Narratives Of Political Violence

In exploring how political violence is constructed by examing the life stories of former militants, this book innovatively combines a critical theory approach with a narrative paradigm.

This title was first published in 2001. The modern state’s claim to a monopoly of legitimate force bestows the concomitant duty of preventing the resort to violence by non-state actors. Consequently, failure to do so often leads to debates, concerning the legitimation of the perpetrators themselves and the legitimation of the authorities who were unable or unwilling to prevent their violent actions. Narratives of Violence constitutes the first work which relates these stigma contests to each other by analyzing the public discourse about right-wing violence in Israel. The result is an absorbing book which provides a fundamental re-evaluation of the causes and consequences of political violence and its societal boundaries. Its conclusions will have a resounding impact on the Israeli body politic and for democratic governments around the world.

Narrative, Political Violence and Social Change is a call for engaging actively and critically with the ontological, epistemological, and methodological implications of narrative in the study of political violence and terrorism. Building on a basic framework of three modes of narrative – as lens, as data, and as tool – the chapters in this book demonstrate how the study of political violence and terrorism benefits from narrative inquiry as an interdisciplinary endeavour, in particular as regards diverging perceptions of social reality, the meanings of belonging, and the human drive for change. They showcase the substantial advances that scholars have made in this field to date and identify promising avenues for further research. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Studies in Conflict & Terrorism.

"A sophisticated and persuasive late-modernist political analysis that consistently draws the reader into the narratives of the author and those of the people of violence in Northern Ireland to whom he talked. . . . Simply put, this book is a feast for the intellect"—Thomas M. Wilson, American Anthropologist "One of the best books to have been written on Northern Ireland. . . . A highly imagination and significant book. Formations of Violence is an important addition to the literature on political violence."—David E. Schmitt, American Political Science Review

An exploration of how political violence is constructed, this book presents the life stories of individuals once committed to political transformation through violent means in Portugal. Challenging simplistic conceptualisations about the actors of violence, this book examines issues of temporality, gender and interpersonal dynamics in the study of political violence. It is the first comprehensive case study of political violence in Portugal, based on the perspectives of former militants. These are individuals from different political spheres who became convinced that they could not be mere spectators of the circumstances of their times. For them, the only viable way of making a difference was through violent acts. Applying the Dialogical Self Theory to trace the identity positions underpinning their narratives, this book not only sheds light on radicalisation and deradicalisation processes at the individual level, but also on the meso- and macro-level contexts that instigate engagement with and encourage disengagement from armed organisations. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of critical terrorism studies, political violence, European history and security studies more generally.

An analysis of land and natural resource conflict as a source of political violence, focusing on election violence in Kenya.

Hannah Arendt argued that the “political” is best understood as a power relation between private and public realms, and that storytelling is a vital bridge between these realms—a site where individualized passions and shared perspectives are contested and interwoven. Jackson explores and expands Arendt’s ideas through a cross-cultural analysis of storytelling that includes Kuranko stories from Sierra Leone, Aboriginal stories of the stolen generation, stories recounted before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and stories of refugees, renegades, and war veterans. Focusing on the violent and volatile conditions under which stories are and are not told, and exploring the various ways in which narrative reworkings of reality enable people to symbolically alter subject-object relations, Jackson shows how storytelling may restore existential viability to the intersubjective fields of self and other, self and state, self and situation.

Using a variety of theoretical reflections and empirically grounded case studies, this book examines how certain kinds of imagination – political, artistic, historical, philosophical – help us tackle the challenge of comprehending and responding to various forms of political violence. Understanding political violence is a complex task, which involves a variety of operations, from examining the social macro-structures within which actors engage in violence, to investigating the motives and drives of individual perpetrators. This book focuses on the faculty of imagination and its role in facilitating our normative and critical engagement with political violence. It interrogates how the imagination can help us deal with past as well as ongoing instances of political violence. Several questions, which have thus far received too little attention from political theorists, motivate this project: Can certain forms of imagination – artistic, historical, philosophical – help us tackle the challenge of comprehending and responding to unprecedented forms of violence? What is the ethical and political value of artworks depicting human rights violations in the aftermath of conflicts? What about the use of thought experiments in justifying policy measures with regard to violence? What forms of political imagination can foster solidarity and catalyse political action? This book opens up a forum for an inclusive and reflexive debate on the role that the imagination can play in unpacking complex issues of political violence. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of the journal, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.