‘BANAL VIOLENCE‘? THE EVERYDAY UNDERPINNINGS OF COLLECTIVE VIOLENCE

Outbursts of collective violence are often (understandably) met by expressions of outrage or condemnation. ‘How is it,’ accounts muse, ‘that ordinary people can commit such atrocities?’ This article argues that an exclusive focus on the violent act can contribute little to our understanding. Instead, it seeks to elucidate the routine processes and actions that serve to render violence acceptable (even banal) as a mode of action. Exclusive identities and a powerful rhetoric of honour, pride, and shame persuade people that violence is either desirable or even necessary in a given context. Following Billig's account of banal nationalism, I argue that grasping these mundane day-to-day processes is essential for an understanding of collective violence. The article draws on research amongst caste-based movements in South India to support this argument.     

“Involved in something (involucrado en algo)”: Denial and stigmatization in Mexico’s “war on drugs”

This article responds empirically to the question posed by Stan Cohen about “why, when faced by knowledge of others’ suffering and pain—particularly the suffering and pain resulting from what are called ‘human rights violations’—does ‘reaction’ so often take the form of denial, avoidance, passivity, indifference, rationalisation or collusion?”. Our context is Mexico's “war on drugs.” Since 2006 this “war” has claimed the lives of around 240,000 Mexican citizens and disappeared around 60,000 others. Perpetrators include organized criminal gangs and state security services. Violence is pervasive and widely reported. Most people are at risk. Our study is based on qualitative interviews and focus groups involving 68 “ordinary Mexicans” living in five different Mexican cities which have varying levels of violence. It investigates participant proximity to the victims and the psychological defense mechanisms they deploy to cope with proximity to the violence. We found that 62 of our participants knew, directly or indirectly, one or more people who had been affected. We also found one dominant rationalization (defense mechanism) for the violence: that the victims were “involved in something” (drugs or organized crime) and therefore “deserved their fate.” This echoes prevailing state discourses about the violence. We argue that the discourse of “involved” is a discourse of denial that plays three prominent roles in a highly violent society in which almost no-one is immune: it masks state violence, stigmatizes the victims, and sanctions bystander passivity. As such, we show how official and individual denial converge, live, and reproduce, and play a powerful role in the perpetuation of violence.     

Science and social work: a sketch

While recognizing that understanding of ‘science’ varies across time and countries, there are strands of a shared albeit diverse inheritance. Failures to see where we are located within this inheritance make the social work community vulnerable to simplistic claims regarding what, for example, ‘doing science’ is like. This in turn makes it difficult to deal adequately with questions such as in what ways can or should we distinguish social work science from other kinds of knowledge? Is science in some recognizable way a unified form of knowledge? How ought we to deal with disputes and disagreements in social work science? What kinds of consequences might we envisage from social work science? I deal in turn with each of these questions.     

Forging the links: (de)constructing chains of behaviours

This paper will discuss an article by Becker and French (2005) in this Journal which proposed the general acceptance of correlations or the ‘links’ between child abuse, animal abuse and domestic violence. Becker and French claim this topic has ‘seen a growth of interest’ (p. 399) over the past two decades and they suggest that organizations across the UK should ‘institutionalize the “links” within policy and practice’ (p. 410). In this paper we question the appropriateness of linking different forms of violence in such a mechanistic and predictive way by drawing on and extending arguments we have made elsewhere. We consider the proposed ‘links’ in terms of assumptions, de?nitions, methods and logic, and raise concerns for a prospective practice which is based on retrospective (and ?awed) research. We aim to appeal to in?uential doubters (social workers, child care workers, animal welfare workers, vets, educators and policy‐makers) in a language of ‘reason’, and we propose that the identi?ed reluctance of professionals in the UK to adopt the rhetoric of ‘links’ can be viewed as an informed and re?ective response. Throughout, we offer a corrective commentary to the ?awed assumptions of the ‘links’ argument and seek to encourage others to remain sceptical about these claims and the suggested implications for practice. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Spiralling Up or Spinning Out: A Guide for Reflecting on Action Research Practice

This paper offers a theoretical ‘action research spiral’ model to guide reflection on the dual client focus of action research. While theoretically exploring and highlighting the tensions and dilemmas created by this dual client focus, this paper will argue for a greater degree of reflection on action research practice and utilize vignettes from action research cases to illustrate those reflective processes. It is concluded that further discussion and reflection on the process of action research is an important component of social science’s contribution to phronetic knowledge.

