in local vernaculars that more closely resemble its everyday use among South Sudanese and offers entry points for humanitarian interventions with more realistic prospects of positive outcomes for communities sceptical of humanitarians' broken promises to protect.

What’s at Stake for Women in Mexico after the 2024 Presidential Elections?

The next president of Mexico will almost certainly be a woman since both major coalitions have nom- inated women for the 2024 presidential election. Which candidate is likely to more effectively ad- dress the crisis of gender violence? This paper com- pares the record of female and male governors in reducing female homicide rates and also examines the records of Morena and PAN governors in reduc- ing violence against women. The statistical results show that the sex of governors had very little im- pact on female homicide rates. States governed by the PAN had slightly lower rates of female homicide than others. In general, states with Morena governors did not have lower female homicide rates, but the female homicide rate did decline in Mexico City under Claudia Sheinbaum’s leadership.

Strengthening the medicolegal system: Fulfilling international law obligations during conflicts and disasters to prevent and resolve issues of humanitarian concern

Abstract In times of armed conflict, disasters and violence, people may become separated from their families, go missing or die, or become victims of ill-treatment and sexual violence. Under international humanitarian law, States have obligations to prevent harm and address humanitarian needs. At State level, the medicolegal system is conventionally mandated to address these needs and fulfil related legal obligations. In practice, State responses can sometimes be non-existent, limited by the endemic functionality of existing systems, or degraded by crises of violence, natural disasters and migration. These conditions can, in turn, impede the establishment of peace, reparations, restorative justice efforts and post-conflict reconstruction. This paper explains what a medicolegal system is and the entities that encompass it. The paper highlights the importance of developing clear policies, regulation and procedures that ensure proper functioning of the system. It reviews common gaps and challenges that limit State prevention and response to issues of humanitarian concern. Finally, recommendations when developing and implementing humanitarian programmes to strengthen medicolegal systems are provided, with a particular focus on the content of protection dialogue in diplomatic fora.

Contested Legitimating Agents: The Regional “Battle” for Legitimacy in Venezuela

Abstract Practitioners, pundits, and scholars increasingly recognize the role that international organizations play in conflicts. Regional organizations (ROs), as brokers of collective security, welfare, and identity, have become particularly active agents during violent crises by granting legitimacy to certain protagonists and discrediting the legitimacy of others, thus affecting international policymaking. However, existing research generally assesses the legitimizing effects of ROs in either a static way, in which the stances of their member states do not change over time, or in an institutional vacuum, where ROs are not challenged by other ROs. This study aims to shed light on the impact of multiple ROs dynamically and simultaneously intervening in legitimation struggles. It focuses on the 2014–2020 regional “battle” over the legitimate authority of the Chavista–Madurista regime in Venezuela, examining how multiple Latin American ROs articulated their discourse seeking to influence the crisis’ outcomes. To this end, a multi-step process tracing based on four phases (opening, deliberation, judgment, and denouement) is applied. The findings reveal the lively competition between involved actors for the recognition of ROs as the relevant legitimating agents, and the limits faced in achieving collective action when polarization over such a regional legitimating role prevails. The study has novel implications for scholarly understanding of the role of legitimation dynamics in promoting international cooperation during periods of disruption.

The dynamics of social, cultural, human, and economic capital in food insecurity among the forced migrants

Food insecurity signifies limited access, expertise, and capacity to affordable safe food. Food insecurity creates different experiences in the daily lives of people worldwide. Food insecurity is common among forced migrants due to changes in cultural norms, space, politics, and economies. While it is readily apparent that forced migration is associated with food insecurity, the details of how the changes in their social, cultural, human, and financial capital affect their food security are not well understood. This matters for finding ways to address food insecurity for those who are, forced to migrate to help improve their food across the migration trajectory. The objectives of the study are to find out how social capital improves the migrant's sources of livelihood and ensures their food security before the violent crisis. Find out how they lost the capital and the implications for food security. Find out the efforts made by forced migrants during and after migrations to ensure food security. This article draws on twenty-five (25) in-depth narrative interviews with people who had experienced conflict-induced migration in Nigeria to address this gap. Their responses were audio recorded and subsequently transcribed and written in English. The contextual data was, subjected to computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS), and the data analyzed. Analysis of this data provides critical insight for explaining and addressing the dynamic relationship between social, cultural, human, and economic capital and food insecurity experienced by forced migrants. It revealed that social, cultural, human, and economic (financial) capitals are significant factors shaping the participant’s livelihood sources before and after the crisis.

