Wartime Violence Research Articles

Indigenization of the Pacific War in Timor Island: A Multi-language Study of its Contexts and Impact

This article provides a multi-dimensional picture of West and East Timorese participation in war-time violence using Japanese, Portuguese and English sources. It argues that mobilization of the ‘natives’ by foreign forces in neutral Portuguese Timor brought about a reorganization of social relations on Timor Island. From a local perspective, the exploitation of the Timorese resulted in a great number of casualties, and intensified existing tensions, but also created trans-colonial communities.

War Violence Exposure, Reintegration Experiences and Intimate Partner Violence Among a Sample of War-Affected Females in Sierra Leone

Although international attention has focused mostly on boys as child soldiers and youth affected by armed conflict, girls account for more than 40 % of this population globally. Primarily recruited and abducted into armed conflict to serve as “wives” and sexual slaves for commanders and other soldiers, girls experienced high rates of rape and sexual abuse. Using data from a longitudinal study conducted in collaboration with a major international Non-Government Organization (NGO) in Sierra Leone, this study examined the contributions of potentially stigmatizing war violence exposures and more recent post-conflict reintegration experiences to IPV. Results indicate the various aspects of wartime violence, this sample of female youth showed the highest rates of ambient wartime violence, victimization, and sexual assault. However, this sample also showed a non-trivial proportion of perpetrating wartime violence. Overall, this sample reported middling levels of community reintegration, and similar average rates of family reintegration. This study indicates a need for war-affected females to have greater access to resources that can empower them post-conflict.

The Colonial Boomerang: A Comparative Analysis of the Traumatic Effect of the Violence of War in Alexander Kanengoni’s Echoing Silences and Alexandra Fuller’s Scribbling the Cat

This literary analysis explores how the repercussions of violence had both metaphysical and traumatic consequences for those involved in the war that led to the liberation of Zimbabwe, regardless of which side they fought for. This scarring of the psyche is vividly explored in Alexandra Kanengoni’s Echoing Silences and Alexander Fuller’s Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier. The main character in the former text is a black Zanla freedom fighter, while the protagonist in Fuller’s text is an ex-Rhodesian white soldier. This allows for insightful comparative analysis. Despite their differing socio-political cultures and positions within the war—one seeking to perpetuate colonial hegemony, the other to destroy it—in the post-war era neither of them escapes the boomerang effect of the wartime violence. The premise of this analysis is therefore, encapsulated in the Shona proverb Hapana mhosva isangaripwe (“There is no crime which does not carry a fine or reparation”). A psychoanalytic theoretical framework informs the examination as we reveal the traumatic experiences the two protagonists encounter, and trace their journeys as they revisit and re-member their sites of violence during the war in a quest to purge themselves of their “demons” and achieve psychological redemption.

Democracy and civil war: The case of Colombia

We argue that scholarship on the Colombian civil war can fertilize the research program on political violence and democracy in two ways. First, the Colombian case demonstrates that the scholarly research agenda on electoral violence should expand to incorporate a broader focus on democratic institutions. In the context of an ongoing civil war, democratic reforms in Colombia had a substantial impact on the dynamics of wartime violence. Second, the Colombian case showcases an overlooked danger of decentralization that, if implemented under the wrong conditions, can facilitate the capture of democratic institutions by political and criminal armed groups. These insights have important implications for the study of wartime democratic governance and state-building relevant both for the peace process between the Colombian government and the FARC, and for cases beyond Colombia.

Ethics Abroad: Fieldwork in Fragile and Violent Contexts

ABSTRACTThe diversity of political spaces, availability of cheap labor, ease of access to powerful figures, and safety net of a foreign passport attract researchers to the developing world. However, environments of extreme state weakness and ongoing conflict permit research behavior that would be frowned on in the global north. We suggest that weak regulatory authority in conflict-affected states offers foreign academics opportunities that are not available when states have greater reach or capacity. Qualitative researchers may find requests to interview victims or perpetrators of wartime violence granted with ease. Experimenters can coerce under-resourced NGOs to pursue interventions at odds with their organizational mandates. We posit that conflict contexts can constitute permissive environments in which researchers can engage in conduct that would be considered deeply problematic at home. Because studying political violence can require firsthand research on aspects of political life not easily observed elsewhere, this article offers a set of guidelines to foster more ethical and responsible research practices.

