Structural violence and politics

Abstract

In Red Tape, I do not use the term “arbitrary” in opposition to “systematic”, as is alleged by Harriss and Jeffrey. Arbitrariness accompanies systematic forms of discrimination, and is the result of both, the indifference to outcomes and to the chaotic style of functioning of Indian bureaucracies. Interpreting structural violence, or explaining injustice, requires understanding what the state means to different people. The chief argument that poverty is a form of violence, and represents the killing of the poor, underlines the injustice that results from treating poverty as a biopolitical fact. I employ a notion of politics that is not restricted to parties and mobilization, but which saturates all relations of inequality. Despite voicing dissatisfaction with the analysis presented in Red Tape, Harriss and Jeffrey fail to forward an adequate and coherent alternative.     

Rigging elections with violence

In most developing countries even today, political parties spend a substantial fraction of their resources in attracting voters through ideological exhortation as well as force. In this paper we present a model of political contest between two parties that compete in two distinct arenas though the goal of the contest in both arenas is the same-to garner more political support. In the first, which we call “ideological”, the contest involves no use of force. In the second, which we call “conflictual”, party activists use violence either to force ideological supporters of the competing party to vote in their favor or restrain them from voting. We show that a party with lower initial political support will resort to more political violence, ceteris paribus and as the fraction of undecided voters goes up, elections will tend to be less conflictual. We also show that if there is an incumbency advantage, then the resources devoted to creating political unrest increase in equilibrium and political competition is more violent. We also provide some historic and journalistic evidence that supports our results.     

Counterinsurgency agent networks and noncombatant-targeted violence

In counterinsurgency, agent networks are double-edged swords. They are useful tools for degrading insurgent influence and protecting the population. However, they also endanger the population in some ways, as we have seen with mass executions of suspected agents and agent misdirection of raids. Identifying how/why this occurs is critical for developing intelligence practices to more effectively implement COIN strategies. This exploratory study uses three recent counterinsurgency cases – for which significant secondary open-source agent network documentation is available – to identify, describe, organize and analyse patterns of noncombatant-targeted violence associated with human intelligence networks. Identified cases of noncombatant-targeted violence in Operation Enduring Freedom – Afghanistan, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the – Israeli–Palestinian conflict are used to develop a theoretical framework that models intelligence-related violence incentivization, which also draws from theoretical literature on human intelligence, civil war violence, police states, community policing, and the sociology of betrayal.     

South Africa: capital accumulation and violence

This article analyses the conditions of capital accumulation in South Africa, and seeks to explain the authoritarian and racially discriminatory features of the South African social structure in terms of (a) the specific historical processes of change (mercantile colonial conquest, primitive accumulation in mining and farming) and (b) the specific features of contemporary capitalism, notably the capital-intensive structure of industry. The authoritarianism embodied, for example, in the extra-economic coercion of black labour is seen as reflecting the circumstances of the struggle between capital and labour under conditions where capital-labour contradictions exist alongside the contradiction between South African capitalism and the ‘dependent’ societies it has preserved/recreated. The implications of this situation for strategies of socialist change are briefly evaluated.     

Kenya's election: risk of renewed violence

Kenya is preparing to hold its first set of presidential elections since 2007, when ethnic violence prompted by vote-rigging saw between 1,300 and 1,500 people killed and 300,000–600,000 internally displaced. The country has been relatively stable since the last crisis, but its underlying causes have not been fully addressed. Given Kenya's role as a regional economic, transport and diplomatic hub, fresh violence surrounding the 4 March vote could destabilise a fragile region.