Discussion Of Violence Research Articles

Strategies of representation in auto/biography: reconstructing and remembering

1. Fictions of Autobiographical Representations: Joshua Nkomo's The Story of My Life Maurice Taonezvi Vambe 2. Memory, Gender and Narration: Reconstruction of Subjectivity in Makeba's My Story and Masekela's Still Grazing Nonhlanhla Dhlamini 3. Imagining The Nation: Autobiography, Memoir, History or Fiction in Peter Godwin's writing Muchativugwa Liberty Hove 4. Denomi/Nation: Envisioning Possibilities of Re-Constructing an Alternative Zimbabwe in Muzorewa's Rise Up and Walk Tasiyana D. Javangwe 5. Reading Dzino: Memories of a Freedom Fighter Arthur P.T. Makanda 6. Vortex of Violence: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Peter Godwin's The Fear Muchativugwa Liberty Hove 7. 'We Were Little Kings in Rhodesia': Rhodesian Discourse and Representations of Colonial Violence in Kandaya and Let's Don't Go To The Dogs Tonight Murenga Joseph Chikowero 8. Women Re-defining Themselves in the Context of HIV and AIDS: Insights from Tendayi Westerhof's Unlucky in Love Anna Chitando 9. Historical Metaphors of the Self: Chimurenga Names as Autobiography Charles Pfukwa

Narrative and violence: the <i>Brazilian Autumn</i> coverage on Twitter

This paper analyses the media coverage of the Brazilian protests that happened in June 2013. We monitored 2,852 tweets from ten news organizations and newspapers that were covering the events on Twitter and, based on content analysis, we compared and identified messages focusing on violence aspects of the manifestations. We also compared this discourse to official data from 268 protests that occurred during the same timeframe, regarding deaths, injuries and arrests. Our results indicate that news coverage on Twitter diverged from official sources, amplifying the violence discourse by focusing tweets’ contents on this topic.

The linguistic representation of gender violence in (written) media discourse

‘Woman’ is a key social actor, and a central conceptualization, in the construction of media discourses of gender-based violence. Scholarly research at the turn of the 21st century (Bengoechea 2000; Lledó 2002; Fernández Díaz 2003; Jorge 2004) showed that in the Spanish press, media discourses had a tendency to naturalize male aggression not as violence but as part of the (private) sexual arrangement between the sexes. In this paper we explore the treatment of the phrasemujer maltratada(EN ‘battered woman’) in intimate partner violence newspaper articles from 2005 to 2010. Our aims are: (i) to account for the discursive representation of violence against women (VAW) in Spanish contemporary media discourse in recent years; and (ii) to unveil the expectations about gender, sexuality and power implicit in public discourses about VAW, given their apparent objectivity. In doing so, we draw on the evaluation framework for the analysis of news reports proposed by White (2004, 2006) and on Corpus Linguistics tools.

Throwaway Youth: The Sociocultural Location of Resistance to Schooling

This article illuminates the ways in which resistant youth challenge attempts toward cultural homogenization within public school systems. We trace how youth from historical and lived traumatic experiences such as African American, Native American, and youth with histories of domestic violence, navigate the dominant narrative of pity and punishment in public schools. We argue that these resistive youth have been tagged with constructed identities as “broken youth.” The article situates the practice of school discipline in terms of traditional and neoliberal agendas that seek to throw away noncompliant students and label them as deviant and/or disordered. Drawing from Bauman's (2009) conception of a world where vast numbers of human beings are increasingly seen as expendable and unworthy of a dignified existence, this article seeks to uncover how disciplinary and labeling practices become a vital part of the school-to-prison pipeline. We trace how deficit oriented discourses of historical and familial domestic violence help shape the often-unintentional violent discourses of pity and punishment towards resistant youth in public school settings.