Policy preferences in a post-war environment

Can reminders of violence committed in the past influence citizens’ policy preferences in the present? Prior work has found that under the threat of violence individuals prioritize safety and adopt policy views aimed at reducing the threat. Elites can then strategically employ concerns over personal safety and security to shape the public’s preferences. I contribute to this literature by conducting an exploratory study of whether invocations of violence committed in the past shape preferences in the long-term, years after the actual violence has ended. To do so, I fielded an experiment on a large ( N = 1125) and nationally representative sample of respondents in Bosnia, the site of a major ethnic civil war in 1992–1995. I did not find evidence that reminders of wartime violence in and of themselves affect policy preferences. Ultimately, this study represents a first cut at a neglected question in the literature and has implications that could motivate future research on the relationship between violent conflict and policy preferences.

Forgotten Wartime Violence among the Masses in Periphery during the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines: With Special Reference to the Paramilitary Groups Collaborating with the Japanese in Leyte Island

Forgotten Wartime Violence among the Masses in Periphery during the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines: With Special Reference to the Paramilitary Groups Collaborating with the Japanese in Leyte Island

How Exposure to Violence Affects Ethnic Voting

How does wartime exposure to ethnic violence affect the political preferences of ordinary citizens? Are high-violence communities more or less likely to reject the politicization of ethnicity post-war? We argue that community-level experience with wartime violence solidifies ethnic identities, fosters intra-ethnic cohesion and increases distrust toward non-co-ethnics, thereby making ethnic parties the most attractive channels of representation and contributing to the politicization of ethnicity. Employing data on wartime casualties at the community level and pre- as well as post-war election results in Bosnia, we find strong support for this argument. The findings hold across a number of robustness checks. Using post-war survey data, we also provide evidence that offers suggestive support for the proposed causal mechanism.

「平和の犯罪」としての戦時・植民地主義ジェンダー暴力

「平和の犯罪」としての戦時・植民地主義ジェンダー暴力

Violence and the contemporary soldiering body

This article asks what is the significance of making the soldiering body (hyper)visible in war. In contrast to the techno-fetishistic portrayals of Western warfare in the 1990s, the recent counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan witnessed a re-centring of British soldiering bodies within the visual grammars of war. In the visibility of this body, violences once obscured were rendered viscerally visible on the bodies of British soldiers. Locating the analysis in the War Story exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, London, the article details two moments of wartime violence experienced and enacted by British soldiers, tracking how violence was mediated in, on and through these hypervisible soldiering bodies and the attending invisibility of ‘other’ bodies. The article argues that during the Afghanistan campaign, soldiers’ bodies became not just enactors of military power but crucial representational figures in the continuance of violent projects abroad and their acceptance back home.

Exposure to Violence and Attitudes Towards Transitional Justice

Transitional justice has emerged to address victims' needs as a means of restoring relations broken by violence. Yet we know little about victims' attitudes towards different transitional justice mechanisms. Why do some victims prioritize retributive justice while others favor other forms of dealing with the violent past? What determines victims' attitudes towards transitional justice policies? To address these questions, we offer a new theoretical framework that draws upon recent insights from the field of evolutionary psychology and links both war exposure and postwar environments to transitional justice preferences. We argue that both past experiences of wartime violence and present‐day social interdependence with perpetrators impact transitional justice preferences, but in divergent ways (resulting in greater support for retributive vs. restorative justice measures, respectively). To test our framework, we rely upon a 2013 representative survey of 1,007 respondents focusing on general population attitudes towards transitional justice in Bosnia two decades after the implementation of the Dayton Accords. Specifically, we examine the impact of displacement, return to prewar homes, loss of property, loss of a loved one, physical injury, imprisonment, and torture on attitudes towards transitional justice. On the whole, our findings confirm our two main hypotheses: Exposure to direct violence and losses is associated with more support for retributive justice measures, while greater present‐day interdependence with perpetrators is associated with more support for restorative justice measures. While acknowledging the legacy of wartime violence, we highlight the importance of the postwar context and institutional mechanisms that support victims in reconstructing their lives.