I saw the University as helping us to reflect on what we are doing—they are the expert reflectors. This is particularly what I saw as X’s role. Sometimes his interjections go above their heads and his ‘nine words or less’ statements need to have some explanation, and I should feed this back to him. I also see the University as playing a visionary role, helping to show us new things about what is possible. I don’t see the University as helping to pull the team together—that is when it gets confusing. They are observing us, they are looking at us as the rats, and when they see something that they think needs to be addressed, they can feed this back to us—and this is where teaching and formal learning comes in. This is a difficult role for the University. I can see some of the University people just squirming—you can see it in their face that they want to intervene. They know something about what we are doing but are not imparting the knowledge. This can piss people off. They are withholding what they know and not helping. But it can also piss people off if they come in too early and tell us what is going on and what to do and not let us wallow around for a while, and learn. This is what I see as a major problem for the University. As you observe us, at what point do you reflect the learning and feedback, and yet not prostitute the learning or dirty the data. …We are the rats, the factory is your laboratory. But when we are looking at the role of the University, you are the rats. (Plant Manager and Industry Sponsor of an Action Research Project, 2000)     

Tokens or Stakeholders in Global Migration Governance? The Role of Affected Communities and Civil Society in the Global Compacts on Migration and Refugees

Focussing on the inclusion of those primarily affected as stakeholders (refugees and other migrants), this article addresses a key ambition of the compacts themselves. We employ an ‘inside‐outside’ perspective and firstly ask: which groups participated in the consultative processes, what agenda did they set ‘inside’ the meetings, what alliances did they establish and how did they influence the outcomes? Secondly, we investigate what kind of advocacy took place ‘outside’ of these formalized spaces and what impact it had? By this, we not only contribute to an evaluation of the processes themselves, but also advance current academic debates on strategies, spaces and political opportunity structures for civil society and particularly migrant involvement in global migration governance from below and the larger debate on democratizing global institutions.     

Igniting Constructionist Imaginations: Social Constructionism’s Absence and Potential Contribution to Public Sociology

Why have social constructionists remained absent from debates over public sociology? I argue that constructionist scholarship would be particularly amenable to Michael Burawoy’s notion of ‘organic’ public sociology, given the ability of constructionist scholars to orient awareness contexts in order to help engender constructionist imaginations. This approach requires that constructionists take on a different view of the role of the analyst. I also discuss some of the problems Canadian academics have had engaging with the media in their efforts to engage in ‘traditional’ public sociology, as well as what a constructionist public sociology may look like practice. I conclude by addressing potential challenges to a constructionist public sociology within Canada, including reference to sociology’s disciplinary coherence and how we can approach—and what we mean by—‘publics’.     

THE MICRO-ETHICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE

In this article I offer an unfashionably ideological critique. I argue that, in the USA, ideology now appears in the form of the narratives that capitalism tells itself about itself, in particular at sites of commodity consumption. I examine three everyday sites in which capitalism constructs an Imaginary version of itself as it exhorts contemporary consumers to consume ethically: during a visit to a Target Superstore; on an overnight stay in a hotel room; and while purchasing a bag of fair trade coffee. In these moments and at these sites, corporations instruct us in the ‘ethical’ use of their commodities, and obeying those instructions promotes us to the rank of ‘consumer activist’. This article attempts to explain how this ‘ethical consumption’ – a form of what I call ‘micro-ethics’ – has displaced more social, or ‘macro’, forms of ethical action. To make my case, I argue that globalized capitalism denies many of us the social coordinates, or handholds, that are necessary if we are to feel that we can act meaningfully within the Symbolic Order, or social reality itself. This ‘deworlding’ effect, as Alain Badiou calls it, encourages us to reject social forms of ethical and political life and to retreat to a careful policing of the Imaginary boundaries of our ‘inner selves’ instead. In other words, global capitalism logically produces, as its own ideological support and supplement, a micro-ethics that attends only to what the single person can do, and only within the realm of consumption. We participate in this fantasy version of ‘eco-capitalism’ that advertising, publicity and other discourses establish to the extent that we accept consumption as the ultimate horizon of our ability to intervene in problems of ecological depredation and the exploitation of labour in the First and Third Worlds.     

The ‘Indian Queen’ of the four continents: tracing the ‘undifferentiated Indian’ through Europe’s encounters with Muslims,anti-Blackness,and conquest of the ‘New World’

ABSTRACT

This article places Columbus’s travels to the New World within a much older history of eight centuries of Muslim/Moor presence on the Iberian Peninsula. It argues that the Orientalist logics underlining the creation of the ‘New World Indian’ have a long history interpellated through figures of the Moors and other Africans whom Europeans knew for centuries before they encountered the Indigenous peoples of the ‘New World.’ This article argues for the need to bring together seemingly discrepant figures, spatialities, and temporalities in order to re/examine what we know and have yet to learn about entanglements of colonialism, capitalism, race, caste, gender, sexuality, and other social formations. Such a reading of the figure not only brings to fore unexamined relationalities but also demands that we think critically and concretely about questions of our complicity in upholding different systems of violence.     

