Political Violence

"The semantics of violence and space in urban history
Rasmus Christian Elling

(draft for chapter in forthcoming volume edited by Nelida Fuccaro)

As a prelude to the Arab Spring, the Iranian Green Movement of 2009 brought Middle Eastern politics to an international audience in ways never seen before. Suddenly, global media was dominated by pictures and video captured on smartphones and uploaded to YouTube from the streets of Tehran. First, it was the awe-inspiring sight of the streets filling up with green colour as millions marched peacefully in protest against what they considered the rigging of the 12th June 2009 elections. And then, after the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei stated on 19th June that no more protests would be tolerated, it was the frightening images of black-clad Islamist storm troopers charging on motorbikes, shooting at protesters and taking control of the streets by brute force. The following day, the image of a young woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, shot to death on a street corner was imprinted in the minds of millions across the world.

To the opposition, Neda became an icon of a ‘surge’ (Per. mowj) for ‘reform’ and ‘change’ while in Western media, the Green Movement was glorified as a ‘youth uprising’ or ‘Twitter revolution’. Iranian state media responded to both representations by demonizing the unrest as a ‘conspiracy’ and ‘sedition’ (fetneh). A worldwide audience had thus caught a glimpse of Tehran’s streets as a powerful theatre of Middle Eastern politics, of urban life torn apart by the spectacle of violence and of the conflicting semantics describing contention in the city.

In this volume, historians study such violence in Middle Eastern cities in the three centuries prior to the rise of social media as a form of global mass communication. The volume tackles  - in the words of Nelida Fuccaro in the previous chapter -  ‘violence as a systemic and experiential feature of urban life’. Examining this key sociological and political issue requires an exploration of the intersection between two semantic categories that appear clear-cut, evident and tangible at first sight, but then, at closer inspection, emerge as ambiguous, abstract and elusive: violence and space. In the social context, violence is not just about bodily harm, and in the urban setting, space does not only designate buildings and streets: both concepts are pregnant with differing meaning. Violence and space speak in their own languages of power, and power is expressed in the ways we speak about violence and space.

“Words are never ‘only words’”, Slavoj Zizek reminds us: “they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.” Translating the ‘language of violence’ into the language of academic research entails both normative and practical questions of interpretation and analysis. The rich vocabularies with which scholars can describe, qualify and quantify violence are paradoxically contrasted by the general absence in the historical sources of obvious equivalents of the English word violence (such as Ar. ‘unf, Per. khoshunat or Turk. siddet). This absence should perhaps not be surprising: after all, in English, the word ‘violence’ did not convey all the aspects that the popularized and prevalent idiom does today. Yet this simple point underscores an important argument: that scholars need to treat their analytical vocabularies as something distinct from those being analysed, and that a present-day reading will tease out violence that was perhaps not even normatively considered as such at the source’s time of writing.

This chapter explores such questions by proposing to see language at work on three interlinked levels. Firstly, violence and space speak their own languages; secondly, we use a specific language to talk and write about violence in lay and academic terms; and thirdly, the historical sources employ their own vernaculars of violence that are determined by cultural, geographical, linguistic and historical factors. I will discuss these levels by posing a series of methodological questions through concrete examples from the case studies presented in this volume."

Between 1984 and 1996, public health authorities in Israel maintained a secret policy of discarding blood donations made by Ethiopian-Israeli citizens and immigrants. Officials later attempted to justify this policy on the grounds that immigrants from Ethiopia were subject to high rates of infectious disease (especially HIV). In 1996, this led to an explosive and violent confrontation between Ethiopian-Israeli protestors and agents of the state, including police and public health authorities. This essay explores the cultural and political context of that confrontation, including the discourse of political violence which it occasioned. The conflict between Ethiopian-Israelis and the state was located within a wider set of political contexts, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which was linked to it through a shared trope of “spilled blood” common to both. Cultural analyses which ignore this dynamic political context are in danger of seriously misrepresenting the meaning of the “Blood Affair” to its participants. At the same time, this essay also engages a critical analysis of the public health policies which led to the crisis. Public health and nationalist discourse reinforced one another at the expense of Ethiopian immigrants in general, and so-called “Feres Mura” Ethiopians in particular.

"En toda sociedad, organizada por normas jurídicas y gobernada por una Constitución, debe existir una claridad respecto de los conceptos de validez y eficacia de las reglas, y así, del derecho, en tanto es un sistema de reglas. A ello, el positivismo jurídico en sus distintas versiones (ideológico, metodológico, teórico y normativo) ha pretendido entregar certezas al respecto. Sin embargo, suele haber discusiones sobre la relación derecho-moral y sobre
otras conexiones como derecho-poder, justicia-derecho y poder-justicia, que han tenido diversos contenidos en la literatura erudita en filosofía jurídica, moral y política.
La presente ponencia intentará explicar la red semántico-conceptual presente en la creación concomitante de un sistema jurídico alternativo y la derrota del derecho vigente, que se presupone válido y eficaz, bajo la premisa del estado de excepción, la violencia constitutiva y la teoría de la soberanía de Carl Schmitt. Para ello me valdré de dos ejes argumentativos. El primero, indagará en la dicotomía entre normalidad y excepción para responder a la
inquietud del cambio de las instituciones a partir de relaciones de poder, violencia y moral del derecho. A ello, explorar la conexión existente entre poder y justicia. El segundo, abordará un caso que intente aplicar lo anterior, como es el del Chile de 1973 a 1980 a
propósito de la Constitución Política promulgada en este último año."

""This paper investigates the neo-Fascist movement CasaPound in Italy , focusing on how political violence is framed in its public discourses, and on the role it plays as a constitutive element of the group's collective identity. Starting from the conceptualization of violence in Italian Fascism, we focus on CasaPound's practices, discourse and ideology. This paper combines findings from 18 in-depth interviews with CasaPound members, participant observation at events and concerts, and quantitative content analyses of the archive of the movement and of media coverage of its activities (2004-2012). With the aim of filling the gap in academic research on the social movement activism of the far right, this paper disentangles CasaPound's official discourse on violence, which stands out as one where violent activities are only accepted as a tool of self-determination and defence. At the same time, we find out that a cult of violence similar to the one of traditional Fascism not only emerges from the semiotic repertoire mobilized by the movement, but is also reiterated by means of experiences of collective socialization based on violence.
"

A 2005 survey of 2,328 youth (ages 12 to 18) in the West Bank, Palestine, revealed an association between exposure to politically violent events, domestic violence, and school violence and with psychological symptomatology. Results also found associations between family violence, family economic status, and psychological symptomatology. Respondents reported low levels of family functioning. Data revealed some geographic variability in experiences of politically violent events, domestic violence, school violence, and psychological symptomatology. Implications for practice are discussed.

"This volume examines "jihadi" content on the Internet by drawing on both Arabic and English primary source materials. After examining this content as digital media, the work looks at how it is productively consumed by online communities, including how "jihadi" individuals construct themselves online and how jihadism is practiced and represented as an online activity. The work also discusses the consumption of such jihadi media by those who are hostile to radical Islam and the relation between fantasy, pleasure, ideology, and ordinary life.

This unique survey features case studies, such as the cyberjihadi "Irhabi 007," pro-US and Israeli "patriots" who are often openly Islamophobic, and "Infovlad" --a forum that became the meeting place for radical Islamists and radical freelance "counter terrorists."

This innovative approach to studying violent content on the Internet is a significant contribution to the literature that will appeal to anyone interested in political violence, terrorism, and political communication."