Introduction: Visualizing Violence

The Introduction explores the relationship between visual and literary representations of modern warfare. What impact have paintings, cartoons, films and television had on the reporting of conflicts? How has the visual imagery of military violence – as the most extensive and damaging form of violence – changed? Here, Susan Sontag's 2003 essay Regarding the Pain of Others is used as a starting point for a wider discussion of what it means to portray, and to witness portrayals of, wartime violence.

Early Representations of Wartime Violence in Films, 1914–1930

This article deals with the cinematic representations of warfare violence and with its aestheticization in early films. It argues, in particular, that the patterns and narrative structures of (anti-)war movies were laid out during the First World War. Among the first films establishing those patterns and rules were D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, a film on the American Civil War, and Hearts of the World, showing the war on the western front, produced in 1918. Films such as these offered the main elements that would mark, henceforth, how anti-war movies would portray violence. With the up-coming of sound, moviegoers would be able not only to see, but also to hear what a war sounded like. Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), one of the first sound films, exposed the audiences to a series of (calculated) audio/visual distortions, including explosions, screams, and the monotone sound of machinegun fire.

Moral injury and original sin: The applicability of Augustinian moral psychology in light of combat trauma

Veterans of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan often experience moral injury as an ambiguous sense of guilt or deep confusion or annihilation of a sense of what is good and right. Augustine argued that as personal agents, our willing follows that which we desire—the problem is that our desires are externally and internally distorted and our willing thus follows goods that are twisted and false. I argue that an Augustinian framework of human willing in pursuit of distorted goods holds a great deal of explanatory power in terms of the pathology of human violence and the phenomenon of moral injury in combat veterans. As several prominent psychological studies suggest, evolutionary, societal, and cultural forces condition our capacity to make critical moral decisions. Those studying moral injury in combatants have observed the profound guilt that eventually results from their participation in acts of violence and even in support of missions whose moral “good” they come to question. An Augustinian framework recognizes both the power of these external forces and the distortable nature of our own moral values and therefore allows us to locate moral injury in the realm of systemic, widespread societal and cultural problems. This definition allows the experience of differing levels of participation in wartime violence from “front-line combat” to support missions to be understood as valid experiences of moral injury while simultaneously recognizing that one’s active agency is required in order to experience moral injury. Further, this framework may resonate with veterans who experience hopelessness as a result of reflection on the malleability of human willing and its profound vulnerability to outside forces.

Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared by Trinh T. Minh-ha

Reviewed by: Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared by Trinh T. Minh-ha Krista Geneviève Lynes Trinh T. Minh-ha, Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared New York: Fordham University Press, 2016, 298 pp. ISBN 978-0-8232-7110-8 Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared is written in the midst of a wartime violence whose endless terror has engendered and sanctified new forms of domestic and international surveillance, "security" measures, the militarization of daily life, discriminatory policing, and imperialist bluster. Haunted by the specters of other conflicts—Sudan, Tibet, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Rwanda, Congo, Burma, Bosnia, Kosovo, South Africa, Cambodia, and Vietnam—Trinh Minh-ha elaborates the intimate and worldly effects of war's Manichean violence on daily embodied life, on living "exiled, expatriated, segregated, deported, displaced, discarded, repudiated, estranged, disappeared, unsettled and unsettling" in times of crisis (2). The book tracks both the rising US military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan and China's occupation of Tibet, mapping the intersecting forms of imperialism whose discursive force makes certain forms of writing and making impossible. In the face of wartime image making and iconoclasm, Trinh devises a method and language to write from and through the contemporary moment's unsettling climate. Lovecidal is partially a factual account of the state of war under US and Chinese imperialism and partially a philosophical account of the epistemological and ontological conditions of [End Page 377] the post-9/11 world, these two accounts interspersed with lyrical passages of a woman's movement through a twilight landscape, as well as black-and-white photographic images of fragmented, bisected, and mirrored female bodies in natural landscapes. The book aims explicitly to challenge acts of militarism and surveillance, as well as the confiscation of language by militarized rhetoric, and to find a voice resonant with the forms of resistance she turns to in and through the text. Much of her account of imperial power (by both the United States and China) revolves around the intersections of state violence with image making and image repression. In response to the missing image of the corpse of Osama bin Laden, for instance, Trinh recounts the frenzied circulation of hoaxes on the internet, including a doctored photo of bin Laden's bloodied head that appeared on Pakistan's GeoTV (10). Image making, for Trinh, is a tactic of wartime propaganda, the reiteration of power through showing sensational, exceptional, extra-ordinary feats, what she calls a "mise-en-scène of victory" (43). She points to the 1991 Gulf War (the first twenty-four-hour cable news war) as a site for the orchestration of homogeneous coverage of an event, which programmed the world to feel "shock" and "awe" at "the deployment of power via images of raw sensational destruction" (43) and the "power of the camera indulging evil as aesthetics" (58). The Gulf War was not only a spectacle of "shock" and "awe," though, but also a concerted orchestration of the absence of the war itself. The "war" went unseen as the coverage focused on techniques of war processing, a "carefully filled Absence: since the press was not allowed to see what was happening" (87). The account Trinh builds of wartime is contemporary but transversal—sliding between the first and second Gulf Wars, between the "war on terror" and the war in Vietnam, between the imperial ventures of the United States and France, and between Western and Eastern imperial power. Drawing predominantly from news reports, popular magazines, blogs, and alternative press sites, Trinh builds an account of war in its very emergence, in the liveliness of its contemporary moment, through the media apparatuses that give it (and its repressive effects) shape. If the first half of the book concerns itself with US imperial power, the second half focuses its lens more properly on emergent Chinese imperialism, most particularly evidenced in its occupation of Tibet. China exercises its power not only through direct repression of dissent, but also through complex processes of displacement (the forced modernization and "Sinicization" of Tibet) and censorship of all objects of Buddhist veneration, most notably images of the Dalai Lama. Throughout her account, Trinh traces how the war of words empties language (and signifying...

Rethinking Rape: The Role of Women in Wartime Violence

ABSTRACTThere is widespread variation in scope, scale, and forms of rape across and within conflicts. One explanation focuses on the integration of women in armed groups. Scholars and international organizations posit that the inclusion of women in armed groups discourages wartime rape. They advocate women's increased participation to combat rape and other forms of civilian violence. Using an original dataset of women's involvement as combatants in civil wars from 1980 to 2009, I argue that the participation of female fighters has no significant impact in constraining an armed group's propensity to rape. Female combatants do not lessen rape because organizational factors, primarily culture, drive violence in armed factions and encourage conformity irrespective of individual characteristics. Advocating further militarization of women in an attempt to reduce conflict-related rape may be an ineffective policy prescription.