Effect of a School Counselor Training on Self-Efficacy in Crisis Handling

We presented a 4-hour training program designed to enhance school counselors’ self-efficacy in handling school crises, with a specific focus on school shootings. Employing a pretest-posttest research design using the School Counselor Response to Violent Crisis Questionnaire, we found that the training was effective in improving the self-efficacy of participants (<em>n</em> = 35) in crisis handling. We discovered, in our pilot study, that crisis training specifically tailored to school counselors can be effective in enhancing their self-efficacy in crisis handling. We discuss our study’s implications for school counselors, workshop leaders, school leaders, and researchers.

Distributed agency: Care, human needs, and distributive struggles in Portugal

Austerity policies in Portugal unleashed a violent crisis of well-being and social reproduction which intensified the ‘triple burden’ placed upon women, making them the primary ‘shock absorbers’ of the crisis. This article addresses the critical role of working-class women’s various forms of paid and unpaid care work in responding to the material and immaterial needs of impoverished individuals and working-class households. It is shown that women’s care-based responses and distributive struggles sought to minimise the risks that the agency of those they cared for could be compromised in the present and the future. Expanding feminist approaches and broader contributions decentring agency from the ends of individual choice and freedom, the article argues that agency is a distributed capacity and potentiality produced by, and productive of, embedded interdependent caring practices, relationships and investments across space and time to define, fulfil and negotiate the inescapable existence of fundamental needs.

Unlocking Gun-Violence Solutions: The Necessity and Power of Lived Experience

<i>This article contributes to our national understanding of gun violence by incorporating in our analyses the perspectives of the young men most likely to be victims and/or perpetrators of gun violence in urban areas.  It also describes a more complex gun violence crisis by taking into account the environment in which many young Black men live and learn and how those settings contribute to their gun possession decisions. This focus on environment underscores the contextual differences between mass and school shootings compared to urban gun violence. The cities where our respondents live are marked by violence and few positive opportunities. By the time they were 15 years old, the majority of our study participants knew someone who had been shot, many knew someone who had been killed by a gun, and the majority had been arrested. On the contrary, few had significant adjucation or incarceration records and most were either in school or had graduated from high school. The findings represent the lived experience of 364 young Black males living in high crime cities. The interviews were conducted in collaboration with community partners in Baltimore, MD, Jackson, MS, Houston, TX, and Wilmington, DE.</i>

The Neo-Victorian Feminist Afterlife of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) in Sam Baker’s The Woman Who Ran (2016)

Anne Brontë’s deliberate exposition in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall of gendered violence as the consequence of the structurally embedded sexism in the Victorian patriarchal socio-legal system is a daring example of feminist critique that was ahead of its time. This article examines the afterlife of Brontë’s feminism in Sam Baker’s The Woman Who Ran (2016), a neo-Victorian domestic noir thriller which re(dis)covers and repurposes Brontë’s novel for contemporary women readers. Baker uncovers the ongoing crisis of domestic violence and sexism in professional spheres that persist despite the progress achieved by Western feminist movements to secure women’s rights in the last century. We argue that The Woman Who Ran demonstrates just how generative Anne Brontë’s writing remains for conceptualising feminist issues in the twenty-first century.

A randomized 3-month, parallel-group, controlled trial of CALMA m-health app as an adjunct to therapy to reduce suicidal and non-suicidal self-injurious behaviors in adolescents: study protocol.

Suicidal and non-suicidal self-injurious behaviors are among the leading causes of death and injury in adolescents and youth worldwide. Mobile app development could help people at risk and provide resources to deliver evidence-based interventions. There is no specific application for adolescents and young people available in Spanish. Our group developed CALMA, the first interactive mobile application with the user in Spanish, which provides tools based on Dialectical Behavioral Therapy to manage a crisis of suicidal or non-suicidal self-directed violence with the aim of preventing suicide in adolescents and youth. To test the effectiveness, safety and level of engagement of the CALMA app in people aged 10 to 19 who are treated in mental health services of two public hospitals, we will conduct a parallel-group, two-arm randomized controlled trial. Participants will be assessed face-to-face and via video call at four timepoints: day-0 (baseline), day-30, day-60, and day-90. A total of 29 participants per group will be included. Change in the frequency of suicidal and non-suicidal self-injurious behaviors will be compared between groups, as well as the level of emotional dysregulation, level of app engagement and time of psychiatric admission during the follow-up period. This study is particularly relevant to young people given their widespread use of mobile technology, while there are currently no available smartphone app-based self-guided psychological strategies in Spanish that attempt to reduce suicidal behavior in adolescents who are assisted in the public health sector from low and middle-income countries in Latin America. https://clinicaltrials.gov/, NCT05453370.

The Moral Economy of the Agatu "Massacre": Reterritorializing Farmer-Herder Relations.

