IBV: socio-political boundaries w3 "groups boundaries & violence" Flashcards
Violence
act of physical hurt deemed legitimate by performer and illegitimate by witnesses. It is communicate: it sends a message
Violence practice
1) always expresses some kind of relationship with another party
2) is never meaningless to the actor - rationality
3) never a totally isolated act (e.g. product of historical process)
Violence as process (Schroder & Schmidt)
- Conflict (socio-economic contradictions at the base of inter-group competition)
- Confrontation (perception of these causes by parties involved as relevant, creating an antagonistic relationship)
- Legitimation (official sanctioning of violence as the legitimate course of action, through imaging of violent scenarios from the past and their social representation)
- war (if these 3 stage have been passed - violence is finally put into practice as a means to achieve specific ends)
Aggression
Derives from the motivation to harm the other as an end in itself
Elite theory
Violence is instrumentally used to maintain and harden (ethnic) boundaries as a means to power.
- top-down and elite driven
- political strategy: acquire power by creating a strong in-group of followers
Alliance Approach
(ethnic) boundaries are master cleavage, instrumentally used by actors teaming up to pursue their goals
- civilians aren’t passive or invisible, they have agency and goals
- violence only possible through alliances between groups at different levels of society
Discursive Approach
(ethnic) boundaries are constructed through the imaging of violent scenarios from the past which are crucial to imagine and legitimize future violence
- takes the building of stories (narratives) as point of departure (of identity)
- “people do not commit political violence without discourse, they need to talk themselves into it”
- violence needs to be imagined in order to be carried out (Schroder & Schmidt)
Power
Elite theory: coercion, owned by some who can wield it over others
Alliance approach: complex, strategic, negotiated relationship ‘we are in’ (Foucault) its the outcome of negotiations
Discursive approach: power as the ability to make other inhabit your story of their reality. It’s relational and discursive.
Discourse community
(Ethnic) group is a discourse community. Ethnic / religious groups are the product of boundary rules, not biology (docu: Rabat, Blood & Belonging)
Violent imaginaries
Emphasize the history of present-day confrontations, this can be represented in
- narratives, keep memory of group history (glorifying achievements or perceived injustices, losses or suffering incurred by one’s own group)
- performances, public rituals where antagonistic relationships are staged an images of violence are enacted
- and inscriptions, visual display on mural and banners of antagonism
Also “symbolism”; polarized structure (us/them), principle of totality (action of other is threat), struggle of vital importance of ‘our’ survival, moral superiority of ‘our’ case and post-war society presented in dire terms: only complete victory or total defeat.
Ethnic conflict
is not a conflict between ethnic groups, but an ethnicized conflict or ethnically framed conflict
situation in which two or more parties perceive they have incompatible goals and label the perceived ethnic differences between the parties as integral rather than
n incidental to the conflict.
Ethnic violence
Violence perpetrated across ethnic lines, (between parties) at which ethnic difference is coded (by perpetrators, targets, third parties, analysts) as been integral rather than incidental to violence. So, violence is coded as having been meaningfully oriented in some way to the different ethnicity of the target. (Brubaker)
Analysis
Unravel the complex dynamics of interactive processes in order to understand how and why people resort to violence.