Social theory and the de-escalation of international conflict*

Are we like the mothers and fathers at Jonestown, with the cyanide in place, rehearsing for suicide-murder? Daniel Ellsberg (1981) observes that the marchers protesting nuclear weapons are doing what the mothers and fathers in Jonestown waited too long to say ‘No! Not our children! This is craziness; we won't be part of it.’ He writes that ‘It is none too soon to be saying this to the President/Prime Minister/Chairman Jim Jones's of the world; nor is it, yet, too late.’ How did we get into a place that even resembles Jonestown: And more importantly, how do we get out of it? Social theory should help provide answers to such questions, but does not obviously do so. In the first part of this paper I discuss an emerging theoretical paradigm that has particular relevance for understanding how international conflicts increase and decrease in intensity. Then I apply that paradigm to instances of international conflict de-escalation, focusing on declines in tension and hostility between the Soviet and American governments and the Israeli and Egyptian governments. Finally, I will point to some implications of the discussion for social theory and for international policy.     

Muslim women as ‘ambassadors’ of Islam: breaking stereotypes in everyday life

This article explores the efforts of Dutch Muslim women who try to break the ‘oppressed Muslim woman’ stereotype by monitoring their own behaviour in everyday interactions with members of the non-Muslim ethnic majority. In representing themselves as modern and emancipated, they try to change the dominant image of Muslim women in Dutch society, and thus also that of Islam. Based on interviews and archival material, I demonstrate that initially this strategy was mostly adopted by Dutch converts to Islam, and later also by ‘born’ Muslim women. Why do more and more Muslim women turn themselves into ‘ambassadors’ of Islam? And what are the costs of this form of self-essentialization? This article demonstrates the usefulness of studying self-representations of minority groups in the light of existing stereotypes, arguing that Muslim women’s self-representations should be seen as part of a politics of belonging.     

Reclaiming the everyday: the situational dynamics of the 2011 London Riots

This paper examines the situational dynamics of the 2011 London Riots. The empirical contribution is to challenge the dominant explanation of the riots as an outbreak of ‘criminal opportunism’. I use the Metropolitan Police record of all riot-related crimes in London to test several hypotheses and show that this ‘criminal opportunism’ theory cannot account for the riots’ spatial patterning. This opens space for alternative explanatory mechanisms. I then use video footage and testimonies of events on the ground to examine the interactions which made up the London Riots. These suggest that the riots were, in part, a way for people to stake a claim to the public spaces in which they lived, to reclaim the everyday. Theoretically, this builds on Randall Collins’s ‘micro-situational’ approach to violence but extends it by embedding historical and structural factors into that micro-perspective. Specifically, the emotional dynamics of these riot interactions cannot be understood without acknowledging participants’ pre-existing expectations of the police and of the everyday places of the riot.     

Contested Concepts in Violence Against Women: ‘Intimate’, ‘Domestic’ or ‘Torture’?

Abstract

Ritualistic, overwhelmingly violent bikie gang or cult-inflicted abuse of women, entrenched by co-opting third party cult or gang members, has been referred to as ‘domestic violence’, ‘intimate violence’ or ‘intimate partner violence’. The present article questions the aptitude of these terms to convey the realities of this violence, in light of the experiences of women attending a South Australian domestic violence service, all of whom were escaping violent partners who were members or associates of bikie gangs and cults. The paper asks, ‘is torture an appropriate term for such violence?’ and discusses the impact of social, legal, organisational and human rights parallel states that collaborate to make it almost impossible for these women to escape this violence and make it difficult for social workers to work effectively with them. The paper concludes that the State needs to adopt a human rights rather than legal focus when addressing the issue of violence against women.     

Meeting the Needs of the Social Care and Health Care Workforce: Can a Duck Sleep with a Hippopotamus?

In a period when recruitment and retention are crucial issues in health and social care the focus of this paper is:

? Who are the workforce of health and social care?

? What are the needs of that workforce?

? How safe is it for the much smaller partner, social care, to work together with the much larger health care?

The latter point heads us back to the sub‐title of the paper: can a duck sleep with a hippopotamus?

This question comes from an advert used in the UK for a bed manufacturer, where our British sensitivities and fear of sex prevents us from showing a man and a woman in a double bed, what the Spanish charmingly call a ‘cama de matrimonio’, a marriage bed, and instead we show a hippopotamus and a duck sleeping, safely, in the same bed.