The Agatu "Massacre" is a conflict between pastoralists and farmers in the Agatu area of Benue State, Nigeria. The conflict is significant because of the event's gravity, but no scholarly inquiry that involves thoughtful and reflective methodological and theoretical approaches has been made. This paper investigates how the farmer-herder relations in Agatu became a violent crisis and situates it within relevant literature to fill gaps in farmer-herder conflicts literature in Africa. Existing literature demonstrates the pertinence of moral economies for resource use, spatial pattern, and manifestations of conflicts in developing and developed worlds. However, studies have yet to use the moral economy concept to explore the African farmer-herder conflicts from a political ecology perspective. This paper demonstrates that the Agatu crisis emerged due to reterritorializations in the moral economy of farmers and herders, disrupting their social ties. It further illustrates that the violence in Agatu was caused by the deviation from the traditional approach to addressing the damage done to crops by herding livestock. Nevertheless, the paper argues that this deviation is the consequence of modifications in the moral economy of farmers and herders driven by the aspiration for financial gain rather than the subsistence of agro-pastoral relations. The paper argues that changes in moral economies can disrupt social relations and lead to farmer-herder conflicts, leading to the exclusion of pastoralists from resource access through policy and legislation.

An Acute Crisis adds to Unresolved Chronic Crisis

Residents in a community in the South Peninsula of the Western Cape, South Africa live with the reality of unresolved challenges. The women and children of this community face a burden from the prevailing inequality and structural violence that plays out in their daily lives as high levels of unemployment, substance abuse, violence in many forms, food insecurity, high school dropout rates and teenage pregnancy. The complexities of living in this community were exacerbated by the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic and the resultant lockdown regulations that destabilised all previous notions of normality. The pre-existing social challenges can be viewed as the residents’ experiences of hazards and stressors that have been in place for years in the unequal social structures of South Africa (The World Bank 2022). In this environment, of what can be interpreted as a community in chronic crisis (Dekker et al., 2021), the addition of the acute crisis of the pandemic, posed further cumulative effects on households that impacted more seriously on those who are already the most vulnerable. This paper presents reflections on the stories of women talking about their experiences of the global pandemic to this coastal community. We aim to show the impact on their lives as members of families within their community. The analysis will utilise the phases of a crisis (Emergency Management, 2022) where the pre-crisis or prodromal phase was recognised as life in the chronic crisis of structural violence. The acute or crisis phase of the pandemic became a lens for the effects of an existing long-term crisis compounded by athe. The response or chronic phase of the acute crisis was again found to be exacerbated by the existence of a long drawn out response phase to the chronic crisis. This paper is a window into the innovative attempts by this community to cope with the immense challenges of Covid-19, followed now by the post-crisis (resolution) phase that reflects the ongoing efforts to rebuild the community in the face of the cumulative effects of the pandemic, as but a temporary diversion from the challenges of a continuous chronic crisis. The post-crisis phase remains incomplete, however, a deeper understanding of crisis upon crisis provides knowledge that can assist those implementing social interventions in this community to tackle challenges as a state of chronic crisis for residents.

COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF ELECTORAL VIOLENCE IN THE 2015 AND 2019 GENERAL ELECTIONS IN NIGERIA AND THE ROLE OF SECURITY AGENCIES: PROSPECTS FOR FUTURE ELECTIONS

Democratic political system is one which makes the government responsive and accountable to the people. Election on the other hand is the fulcrum of democracy hence; election related violence cannot be discussed without the role of security agencies and various non-state actors in the elections. This is a prerequisite for maintenance of law and order that brings about stability and enhances national security. Nigerian democracy since inception has been a subject of controversy with periodic elections consistently marred with issues of violent crises and insecurity. The 2015 and 2019 general elections in Nigeria were no different, the two elections recorded the height of ethno-religious tension in the history of Nigerian election as well as ethno-religious violence that threatened the indivisibility of the entire country. While the 2015 was relatively peaceful despite the violence tension it created in the pre-election campaigning, the 2019 elections were marred with violence. More so, the elections were held in the most insecure atmosphere with the Boko Haram conflict and the herders/farmers conflict going in the northeast and north central zones simultaneously. In addition, security during elections was a source of concern. The Police and other security agencies were often accused of partiality during electoral processes. The paper carries out a comparative analysis of electoral violence during 2015 and 2019 general elections. Drawing data from both primary and secondary sources such as in-depth interviews, key informant interviews (KII), questionnaires and extant literatures

Identity Conflicts in Post-Colonial Northern Nigeria: An Example of E. E. Sule’s Sterile Sky

Ethnicity and religion have continued to play significant roles in preventing the attainment of national identity in post-colonial Nigeria. Within the ambit of the post-colonial theory, this study examines the concepts of identity and hybridity in the inter-ethnic and inter-religious relations that result in the recurring Northern Nigeria’s violent crises as expounded in E.E. Sule’s novel, Sterile Sky. This study shows that the north of Nigeria has, to a great extent, been unable to achieve a hybridized identity with the rest of the nation. Ethnic and, especially, religious identity remain the preferred identity as well as the primary cause of conflicts in Northern Nigeria. In Sterile Sky, ethnic, and especially religious identity are identified as the preferred identity in the cosmopolitan city of Kano, and the primary cause of conflict in Northern Nigeria. This work is a contribution in providing an understanding of the post-colonial conflicts in Nigeria through literary evaluation.

