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Communities of Violence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2013

Faisal Devji*
Affiliation:
St. Antony's College, University of Oxford, Oxford, U.K.; e-mail: faisal.devji@sant.ox.ac.uk

Extract

Violence is a word seemingly meant for theorizing, being as abstract and thus as capacious as any category can be. And indeed the history of its use has only confirmed the all-encompassing character of violence, which can now name almost any kind of action or affect: physical, psychological, and even ideological. And yet this term is also deployed to name the most distinctive and visceral forms of cruelty and suffering, such that it is difficult to treat it merely as another abstract category. Shifting uncomfortably between the particularity of pain and the generality of an intellectual category, violence has until recently been ill served by scholarship. The necessities of justice, for example, have meant that violence is rarely the subject of law in its own right, but used only as a euphemism for some degree of murder or charge of battery. And since historians are especially seduced by legal terminology, perhaps because they have traditionally described and justified power, their efforts to mimic the law by finding some party responsible for something have tended not to deal productively with violence.

Type
Roundtable
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

NOTES

1 Appadurai, Arjun, “Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization,” Public Culture 10 (1998): 225–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Das, Veena, “The Act of Witnessing: Violence, Gender and Subjectivity,” in Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 2007), 5978Google Scholar.

3 Ghassem-Fachandi, Parvis, Pogrom in Gujarat: Hindu Nationalism and Anti-Muslim Violence in India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

4 Devji, Faisal, Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; and The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).