(De)stabilizing Sexual Violence Discourse: Masculinization of Victimhood, Organizational Blame, and Labile Imperialism

Following calls to center nation, we analyze sexual violence discourse in the US Peace Corps. The texts we consider deploy three typical dichotomies—public/private, self/other, and agent/victim—that, in this case, reveal inconsistencies at the intersections of race and gender. We argue that these inconsistencies are evidence of lability, counterintuitive discursive shifts necessary to maintain white heteromasculine dominance. Instead of blaming individual victims of rape and assault, the masculinization of victimhood shifts culpability to the Peace Corps. This organizational blame maintains the moral position of the US and legitimates imperialism. By marking these instabilities, we trace the solidity and vulnerability of sexual violence discourse as it organizes global power.

Smuggling ideologies: From criminalization to hybrid governance in African clandestine economies

This article explores shifting perspectives on African clandestine economies. Previously condemned as products of clientelism and corruption, clandestine economies are attracting renewed interest for their developmental potential in weak state contexts. Focusing on systems of illicit cross-border trade in East and West Africa, this article shows that more favourable views of clandestine trading activities are driven more by their compatibility with liberal reform agendas than by their positive contribution to local development. Indeed, the optimistic turn in perspectives on illicit African trade glosses over its increasingly negative impact on local security and development. While discourses of violence and criminalization were used to characterize the largely peaceful cross-border trading systems in West Africa in the 1990s, new discourses of hybrid governance and state building are used to frame the more violent and socially disruptive cross-border trading complexes of East Africa in the 2000s.

Security blankets: uniforms, hoods, and the textures of terror

Images of the hood have become central in contemporary discourses of state-sanctioned violence. While many have commented on how the hood is situated relative to the politics of in/visibility, scant attention has been paid to the materiality and haptic circumstances of this technology of torture. In an effort to better understand the War on Terror, this essay considers how the hood's particular, textilic form corresponds to the figuration of the un-uniformed, unlawful enemy combatant and to the place that textiles hold in our everyday lives, while it also pays special attention to contemporary artworks that contend with the consistencies of this complicated material network. It ultimately positions “the textile” as a material formed at the intersections of desire and modern politics, and focuses attention on those instances where and when the textile's textility (or texture) trumps its “textuality” (or readability). In so doing, it further aims to contemplate the specific ways that the textile works to produce and maintain the limits of legitimate versus illegitimate forms of state violence, particularly at those junctures where the limit of the word, or the text, is reached.

A Postmodern Critique of Societal Discourses of Male Violence in Interpersonal Family Relationships: A Balancing Act for Social Work

In recent years, treatments of family violence have tended to be built around conventional discourses suggesting that men are major initiators in instances of interpersonal violence. Utilizing a postmodernist analysis, we assess societal discourses that continue to give life to this narrow conceptualization of interpersonal violence. We also examine literature suggesting that both men and women resort to violence to resolve relationship difficulties and suggest that a more holistic and inclusive approach to understanding interpersonal violence is critical for social workers committed to social justice and a balanced understanding of the contextual nature of human problems.

Discourses of violence in the transition from colonialism to independence in southern Sudan, 1955–1960

The Torit Mutiny of August 1955 in southern Sudan did not trigger a civil war, but state violence and disorder escalated over the following years. We explore how the outlook and strategies of the government officials who inherited the state apparatus of the Anglo-Egyptian condominium contributed to this development. They perpetuated authoritarian and violent government practices based on a legalistic distinction between citizen and outlaw, while justifying their actions as part of a developmentalist and nationalistic discourse. The Mutiny created fear of another outbreak of violence which prompted recourse to collective punishment, an expanded intelligence network and bolstered the powers and mandate of the chiefs. However, the authoritarian tendencies were paired with developmentalism and the desire to educate and civilise the southerners. Through education and the justice and penal system, they were to be ‘made to learn’ how to become ‘modern’. This combination of perpetuating colonial government practices and fervent nationalism resonates with analyses of transitions to independence elsewhere in Africa, from which the case of southern Sudan has been largely excluded up to now.