Prosecuting Gendered Violence in International Law: The Paradox of Wartime Violence

By an examination of the judgments of the International Criminal Tribunals, this essay reflects upon the feminist discourse of rape as an instrument of genocide, which has been invoked to call for invervention in conflict zones. I argue that the construction in International law of sexual violence as a 'weapon' that'one side' picks up to harm the other, paradoxically makes the victims of violence largley invisible. This process of invisibility occursin international law when victims of wartime sexual violence, in order to have their experiences represented and recognized at trial, are expected to speak of the violence in a way that weaves fact into a community’s identity. International Criminal Tribunals offer a uniform narrative with distinct language, by which witnesses are permitted to testify to, their stories of violence. Consequently a victim’s individual memory is rendered invisible and transformed in international law as collective memory. This uniform narrative of rape fits well into the memory of collective suffering of a group, however it prevents nuanced understandings of wartime violence, found in the individual memory of victims, from being comprehended.

The commander’s dilemma

This article proposes a framework for understanding variation in armed groups’ abilities to control wartime violence, including violence against civilians. I argue that patterns (both levels and forms) of violence are shaped by armed group leaders’ attempts to meet two conflicting imperatives. To succeed, commanders must build a fighting force capable of swift, unhesitating violence; they must also maintain some control over the level, form(s), and targeting of violence. I refer to this situation as the Commander’s Dilemma. Drawing on literatures from psychology and sociology, I argue that effective behavioral control cannot be achieved via extrinsic incentives (i.e. pecuniary or non-pecuniary rewards and punishments) alone. Rather, effective control of combatant violence depends upon armed group institutions intended to align combatants’ preferences with those of commanders. I therefore focus analytically on political education, the armed group institution most likely to operate in this way. In particular, I hypothesize that armed groups with strong and consistent institutions for political education should display, on average, narrower repertoires of violence than those without. This argument finds preliminary support in a cross-national analysis of reported rape by rebel forces, as well as a qualitative investigation of armed groups during civil war in El Salvador. More broadly, this approach suggests that the creation of restraint is at least as important to our understandings of wartime violence as the production of violence.

Architectures of the Pacific Carceral Archipelago: Second World War Internment and Prisoner of War Camps

Characterisations of the Pacific Basin as a tropical archipelago essentialise its geo-cultural diversity as an alternative way of envisioning the region and its politics. This paper offers a darker projection of this archipelagic imagination as one forged by imperial competition and wartime violence. It traces its genesis across the history of the Second World War internment and prisoner of war camps. Their spatial proliferation as a carceral geography produces a variety of temporary environments where civil and legal rights are suspended. The roles adopted by captors in their treatment of prisoners reflect the social prejudices of the period, the politics of imperialism and the specific responses of warring nations during various stages of the conflict. This paper asks how architectural scholarship might address this imperial history. It draws together diverse models of incarceration related to the Pacific War, acknowledging the different treatment of racially different colonial and national subjects and tracing their passage through multiple spatial configurations of camps. The camps in Australia are contextualised in their wider Pacific geography with special attention to Victoria’s Tatura Group.

Suji Kwock Kim's “Generation” and the Ethics of Diasporic Postmemory

Regarding her highly acclaimed first book of poetry, Notes from the Divided Country, second-generation Korean American poet Suji Kwock Kim has stated that she considers the representation of the traumatic experiences of the Korean War as “the responsibility that one has, in terms of using the imagination as a means of compassion, and understanding things one couldn't have experienced.” If Notes from the Divided Country is a work created from a sense of ethical responsibility, we could perhaps also see it more specifically as a project of ethical memory and ask, along with ethnic studies scholar Jodi Kim, “What does it mean to want to represent or ‘remember’ a war that has been ‘forgotten’ and erased in the U.S. popular imaginary, but has been transgenerationally seared into the memories of Koreans and Korean Americans, and experienced anew every day in a still-divided Korea?” Notes from the Divided Country in many ways grapples with this very question and can be seen as an effort to remember the “Forgotten War” through vivid, chilling, moving poems that depict the enduring trauma of wartime violence from the perspective of diasporic postmemory. Taking Hirsch's work on Holocaust photos as a point of departure, this article reads in the poem “Generation” the poetics of postmemory and the ethics of memory from the perspective of diasporic subjectivity.