To follow this analogy, we have to show:

? that health and social care are in the same bed;

? that one is as large as a hippopotamus, and the other as small as a duck;

? what the dangers are of this;

and ask the question:

? What is there in the place of ‘spring technology’ which would permit both to sleep together, and for the duck not to end up flat?

In doing so, I hope to answer the first three questions I posed.     

Conversation takes two: understanding interactions with people with dementia

The term ‘person-centred’ underpins dementia policy and approaches to support people with dementia. However, ‘person-centredness’ remains hazy, and words and definitions matter greatly when they are at the heart of defining what happens in people’s lives. Drawing on data from an ongoing project, this article suggests that conversations which include a person with dementia can elucidate how ‘relational’ support is enacted in practice and the implications this can have on our understanding of ‘person-centredness’. Identities are shaped in part through how we speak to people, and how they speak to us. This is particularly pertinent to the aims of ‘person-centredness’. A conversation analytic approach to dementia support may therefore move us towards seeing ‘personhood’ as jointly constructed and reconstructed through interactions with others.     

Chronotopes in the scopic regime of sovereignty

The foundations of law are embedded in a cultural imaginary. The exercise of sovereignty by governments today, and how we as citizens relate to it and are constituted by it, is intimately connected to the modes and discourses through which we experience it on a daily basis. To demonstrate this argument, the first two sections address iconic images by two Australians who are among the greatest photo-journalists of the twentieth century – Frank Hurley in World War I and Damien Parer in World War II. The essay then proceed to considers contemporary and global images of sovereign violence. A comparison, not just in terms of what is represented but how, will help us articulate three different ‘scopic regimes’ of war, power, and subjectivity. In particular, we will see that the images organise differing relationships between experience and time. As Mikhail Bakhtin argued in his pioneering work on the novel, these ‘chronotopes,’ by giving aesthetic form to different orientations to time and the temporal, express and indeed constitute different forms of subjectivity. The argument is advanced in this essay by shifting our attention to visual forms and to legal subjectivity.     

Figures of youth: on the very object of Youth Studies

ABSTRACT

‘Youth’ as a social category is used and abused in all manner of ways across an array of fields, platforms, discourses and spaces, Youth Studies notwithstanding. When we talk about ‘young people’ sometimes we seem to be referring to different phenomena, depending upon our political interests, theoretical perspectives and research methods. This article interrogates how the concept of ‘youth’ is figuratively put to work. By suggesting different figures of youth, and inviting suggestions for more, I propose that tracing how they are situated in different ontological spaces can develop a clearer conception of our research object(s) and help reduce confusion and the possibility that we are talking past each other. The incomplete picture I want to paint of figures of youth, in quite broad-brush strokes, all inter-relate in something of a feedback loop, a material-semiotic assemblage that forms powerful affects for the ways that ‘youth’ is brought into being, how youth are researched, governed, co-opted and exploited.     

The 3×1 Programme and criminal violence in Mexico

Are levels of criminal violence lower where emigrants collaborate with the state authorities in the funding and provision of public goods and services? In this article, I examine the causal effect on violence levels in the municipalities participating in Mexico's Three‐for‐One (3×1) Programme for Migrants. Using municipal‐level data for the period between 2001 and 2010, the analysis shows that the implementation of this programme led to an increase in violence in the municipalities in question, and that this effect is driven by the ‘war on drugs’ initiated by the Mexican government in 2006. Because cartels splinter when kingpins are captured, they look for sources of revenue other than drug smuggling. The budgetary gains obtained via the 3×1 Programme inadvertently increased the returns of extortion and directed the attention of organized criminals to the participant municipalities. The evidence highlights some of the unintended effects that the leveraging of emigrants' money may have in home countries where governments make the so‐called ‘kingpin strategy’ a centrepiece of their security strategy.     

Giving,Saving, Spending: What Would Children Do with £1 Million?

This article explores children's responses to a single question: ‘If someone gave you £1 million today, what would you do with it?’ Although such an exploration might seem trivial, we argue that their responses provide important insights into children's values and priorities. One‐third intend to spend it all, one quarter to save it. But the largest group claim that they would give all or some of the money away. Their responses highlight the divergent ways in which children use money to foster particular forms of social relations and social standing. Against the prevalent discourse of consumer society, the dominant theme of giving may indicate that the individualism of neoliberalism is less pervasive than is often feared, but also suggest that further research is needed into the social contexts and processes which encourage children to be ‘givers’, ‘savers’ or ‘spenders’.