Women’s activism in a drug user union in the Downtown Eastside

Marginalized women in Canada who use criminalized drugs are often defined through institutional discourses of addiction, disease, poverty, sex work, and violence. Framed by many researchers as an at risk population, the fullness of these women’s lives is often rendered invisible, and the complexity, diversity, and range of experiences of their political and community work and their movement through the city are less often a topic of interest. This gap is addressed through an exploration of how some marginalized women come to know and experience themselves politically and physically, as part of a reflection upon their movement in and through the Downtown Eastside (DTES) of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Drawing from community-based research in the DTES over a four-month period with women in leadership roles at the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, a drug user union, this paper highlights the results from focus groups and brainstorming sessions. The participants disrupt conventional notions of addiction and criminalization through their political and community activities and their ongoing resistance to systemic discrimination.

Refugee Status: Tracing the Global Flows of M.I.A.

This article argues that Sri Lankan pop star M.I.A. forms an ideal site for the textual study of globalized identity, particularly amid discourses of state power, terrorism, and violence. Rooted in the literature of media and terrorism and grounded in postcolonial theories of hybridization, this study analyzes M.I.A. and her music as globalized media objects, looking at how they use hip-hop as a cultural form to esthetically engage with discourse of violence in order to launch a critique of state power. The factors that enable this critique (globalized media systems, technologies, and cultural forms) help to create a discursive position from within popular culture where new forms of critique can be enunciated and popularized.

Policy Responses to Honor-Based Violence: A Cultural or National Problem?

The UK government has consistently sidelined honor-based violence from mainstream political discourse and has chosen to present the issue as a problem that is embedded in the culture of minority communities. This inevitably leads to a sense of heightened cultural sensitivity and the pressure to be viewed as culturally competent. It is argued that for honor-based violence to be managed effectively, it must first be dissociated from culture and from mainstream domestic violence discourse and recognized as a national problem that requires serious and specific policy intervention. Although it is acknowledged that all policy responses to complex social problems should reflect multicultural sensitivity, we argue in this critical review that this should not become an excuse for nonintervention.

Discourse and Practice of Violence in the Italian Extreme Right: Frames, Symbols, and Identity-Building in CasaPound Italia

An investigation of the neo-Fascist organization CasaPound Italia, focusing on how political violence is framed in its public discourse, and on the role it plays as a constitutive element of the group’s collective identity. Starting from the conceptualization of violence in Italian Fascism, we focus on CasaPound’s practices, discourse, and ideology. The analysis combines findings from nineteen in-depth interviews with CasaPound members and participant observation at protest events and activities. This paper disentangles CasaPound’s relationship with political violence, differentiating its discursive, aesthetic, and identity-building dimensions. Although in the external discourse of the group, violent activities are only accepted as a tool of self-determination and self-defence, we find that a cult of violence inspired by traditional Fascism emerges from the semiotic repertoire mobilized by CasaPound, and is reiterated by means of experiences of collective socialization based on violence.

‘Beauty and bullets’: A content analysis of female offenders and victims in four Canadian newspapers

Media-generated discourse can provide a framework for its consumers to construct representations of the world they live in. These representations, however, are often disproportionate to the true incidence of crime or risk of victimization. In order to examine the extent to which the gender of the offender or victim impacts portrayals of crime, content and discourse analyses were carried out on four Canadian city newspapers over a span of 30 years. The results from the 1190 sampled crime articles revealed that, although portrayals of female offenders accurately depict them as generally lower-risk, both female offenders and female victims were treated equivocally. Women offenders were dichotomized into sexualized bad girls or malicious black widow archetypes. Similarly, female victims were depicted either as bad victims who were blamed for their circumstances, or good victims who garnered sympathy through negative portrayals of the offenders. The findings are discussed within the context of gender differences surrounding the social discourse of violence, particularly chivalry.

