Political settlements as a violent process: deconstructing the relationship between political settlements and intrinsic,instrumental and resultant forms of violence

Abstract

This article explores the opportunities and conundrums of understanding violence at critical junctures following ruptures in political orders through the prism of political settlements. While there is an emerging body of scholarship on political settlements, we specifically examine its relationship to violence, which we argue has been under-theorised. Through comparative country case studies (Bangladesh, Egypt, Kenya, Sierra Leone), we examine in a historicised manner how these types of settlements interact with various forms of violence at various scales. The article reconceptualises political settlements in relation to three forms of violence, intrinsic, instrumental and resultant, and shows how multi-scale dynamics and formal/informal interactions shape the violent nature of political settlements in different contexts.     

Masculinity and male survivors of wartime sexual violence: a Bosnian case study

While conflict-related sexual violence affects men and women, male survivors are often overlooked or marginalised. The case of Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) is a poignant example. Twenty-two years after the Bosnian war ended, little attention has been given to the men who suffered diverse forms of sexual violence during the conflict. The present article contributes to addressing this gap. Based on semi-structured interviews with 10 men who endured the horrors of the ?elopek camp in north-east BiH, it focuses on the lives of these men today. Exploring the men’s silences and the intersection of their trauma with ongoing everyday problems, it goes beyond the commonly made argument that sexual violence against men constitutes an attack on masculinity. Fundamentally, it examines how masculinity norms and expectations have shaped the men’s stories, coping strategies, and current needs. This use of a masculinity lens highlights important gaps within transitional justice, which to date has narrowly focused on violent and militarised forms of masculinity. The article thus calls for transitional justice processes to give more attention to masculinities affected by violence.     

Explaining violence after recent elections in Ethiopia and Kenya

A comparison of recent contested elections in Kenya and Ethiopia points to divergences in the forms of political violence. While both countries saw the use of excessive force by members of the security services, Kenya experienced more widespread and deadly inter-ethnic violence than Ethiopia. This article considers these two countries in light of competing explanations for inter-ethnic violence, and concludes that variation in the extent of constitutional reforms is critical in influencing citizens’ responses to close electoral contests. In Kenya, there has been a lack of meaningful constitutional and institutional reform since the introduction of multiparty politics in the early 1990s. By contrast, Ethiopia has seen extensive and substantive constitutional reform in a similar period, but without a negotiated pact among political elites. In both cases, electoral procedures have heightened the stakes of politics and therefore led to significant and escalating political violence, but in unforeseen ways. The important electoral issue of regionalism or devolution in both countries is also briefly considered here. The violence surrounding the elections raises concerns about how to sustain citizen engagement with elections and other democratization activities when these fail to meet voter expectations over several electoral cycles.     

Electoral violence during party primaries in Kenya

ABSTRACT

Since the restoration of multi-party democracy in Kenya in 1991, elections have witnessed intra-party violence during the primaries for selecting parliamentary and civic seats candidates. This article addresses the question of why electoral violence occurs during party primaries in Kenya and argues that violence is an outcome of the organization of political parties, which has revolved around personalities identified with ethno-regional interests rather than institutionalism. The upshot has been the absence of party institutionalization to establish structures for recruitment of members and organization of primaries. Such organizational weaknesses have denied parties the capacity to match the intense competition for tickets of ethno-regional dominant parties that guarantees nominees to win seats in their strongholds. Intra-party violence has followed. The article submits that intra-party electoral violence in Kenya is a function of the politics of clientelism and ethnicity, both of which have severely hampered the institutionalization of political parties and their capacity to cope with the stiff competition for the tickets of ethno-regional dominant parties.     

Fighting for a name on the ballot: constituency-level analysis of nomination violence in Zambia

ABSTRACT

What factors increase the likelihood of nomination violence? Nomination violence can be an expression of both horizontal conflict, between local political elites, and vertical conflict, between national and local elites. We theorize about factors that may increase the risks of vertical and horizontal conflict and leverage a unique dataset of constituency-level nomination violence obtained from surveys with 464 domestic election observers active in the 2016 Zambian general election. Our statistical analyses show constituencies with an incumbent standing for re-election were more likely to experience nomination violence. Also, contrary to previous research on general election violence, we theorize and find that more rural constituencies had a higher propensity for nomination violence than urban constituencies. Our findings highlight the importance of intra-party power relations and the bargaining relationship between the centre and periphery.     

Fighting your friends? A study of intra-party violence in sub-Saharan Africa

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on a less visible and less studied type of political violence, namely violence that occurs within political parties. We use new, district-level data to compare the temporal and spatial dynamics of intra-party violence to those of general election violence across selected sub-Saharan African countries, including both democracies and autocracies, from 1998 to 2016. Relying on cross-national and sub-national analyses, we show that intra-party violence follows a unique pattern. First, unlike general election violence, intra-party violence peaks prior to election day as it is often sparked by individual parties’ candidate nomination processes. Second, low levels of competitiveness – typically theorized to reduce the risk of election violence – increase the risk of intra-party violence on the sub-national level. Thus, dominant party elections do not necessarily see less election-related violence than hotly contested elections. Rather, violence may be pushed from election day to intra-party competitions. If we neglect the study of violence within political parties, we thus risk underestimating the threat of election violence and misdiagnosing its causes.     

