Geographies of Political Violence, War, and Displacement Flashcards
Define structural violence.
Johan Galtung (1969) developed the concept of structural violence – ‘if people are starving when this is objectively avoidable, then violence is committed, regardless of whether there is a clear subject-action-object relation’.
Concept later developed to include violence arising from the deliberate maintenance of a global system of inequity.
How can we understand geographies of violence?
Violence is involved in the (re)production of place and space.
Imaginative geographies enable the conduct of particular forms of violence – ‘spaces of exception’ (Mbembe 2003 and 2019).
What does colonial violence look like?
Modern African State was conceived through violence; Violence was a central mechanism for governing the colonized people;
‘The colony represents the site where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of a power outside the law (ab legibus solutus) and where “peace” is more likely to take on the face of a “war without end” ( Mbembe 2003)
‘The colonies are the location par excellence where the controls and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended—the zone where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of “civilization.” … In the colonies, the sovereign might kill at any time or in any manner. Colonial warfare is not subject to legal and institutional rules (Mbembe 2003)
Describe populist (media) interpretations of the causes of war in Africa.
Tribalism/Ethnicity – resurgence of age-old hatreds.
Irrational, extremely brutal, inhumane; rape as a weapon of war.
Use of primitive technology – the machete.
What is the ‘New Barbarism’ thesis?
Kaplan (1994)
‘War is consequence of the loss of control over Africa’s youth – ‘loose molecules’ – influenced by Rambo films, globalised synthetic drugs, atavistic forms of witchcraft, rock, gangsta rap’.
Popular with Western policy makers, it is a highly non-progressive thesis.
What is the ‘Greed versus Grievance’ debate?
Argues war is caused by greed. Proponents of the greed argument posit that armed conflicts are caused by a combatant’s desire for self-enrichment.
X - simplistic modelling.
What is the ‘Resource Wars’ thesis?
Greed linked to resource abundance can cause wars.
Countries with a high percentage of non-renewable primary commodity resources are prone to conflict.
Primary commodity resources - high value mineral rich resources, such as oil, diamonds and gold, can be used to prosecute and sustain wars.
!!! Resources are not primary cause of War, but help to sustain them e.g. oil wealth to buy weapons. !!!
How is political violence linked to neo-extractivism in Africa?
Extractivism and Neo-Extractivism can explain some of the conflicts that have occurred in Africa
Resource extraction and the global demand for resources, whether strategic minerals or land, can be accompanied by violence
Donors still allied with predatory elite – rent-seeking elites (i.e. state elites who capture state resources for personal gain)
Donors promote ‘good governance’; that is ‘political regimes managing public affairs according to the free market and controlling popular internal opposition without gross abuses of human rights’ (Adedeji, 2004).
Elections - rigged (electocracy not democracy) (Ake 1996):
Civil society participation but not empowerment; not autonomous but link to state in a network of governance – involvement of civil society in the production of PRSPs.
Context of displacement in Africa?
6.6m refugees; 14.6m Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) 83% of African refugees remain on the continent; 17m of concern to UNHCR (UNHCR, 2017).
Key characteristics: Protractedness, Recycling and reliance on international humanitarian aid.
Describe the trouble with camps.
Camps, established as temporary spaces for managing emergencies, have become semi-permanent.
Camps as ‘waiting rooms’ (Hyndmann & Giles 2011).
Generates ontological insecurity – anxiety due to absence of meaning to life (Hyndmann 2016).
Feminization of men – real men are passive waiting for resettlement (Hyndman & Giles 2011).
‘Dangerous places’ – ‘state of exception’ – spaces for disciplining refugees technologies of ‘care and control’ for those ‘out of place’ (Malkki, 1995) (Agamben, Minca, Ramadan 2012)
