definition
- Includes censorship
- “Undue alteration (as of wording or sense in editing a text)” — Merriam-Webster
theories
- Biological approach
- Predisposition approach
- Gendered
- Psychological approach
- Abuse
- Neglect
- Personal histories
- Sociological analysis
categories
- Law
- Rationale
- Senseless
- Mental illness or pathology
- Extreme inhumanity
- Legitimate
- State-sanctioned
- Genocide → senseless in retrospect
- Punishment, power, control
- Defense, resistance
- Entertainment
- Levels
- Subjective: visible with clearly identified agent
- Symbolic: language and structures of discourse (e.g. flying Nazi flag — pressure and push to other)
- Systemic: naturalized, invisible and sustains dominant sociocultural order (e.g. prison systems, patriarchy)
social theory
- Violence occurs as society breaks down (Delanty)
- Violence as core to social bonding (Girard)
- Sacred rituals
- Prohibitive laws for order
- Violence monopolized by the state (Giddens)
- Military power
- Civic pacification
power
- Violence can never generate power (Arendt)
- Violence is “hope of those who have no power”
- Violence can be a source of power (Ray)
- “Underside of power” (Foucault)
- Encoded systems of normativity: justifications for violence
- Reasoning
- Revolution or self-defense
- Achieving status, land, or goods
socially organized
- Violence and its reactions (e.g. war and trauma) can create social bonding
- “Civilization process” (Elias)
- Social interdependence → state’s monopoly on means of violence
- Privitization of violence (Cooney)
- Restraint on public violence → increase in intimate-familial violence
- Rise and fall because of real causality or because its being talked about more and recorded more?
- Modes of discipline (Foucault)
- Prison system, social control
- Visible forms of violence
- “Peace lines”, DMZ
- Symbolic
state violence
types
- Used in conjunction in authoritarian states
- Instrumental violence: to achieve a goal
- Direct targeting and neutralizing of threats or challenges
- Rebels, rival authorities
- e.g. Rounding up communists for detention or execution
- Exemplary violence: to stop others from committing similar “crimes”
- Propaganda, surveillance, suppression of speech
- Primary targets and secondary audiences (those who learn)
- Instructing through negative examples