Appropriating the civil sphere: the construction of German collective identity by right-wing populist actors during the Covid-19 pandemic

This paper considers the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on right-wing populists’ constructions of German collective identity. In their “Covid-19 crisis” narratives, German populists attempted to rearrange the discursive and institutional space of the German civil sphere through a symbolic inversion of the heroic signifier and legitimization of violence against perceived enemies. To analyze such discursive dynamics, this paper utilizes multilayered narrative analysis, drawing on the synthesis of civil sphere theory, the anthropological conceptualization of the relationship between mimetic crisis and symbolic substitution of violence and the sociological narrative theory of the sacralization and desacralization of heroism. This analysis structures the investigation of positive and negative symbolic constructions of German collective identity by German right-wing populist narratives. The analysis shows that although German right-wing populists are politically peripheral, their affective, antagonistic and anti-elite narratives contribute to the semantic erosion of the liberal democratic core of the German civil sphere. This in turn reduces the ability of democratic institutions to control violence and leads to the restriction of civil solidarity.

Through the Lens of #MeToo: A Discussion on Sexual Violence in Chinese Schools

There is a global school sexual violence crisis, and China is not free from it. This study discusses the causes and influencing factors of school sexual violence first, including power imbalance in school, traditional gender roles and respect for teachers, as well as the ambiguity or lack of laws. To further study the natures and perspectives of school sexual violence, we analyse the impacts and hindrances of #MeToo movements in the specific context of school sexual violence. Although the positive impacts of #MeToo such as increasing social awareness and individual empowerment proves its efficiency to certain extent, there are still multiple hindrances ahead such as threats from school management and media censorship still reflects, showing how complex the issue of the school sexual violence is.

Oil Exploration in Eastern Obolo Environment, 1996 – 2021

Eastern Obolo is richly endowed with abundant natural resources especially crude oil and gas. Oil exploration has impacted disastrously on the people and their environment. Despite its immense contribution to the up-keep of the state, the area has suffered monumental neglect and deprivation in addition to the destruction of the ecosystem. The fauna and flora are under threat. The exploration of crude oil apart from causing damages to the ecosystem has been one of the major sources of communal conflicts and crime in the area. This vexed situation has in recent years encouraged youth restiveness, violent protests, pipeline vandalisation and kidnapping. Against this backdrop, the paper argues that unless there is a paradigm shift in the manner the oil multinationals as well as the state and federal government respond to these ugly situations, violent crisis will continue to prevail.

ПОШУКИ НОВОЇ МЕТАФІЗИКИ: КОНЦЕПТ ФІЛОСОФСЬКОЇ КОСМОЛОГІЇ ЖИЛЯ ДЕЛЬОЗА

B a c k g r o u n d . The purpose of this article is to reveal the concept of philosophical cosmology as a new metaphysics based on ideas proposed by Gilles Deleuze in his work "The Logic of Sense". For this, it is necessary to get rid of the interpretation of philosophical cosmology as an exclusively philosophical-scientific discipline and begin to perceive it as a basic theory of order that can replace ontology. To implement this strategy, Deleuze turns to the ideas of the philosophy of Stoicism. This choice is primarily due to the first concept of sense (lekton theory), as well as the doctrine of space (khora) and the living, renewable cosmos (palingenesia). The relevance of Stoicism is reinforced by the historical and civilizational perspective, where the emergence and renewal of interest in the Stoics' thoughts corresponds to periods of violent crisis. M e t h o d s . The hermeneutic analysis of the works of Gilles Deleuze, the Stoics and researchers of Stoicism makes it possible to include the concept of philosophical cosmology in the foundations of spatial phenomenology which is implemented in the topographic method of researching its main subject, which is the world, and culture in particular. R e s u l t s . In this way, the philosophical cosmology of Gilles Deleuze provides grounds for a better understanding of the cultural and intellectual situation of today, which includes information overload and the essential uncertainty of the prospects of civilizational development, in which culture appears more as a spontaneous performative formation than a logical projected system of valid norms and rules. C o n c l u s i o n s . That is why philosophical cosmology has applied value, as it responds to the spatial and performative turn in modern culture.

Keeping Healthcare Workers Safe Through Policy Initiatives

Keeping Healthcare Workers Safe Through Policy Initiatives