The subjective and objective violence of terrorism: analysing “British values” in newspaper coverage of the 2017 London Bridge attack

This article examines how ?i?ek’s analysis of “subjective” violence can be used to explore the ways in which media coverage of a terrorist attack is contoured and shaped by less noticeable forms of “objective” (symbolic and systemic) violence. Drawing upon newspaper coverage of the 2017 London Bridge attack, it is noted how examples of “subjective” violence were grounded in the externalisation of a clearly identifiable “other”, which symbolically framed the terrorists and the attack as tied to and representative of the UK Muslim community. Examples of “systematic” violence were most notable in the ideological edifice that underpinned this framing but also in the ways in which newspaper reports served to draw upon British values in the aftermath of the attack. This directed attention away from the contradictions within the UK, towards narratives that sought to “fix” these contradictions through eradicating the problem of “the other” and/or by violently protecting the British values “they” seek to undermine. As a consequence, newspaper coverage worked to uphold the illusion that “peace” could be achieved by eradicating terrorism through further forms of objective violence, including, internment without trial; the “ripping up” of human rights; and closer surveillance of Muslim communities. Indeed, it was this unacknowledged violence that worked to maintain British values in the press' coverage.     

A New Typology of Electoral Violence: Insights from Indonesia

ABSTRACT

Existing literature on election violence has focused on how violence suppresses voter participation or shapes their preferences. Yet, there are other targets of election violence beyond voters who have so far received little attention: candidates and government agencies. By intimidating rival candidates into dropping out of the race, political hopefuls can literally reduce the number of competitors and increase their likelihood of winning. Likewise, aspiring candidates can target government agencies perceived to be responsible for holding elections to push for electorally beneficial decisions. In this paper, we introduce a new typology of electoral violence and utilize new data of election violence that occur around executive elections in Indonesia from 2005 through 2012. The types of violence we identified differ in these ways: a) Of all cases of electoral violence observed in this article, most incidents were targeted towards candidates and government bodies; b) candidates are generally targeted before elections, whereas voter-targeting incidents are spread out evenly before and after elections and government-targeted violence tends to occur afterwards; c) pre-election violence is concentrated in formerly separatist areas, but post-election violence is more common in districts with prior ethnocommunal violence. These distinctions stress the importance of examining when and why different strategies are adopted.     

Defensive development,combative contradictions: towards an international political sociology of global militarism in Africa

ABSTRACT

Drawing on international political sociology, this article shows how the merger of development and security has become part of the ideational architecture that facilitates a new ‘feel-good’ militarism in Africa. Contemporary international reform efforts are designed to restrain military power in the name of development, democracy and civilian oversight, but also to strengthen the coercive capacities of African security institutions and make them more efficient in the global fight against violent extremism. Such defensive development efforts have implications for the historically problematic relationship of the African state with modern forms of organised force, reconfiguring and recalibrating relations and dynamics between the state, military forces and external actors. The article concludes that defensive development is fraught with combative contradictions and risks becoming the handmaiden not only of increased militaristic violence, but also of oppression and the restriction of freedom and democracy.     

Small wars in Marsabit County: devolution and political violence in northern Kenya

Abstract

When the elections of 2013 devolved budgetary and legislative powers to 47 counties in Kenya, there was nationwide relief when they passed off peacefully. The new county governments settled down to bargaining over local powers and appointments, delivering on their new institutional mandates, spending money and dealing with recentralisation manoeuvres. Now with the 2017 elections looming, the question has been raised, will there be violence? Based on qualitative interviews with citizens of the northern town of Marsabit shortly after the 2013 elections, this article presents citizens’ views on how devolution affected political competition, including how familiar repertoires of violence were used to influence not only the vote but also the construction of the new country government. To explain what concerned voters in the newly devolved county, the article explores the role played by colonially constituted ‘ethnicity’ in control of land and citizenship in the pastoralist north of Kenya and in the evolution of politics and the state after independence. It shows how the new configuration of power brought by devolution in 2013 has not yet resolved people’s feelings of deep insecurity over territorial tenure. It offers insight into the task faced by devolved institutions in relation to land, adding texture to current literature on the politics of devolution.     

Painful Pleasure: The Politics and Aesthetics of Psychosocial Trauma in Impunity

Abstract

Continuous trauma syndrome (CTS) is the foundation for the characters in the film Impunity. The aesthetic choices in the narrative structure are an exploration of the discursive nature of violence and trauma in contemporary South African society. The theorising of continuous stress trauma provides the necessary challenge to the more conventional understanding of post-traumatic stress syndrome and informs the underlying analysis of the film. This analysis is offered in an interlocutory manner with psychology theorist Garth Stevens who provides a hermeneutic reading of Impunity that draws directly from his own research and others in the field of psychology. The paper is offered as an examination of an artistic research, film practice. The practice itself constitutes a theoretical expression which connects the aesthetic and structural choices of the film with the disciplinary observations made by Stevens. It suggests two theoretical approaches from different disciplines brought in conversation with each other to inform the reading of Impunity as artistic expression. The paper puts at its centre the discursive approach to the study of violence and trauma to suggest how the film’s structure and its aesthetics may be connected to research in the field of psychology.     

