intro to violence

Violence

the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation”

Political violence

Coercive harm connected to struggles over political authority, collective identity, territory, control or political order. It may combine political and private motives.

Symbolic violence

A subtle fight for domination through meanings, norms and social categories (works through language, status, expectations and classifications)

It makes social hierarchies appear natural and shapes how people see themselves and others

Structural violence

A patterned, avoidable form of harm built into social, economic and political arrangements. It often operates through unequal access to reosurces, protection, healthcare, rights and opportunites. (AVOIDABILITY)

Farmer

Shows how poverty, racism, gender inequality and political exclusion become embodied as suffering, illness and premature death.=

Farmer sees structural violence as

Indirect, reproduced through social arrangements, historically produced, normalized and invisibilized, and constraining agency

Farmer’s ethnography helps us see

Links between experiences lived to institutional and economic structures and historical dynamics, shows that individual cases are not accidental but patterned, challenges hegemonic accounts

Inner-city street culture

A web of beliefs, symbols, modes of interaction, values, and ideologies that have emerged in opposition to exclusion from mainstream society → it allows people to develop dignity while resisting dominant culture

Nordstrom

Politics of erasure → what do we see, generalizations & stereotypes, the role of power in war, what does war feel like?

Factors that reduce culpability

• Endogenous impairments in decision making

• Extraordinary circumstances

• Out of Character

Adolescents culpability

• Diminished decision-making capacities

• Susceptibility to peer influence

• Heightened vulnerability to coercive circumstances

• Unformed character

Moffitt

Dual Taxonomy of Offending

Life Course Persistant

• Individual risk factors: neuropsychological deficits

• Environmental risk factors: inadequate parenting & low SES

Adolescent limited

• Individual risk factors: maturity gap

• Environmental risk factors: deviant peer influence

social neurodevelopmental models

Cognitive control systems vs Socio-emotional system

In emotionally arousing contexts, adolescents’ socioemotional processing systems in the brain become hyper-responsive and override the cognitive control system ultimately leading to heightened adolescent risk-taking

Defoe

Development Neuro-Ecological Risk-taking Model

Development Neuro-Ecological Risk-taking Model

This model emphasizes an interaction between adolescents’ neuropsychological development adn their changing physical and social ecology (social and physical risk exposure)

Measuring violence through psychology

Forms of measurement (continuous vs discrete with antisocial behavior vs defined by law)

Research methods include mixed forms of measurement using experiments, questionnaires, ec.

Raine

Biosocial model of violence

Risk factors of youth

biological and early developmental factors, adolescent developmental factors (ongoing development of skills & peer environment), family and parenting environment, and structural environment (housing, schools, neighborhood)

Galtung's Six Dimensions of Violence

Mode of influence (physical v. psychological)

Approach to influence (negative v. positive)

Object side (object present v. object absent)

Subject side (personal/direct v. structural/indirect)

Intention (intended v. unintended)

Level (manifest v. latent)

Negative Peace

Absence of direct violence

Positive peace

Reduction of structural violence and social injustice

Visibility of structural vi

Farmer Haiti

History (slavery) → Structure (poverty, unequal access) → Exposure (differential risk) → Outcome (illness, delayed care, death)

Children at risk

Children and young people often encounter violence not only as direct victimization, but through institutions that shape exposure, protection and recovery

Exposure → protection → Recovery

Master cleavage

The conflict as outsiders often describe it (ethnic, ideological, religious, class-based)

Local cleavage

what may motivate action on the ground (old rivalries, property disputes, revenge, local office)

Kalyvas

Violence as political v. Violence as greed → Reject the dichotomy

Land regimes are encoded by

Property rights, authority rights, citizenship rights, jurisdiction

The Arena

Institutions shape;

• who is vulnerable

• which identities become politically salient

• where claims are directed

• which strategies are available

The Capacity

Institutions and resource arrangements shape:

• who can be hired

• how costly violence can be

• whether relationships are ad hoc or durable

• how coercive capacity is organized

Political Violence has a Political Economy

Incumbent incentive → Unequal rents → Perpetrator Choice

High rent settings

• Armed groups are costly but effective

• Organized structure and local knowledge

• Violent reputation enhances intimidation

• Greater autonomy and bargaining power

• Relationships can be long-term

Low-rent Settings

• Ordinary citizens are cheaper

• Recruitment is more ad hoc

• Localized reach

• Less coercive reputation

• Greater dependence on incumbents

Rent process

Fiscal decentralization → incumbent access → recruitment choice → coercive capacity → political violence

Democracy Expectations vs. Reality

Expectation: Democracy should reduce violence by opening institutionalized channels for participation, dissent, and bargaining. Despite political violence declining in much of Latin America poverty, unemployment and inequality often persist. → Conditions are important too

Violence sometimes persisted under democracy and sometimes ended under authoritarianism.