Discourse and Practice of Violence in the Italian Extreme Right: Frames, Symbols, and Identity-Building in CasaPound Italia

Discourse and Practice of Violence in the Italian Extreme Right: Frames, Symbols, and Identity-Building in CasaPound Italia

The Descents of Military Violence against Civilians: a history of the present

Inspired by the works of Michel Foucault and Erling Sandmo, this article explores contemporary discourses of military violence against civilians from a genealogical perspective. The purpose is to shed light on the historicity of certain structures of knowledge, thoughts, politics and ethics that are fundamental for the ways in which military violence against civilians is put into words, interpreted and explained in various situations and contexts today. My main argument is that the descents of Swedish contemporary discourse on military violence against civilians can be traced back to epistemological and politico-legal conflicts in the 17th century.

Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo on the way to peace? War remembrances, post conflict discourse construction: a discursive analysis of Djungu-Simba's novellas

Throughout the history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, various writings – literary, sociological, and political – retrace the challenges that have faced the nation: colonialism, access to independence, postcolonial failures, wars, dictatorships and female exploitation. Some historians, sociologists, literary critics and journalists touted the successes of colonial times and the first Republic, especially those who worked for these governments. Other essential voices remained silent, in order to avoid dictatorial repression and censure, especially under President Mobutu. With the arrival of Laurent Kabila, freedom of speech brought forth discourse that slowly deteriorated into insincere rhetoric and, finally, utter silence. In Les Terrassiers de Bukavu: Nouvelles, Charles Djungu-Simba, the editor of several Bukavu Congolese novella writers, predicts that the socio- political discourse put forth in such narratives will lead to chaos followed by further repression that will continue the cycle presented all along these metanarratives unless oppression is radically addressed from the grassroots. Key words: Bukavu, violence discourse, war, apocalyptic myth, UN Forces, Democratic Republic of the Congo, novellas

Understanding the Dynamics of Israeli-Palestinian Grassroots Dialogue Workshops: the Contribution of a Habermasian Approach

In the post-Oslo context, Israeli-Palestinian people-to-people programmes based on dialogue (re-)create vital spaces of communicative action not always directly available at other levels. By enhancing the overall deliberative quality of the system, they can generate a shift away from discourses of violence in the public sphere and contribute significantly to peace-building dynamics. Conceptual frameworks developed by Jurgen Habermas are useful in understanding the opportunities and challenges faced by such initiatives both at the micro- and macrolevel.

Een doorbreking van orde

This paper discusses the relationship between security and public order. In so doing, it first presents a review of critical literature on the role security (defined as ‘securitas’) plays within a capitalist or neoliberal system. Although such analyses are quite useful for disentangling violent discourses underlying western society, they are also too negative and one-sided to offer avenues for a new approach. Therefore, the second part of this paper explores a more positive outlook on security (defined as ‘certitudo’) that is grounded in social connectedness, trust and faith.

Memory and identity: intergenerational narratives of violence among refugees in Serbia

This article examines the role of the intergenerational memory of the Second World War (WWII) in identity formation and political mobilization. An existing explanation in the ethnic-conflict literature is that strategic political leaders play a crucial role in constructing and mobilizing ethnic identities. However, based on 114 open-ended interviews with individuals born in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia, conducted in Serbia during 2008–2011, nearly a third of the respondents make spontaneous references to WWII in their statements, usually drawing parallels between the cycle of violence in the 1990s and that in the 1940s. The question this article asks, then, is why some respondents make references to WWII spontaneously while others do not. It is argued that intergenerational narratives of past cycles of violence also constitute a process of identity formation, in addition to, or apart from, other processes of identity formation. The respondents mention WWII violence in the context of the 1990s events because they “recognize” elements, such as symbols, discourse or patterns of violence, similar to those in the intergenerational narratives and interpret them as warning signs. Hence, individuals who had previously been exposed to intergenerational narratives may be subsequently more susceptible to political mobilization efforts.