“So,the Killings Continued”: Wartime Mobilization and Post-War Violence in KwaZulu-Natal,South Africa

ABSTRACT

Many post-war states experience continuous low-intensity violence for years after the formal end of the conflict. Existing theories often focus on country-level explanations of post-war violence, such as the presence of spoilers or the nature of the peace agreement. Yet, post-war violence does not affect all communities equally; whereas some remain entrenched in violence, others escape the perpetuation of violent conflict. We argue that communities where wartime mobilization at the local level is based on the formation of alliances between armed groups and local elites are more likely to experience post-war violence, than communities where armed groups generate civilian support based on grassroots backing of the group’s political objectives. We explore this argument in a comparison of three communities in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, which have experienced different levels of post-war violence. The analysis supports the main argument and contributes to the research on the microdynamics of civil war by outlining the implications of certain strategies of wartime mobilization and how these may generate localized legacies.     

Politics,exit strategy and political settlement in Sierra Leone: a critical analysis of a laboratory experiment (1991–2015)

Abstract

A glance at key indicators—in terms of growth forecast and stable elections—will project Sierra Leone as a political settlement model for a post-conflict state. Sierra Leone has been an important laboratory for UN and international donors’ interventions and thinking. However, efforts by the international donor community to decentralise power to the margins, both geographically and demographically, have failed. Instead, this focus on the institutions of governance has allowed the same elite to maintain power. Sierra Leone today shares similar socio-economic and political conditions with the Sierra Leone before the outbreak of the civil war. A detailed analysis of the country’s socio-economic trends, its political institutions and the logic and dynamics of violence show a disturbing picture. While the international community considered that an exit strategy was feasible, the political settlement remains an experiment in that it is detached from everyday life and livelihood concerns of Sierra Leoneans and reveals the structural violence behind this process.     

Spousal visa law and structural violence: fear,anxiety and terror of the everyday

Attending to mundane bureaucratic politics can highlight forms of everyday structural violence. This article draws attention to the spousal visa law in the UK. On the surface, this law does violence to family life, forcing indefinite separation. However, this law is also symbolic of some of the main structural violence in society that cross-cut gender, race, ethnicity, socio-economic class, age, education level and profession, thus making tangible some of the intangible borders in society. Through the vehicle of this law we will consider how structural violence can operate as an everyday terror, disrupting the boundaries of public and private life.     

This violence good,that violence bad: normative and state-centric discourses in British school textbooks

ABSTRACT

Under the statutory obligations of the Prevent strategy, British schools have greater responsibility to counter terrorism and extremism than ever before. However, research has yet to fully explore how schools tackle such a complex issue in the classroom. This research critically examines the discourses of terrorism and extremism found within British secondary school textbooks to deepen understanding of how terrorism and extremism are taught in schools. This article deploys a mode of critical discourse analysis to assess and critique the ways in which the political realms of terrorism and extremism are constructed. I argue that these discourses construct an ethical proximity between the text, the reader and the state, while rendering voiceless both the “terrorist” and the civilian living in states prioritised by British foreign policy. As such, this article argues that British school textbooks construct a normative perspective through which the violence of states is sanitised and normalised. It raises concern regarding the role of contemporary schooling in perpetuating a global politics of violent foreign policy.     

Good radicals? Trajectories of pro-Kurdish political and militant mobilisation to the wars in Syria,Turkey and Iraq

ABSTRACT

This article explores the interrelation of volunteering, violence and ideology by studying the pro-Kurdish political and militant mobilisation to the wars in Syria, Turkey and Iraq. Focusing especially on the trajectories, motives and reflections of foreign volunteers in different Kurdish militant groups, I argue that ideology is neither a precondition nor a necessary reason for mobilisation to an armed group. In many cases, it is the other way around, as mobilisation to violence is often the source of ideological conviction.     

UN Troop Deployment and Preventing Violence Against Civilians in Darfur

ABSTRACT

Does the presence of UN peacekeeping force lower civilian fatalities at the local level? If it does, is it because of their coercive military capacity or for other reasons such as their roles in monitoring and reporting violent atrocities? To explore these questions, I study the deployment of peacekeeping units in Darfur and its impact on violence against civilians. Using original geocoded data of UN deployments before and after the intervention, I examine what aspects of such deployments impact one-sided civilian killings by government and rebel groups. Results indicate that deploying UN peacekeepers in an area restrains belligerent from targeting civilians. However, the military capacity of peacekeepers is not a significant predictor of violence against civilians. While their ability to defend themselves is extremely important for peacekeepers, these findings caution against the militarization trend in UN peacekeeping and seek to reshift focus on other substantive aspects of peacekeeping.