Putting the Political back into Political Violence

Abstract

Since the end of the Cold War, two competing explanations of political violence have come to dominate the minds of policy makers, and a significant section of academia. The first is, as Dag Tuastad notes, a tendency to explain political „violence as a result of traits embedded in local cultures‟. This, Mahmood Mamdani continues, holds „that every culture has a tangible essence that defines it, and it then explains politics as a consequence of that essence‟. The second is that political violence is driven by expected utility – particularly personal gain. Long the favoured explanatory framework for the Bretton Woods institutions, this was (in)famously captured by Paul Collier‟s “greed” thesis. Rebellions are, he wrote, nothing more than the „large-scale predation of productive economic activities‟ accompanied by obfuscatory discourses that provide „no informational content to the researcher as to the[ir] true motivation‟. Both these approaches have been used extensively to explain the violence of the non-Western “other”. Accounts of the “communal” violence of south asia, the “sectarianism” of the Middle East and the “ethnic” wars of sub-Saharan Africa are often presented as resting on the ancient hatreds of faith, culture and settled history or the avaricious motives of conflict “entrepreneurs”. Neither approach, however, offers very much space for a political understanding of individual motive and collective mobilization. On the one hand, what Etienne Balibar, Arun Kundnani and others call the “new culturalism” has tended to obstruct or dilute critique while, on the other, viewing political violence in „quasi-criminal‟ terms (in Collier‟s words) has often produced a-historical studies with little social context. The combined result is frequently a conservative endorsement of Western security policy, state authority and existent power relations. This panel seeks to present alternative, political explanations of violence – an attempt to get towards what Chris Cramer has called „the relations of force rather than just choices of violence‟. Papers might look critically at representations of violence, the politically contingent use of history, the role of the state, the distribution of resources, the meanings/motives of “terrorism” and war or the maintenance of the international order, but any contribution that speaks broadly to our theme will be considered.

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Political violent activism in times of social turmoil: the life stories of former clandestine militants in Portugal	View Paper Details
When Political Control Declines: Explaining Local Variations in State Repression of Arab Protest in Israel, 1990-2000	View Paper Details
What Makes Violence Political? A Narrative Approach to the German Terrorist Group National Socialist Underground (NSU)	View Paper Details