Conditions

Semi-Democracy: Transitions may combine newly opened opportunities for mobilization with unresolved grievances and weak impartial institutions

Unequal welfare: Democracy does not automatically redistribute. Organized groups may capture benefits while poorer groups remain weakly represented

Violence finance: Political violence may survive where armed actors have viable revenue sources even in democratic contexts

Institutions can reduce political violence through

Voice, responsiveness, welfare, and accountability

Allocation mechanism

Structure describes the context in which actors struggle; structure itself does not mechanically produce outcome

Capacity mechanism

The cases probe plausibility; alternative explanations cannot all be excluded. Resources shape capacity within a strategic political process.

Channeling mechanism

Democracy's effect is mediated by income, state capacity, legacies, welfare institutions, peace agreements and violence financing

Differences between structural and political violence

• systemic avoidable harm produced through unequal social arrangements vs violent action connected to a conflict, authority, identity, and contestation

• Indirect and normalized vs direct and observable

• Social structures and institutiosn unequally distributing resources and constraining agency in a patterned but not targeted way vs actors using, threatening, organizing, or delegating violence in pursuit of political struggles towards people because of their identities

How anthropology studies violence

Anthropology asks how violence becomes ordinary meaningful, embodied, and unevenly distributed across time and different scales

Ethnographies put perspectives into relations rather than treating one account as the whole story. All perspectives including contradictions between perspectives are data. This multi-perspectival approach prepares the move from interpersonal violence to structural and environmental violence.

Parts of Anthropological Studies

• Lived experience: ethnography follows everyday life: fear, dignity, pain, coping, relationships, and meanings

• Social relations: violence is examined through households, streets, institutions, workplaces, policing and care

• History and power: anthropologists connect the presnt to colonialism, racism, labor regimes, state policy, and political economy

• Embodiment: inequality becomes material: illness, injury, exposure, stress, hunger, displacement, shortened lives

• Scale: body, household, community, institution, state, global processes

How does ethnographic reasoning make hidden violence visible?

Anthropology builds explanation by following patterns across time, relationships, institutions, and material conditions.

thick description → patterned relations → institutional mechanisms → historical structures → wider theory

stay close, follow connections, compare accounts, historicise

Slow violence

A violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all

Visibility

Mismatch between temporality of environmental harm & temporality of attention → visibility becomes political.

Politics of postponement. Prevention is politically difficult because costs are immediate while benefits may occur decades later. Slow violence therefore encourages deferral, death by indirection.

Displacement of place

Person remains → place changegs

Environmentalism of the poor

Environmentalism struggles among poorer communities are often struggles to protect the material conditions of everyday life

Slow violence and structural violence

• Both concepts draw attention to:

  • social injustice, hidden agency, indirect harm

• Slow violence additionally foregrounds:

  • how does that harm unfold through time?

  • how does cause become separated from consequence?

  • how does environmental change make violence difficult to perceive?

Environmental justice is rarely only environmental

Nixon connects environmental suffering to resource imperialism: wealthy populations and expanding middle classes consume resources drawn from environments inhabited by populations who often bear disproportionate ecological costs.

Environmental changes’ effects are entangled with histories of inequality, land control, development and dispossession

Toxic confusion

Exposure → uncertainty → division → waiting

Residents are exposed, but contradictory actions and messages make causality and responsibility difficult to establish

Climate reductionism

Over-attributing complex social, political, and ecological problems only to climate change → depoliticization

Difference between structural and slow violence

Slow violence foregrounds questions of change and movement over staticity.

Structural violence is a theory that entails rethinking different notions of causation and agency with respect to violent effects. Slow violence has a wider descriptive range in calling attention, not simply to question of agency, but to broader, more complex descriptive categories of violence enacted slowly over time.

Social push hypothesis

Where an antisocial child lacks social factors that “push” or predispose them to antisocial behavior, then biological factors may more likely explain antisocial behavior

Fuzzy trace theory

Differentiates between verbatim-based decision-making and gist-based decision-making

Neurodevelopmental Imbalance Models

Differentiate between cognitive control versus socioemotional brain systems