“I have always been so afraid”: Fearsome Encounters in Unni Lindell’s Rødhette

Norwegian crime writer Unni Lindell’s novel Rødhette [Red Riding Hood] (Oslo: Aschehoug & Co, 2004/2010) is a narrative about a woman whose feeling of safety transforms into a fear of violation, and how her defence against this fear takes the form of systematic violence. The novel is a rewriting of the traditional tale of “Little Red Riding Hood” and is a comment on the patriarchal premises of the most widely known version of this folktale. In the article, I discuss the representation of the female murderer as being in the grip of an affective economy based on the fear of male violence, represented in the novel by the metaphor of the “wolf”, and how fear grows into a comprehensive, moral and pragmatic, murderous orientation towards the world after an experience of violence. Theoretically, I draw on affect theory and particularly Sara Ahmed’s ideas about the affective politics of fear (The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014) and how this fear turns into a significant qualifier in encounters with people who are experienced as strangers (Strange encounters: Embodied others in post-coloniality. London: Routledge, 2000). Fear is treated in Lindell’s novel as a psychological constriction and a tool for the construction of agency, through which the mechanisms of othering and violence are explored.     

Misogyny in ‘post-war’ Afghanistan: the changing frames of sexual and gender-based violence

Abstract

Although the US and NATO invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was ideologically justified under the banner of democracy and women’s rights, the latter issue has been completely forgotten within the public sphere since then. As the war has officially ended in Afghanistan, new forms of misogyny and sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) have arisen. The ‘post-war’ Afghan context presents an institutional normalization of violence, favouring a culture of rape and impunity. The changing frames of violence against women are widely related to the political situation of the country: while public attention is focused on peace agreements, women’s issues are relegated to banalities and depicted as ‘everyday’ news. Meanwhile, new frames of SGBV appear as body part mutilation within marriage, forced prostitution, and increasing domestic violence, partly due to the growing consumption of opium but also to the perpetuation of powerful warlords in state structures. This article draws on gender studies to analyse the current misogynist culture in ‘post-war’ Afghanistan, framing the new forms of violence induced by successive armed conflicts. It relies on interviews conducted in 2013 in Afghanistan; and on secondary sources, mostly taken from the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan and Human Rights Watch reports.     

Decolonising drug studies in an era of predatory accumulation

Abstract

The cultural and political-economic valences of psychoactive drugs in the Global South offer critical insights on local and international fault lines of social inequality and profiteering. Historically, in a classic primitive accumulation process the trafficking of industrially produced euphoric substances across the globe have wreaked havoc among vulnerable populations while extracting profit for the powerful. The complex flows of capital generated both by illegal addiction markets and also by the mobilisation of licit public funds to manage their mayhem, however, suggest the contemporary utility of the concept of ‘predatory accumulation’. The Enlightenment-era concept of ‘primitive accumulation’ usefully highlighted state violence and forcible dispossession in the consolidation of European capitalism. A contemporary reframing of these processes as predatory accumulation, however, highlights contradictory, nonlinear relationships between the artificially high profits of illegal drug sales, repressive governmentality and corporate greed. It sets these patterns of destructive profiteering in the context of our moment in history.     

Electoral violence prevention: what works?

Elections are in theory democratic means of resolving disputes and making collective decisions, yet too often force is employed to distort the electoral process. The post-Cold War increase in the number of electoral authoritarian and hybrid states has brought this problem into relief. In recent years the prevention of electoral violence has played an increasingly large role in the democratic assistance activities undertaken by international agencies, following increased awareness within the international community of the specific security challenges that elections entail. However, there has to date been little systematic evaluation of the success of different electoral violence prevention (EVP) strategies in reforming electoral institutions so as to enable them to maintain the peace during the electoral period. This article assesses the effectiveness of two common types of international EVP activity. Using a new global dataset of EVP strategies between 2003 and 2015, this article finds evidence that capacity-building strategies reduce violence by non-state actors, whereas attitude-transforming strategies are associated with a reduction in violence by state actors and their allies. The findings are relevant both for understanding the dynamics of electoral violence, and also for policymakers and electoral assistance providers in the international community who have responsibility for the design of democratic assistance projects in states at risk of electoral violence.     

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.     

Protecting the state: Russian repressive tactics in the North Caucasus*

Since the end of the second Chechen campaign, the North Caucasus counterinsurgency has experienced the shift from military involvement toward prevalence of law enforcement instruments. This paper discusses the composition of repressive tactics that the Russian state developed as a result of the two decades long evolution of a counter strategy designed to eliminate illegal armed groups operating in the North Caucasus. It is focused on the late stages of conflict (2007–2014) when the violence that had spread across the region started in the early 2000s had symbolically culminated in 2007 with the proclamation of the Caucasian Emirate. This paper advances a reconceptualization of the Russian counterinsurgency by devising an analysis of indiscriminate and discriminate repressive tactics. It demonstrates that security agencies incorporated more selective uses of violence into their tactics, thereby reducing the number of indiscriminate violent actions to an insignificant level. Moreover, along with selective violence, security institutions reinforced their effort by conducting preventive work such as the detection of secret caches of weapons, seizures, and arrests. Findings regarding the current composition of repressive tactics are illustrated by means of new disaggregated media-based data that were especially collected and analyzed to form the basis of this research.     

The role of sectarianism in the Provisional IRA campaign, 1969–1997

This article concerns the nature of political violence in an ethnonationally divided society. The article engages with the debates surrounding the discrimination employed, or not, by the PIRA when selecting their targets and waging their campaign against British rule and partition in Ireland between 1969 and 1997. The piece challenges the assertion that the PIRA discriminated with religious bias, and that they actively targeted Protestant civilians. It does so by drawing upon analysis of original data collected for the piece, corroborated with qualitative primary sources including the memoirs of former PIRA members, and the sentiments of a former PIRA member turned informer, Sean O’Callaghan, who agreed to be interviewed for the piece. It is argued that the PIRA aimed only to kill individuals whom they deemed to be in some measure actively responsible for the persistence of British control in Ireland, and the prevention of a reunion with the Republic; and did so in a fashion that was, for the most part, blind to religious diversity. It is also argued, however, that the PIRA were either unable or unwilling to recognise the gap between the actual impact of their “armed struggle” and the intentions that lay behind it.     

Fighting and voting: Mapping electoral violence in the region of post-Communist Europe

Electoral disputes accompanied by violent outbreaks have become an emerging problem in societies under transformation, in authoritarian regimes, as well as in young democracies. The truth is that many politicians elected to office, their supporters, and political activists have altered their perceptions of electoral competition in a form of zero-sum logic with direct consequences for their opponents. After the fall of Communism in the beginning of the 1990s, Central and Eastern Europe stood at a crossroads. This period of imbalance and uncertainty affected the violent interaction in newly reformed electoral arenas with serious consequences for legitimizing democratic change. Despite the well-documented tension that existed in the region, the importance of violence in the electoral arena is rather neglected. The article approaches this gap as the first attempt to map electoral violence in a new typological environment where the process of transformation has affected political pluralism and the patterns of political contest. It argues that electoral violence is not a rare phenomenon in the region of post-Communist Europe and the dynamic varies on a great scale. Moreover, the article presents a picture of electoral violence occurring in different settings with potentially different contextual preconditions that need to be studied separately.     

Sexual Violence Against Marginalized Victims: Choice of Victim or Victim of Choice?

Research shows that sex trade workers and homeless populations are at a high risk of severe violence and homicide. Based on a sample of 229 violent sex offenders, we investigate the differences between sexual crimes committed against marginalized (n = 73) and nonmarginalized victims (n = 156). Findings from logistic regression analyses show that offenders who target marginalized victims are more likely to degrade their victim and use a variety of torture methods. However, offenders who target nonmarginalized victims are more likely to use a weapon, and kill the victim by strangulation. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Victim Offender Overlap: Dual Trajectory Examination of Victimization and Offending Among Young Felony Offenders Over Seven Years

The relationship between victimization and offending has been shown consistently across different samples, settings, and crime types. This study uses data from the Pathways to Desistance Study to examine dual trajectories of offending between the ages of 15 and 24 in a sample of male felony offenders. The dual trajectory models demonstrate substantial convergence in victimization and offending. And while there are sizable numbers of youth who continue to be victimized, but desist or decrease in their offending behaviors, very few youth continue to offend in the absence of continued victimization. This study also proposes and tests three criminological theories that have been employed as explanations for the victim-offender overlap—low self-control, lifestyles/routine activities, and street-code attitudes. The logistic regression results indicate that involvement in risky and/or unstructured, unsupervised activities is a key correlate of the victim-offender overlap. The strength of the relationship between routine activity variables and the victim-offender overlap supports the provision of structured, supervised activities for youth and young adults as a way of preventing future victimization and offending, particularly among youth who have high exposure to violence.