Mikkel Thorup, Lars Thorup Larsen, Carsten Bagge Laustsen & Thor Hvidbak: Editorial: Violence and Conflict
Slavoj Zizek: The Violence of the Liberal Utopia
While liberal capitalism presents itself as anti-utopia embodied, and today’s neoliberalism as the sign of the new era of humanity, which left behind the utopian projects responsible for the totalitarian horrors of the 20th century, it is now becoming clear that there is a utopian core in the liberal project itself – the violence that accompanies the victories of liberal capitalism is the price we are paying for this utopia. In describing this utopian core, the text proceeds in three steps. First, it focuses on today’s China, an exemplary case of the socially disruptive effects of global capitalism; then, it articulates the basic structure of the liberal utopia; finally, it outlines the dimension missing in this utopia.
Keywords: China; freedom; ideology; Kant; liberalism; utopia; violence.
Donatella della Porta: Eventful Protest, Global Conflicts
Although social movement studies have traditionally stressed conflict as a dynamic element in our societies, since the 1980s, research in democratic society has presented an image of an institutionalization of social movements. Since 1999, with the protest in Seattle against the WTO Millennium Round, this image has been however challenged by a new cycle of protest focusing on ‘alternative globalization’ and global justice. Beyond describing some forms of action that (through counter-summits and social forums) emerged in this cycle of protest, the article address the more general issue of conflict nowadays by considering the emergent character of protest itself. In social movement studies, protest has in fact been mainly considered as a ‘dependent variable’, and explained on the basis of political opportunities and organizational resources. The author suggests here a different approach, by looking at protest as eventful, in the sense of having relevant cognitive, affective and relational transformative impacts on the very movements that carry them out. Some forms of action or specific campaigns have a particularly high degree of ‘eventfulness’. Through protest events, new tactics are experimented with, signals about the possibility of collective action are sent, feelings of solidarity are created, organizational networks are consolidated, and sometimes public outrage at repression is developed. Data from interviews, surveys, focus groups and discourse analysis are used in order to reflect upon the mechanisms that make protest eventful. More in general, the article suggests that the contemporary sociological reflection on conflicts as producers of social capital, collective identity and knowledge, could be useful to balance the negative vision of conflicts as being disruptive of social relations, an analysis that can emerge from an exclusive focus on the most extreme forms of political violence.
Keywords: European social forums; eventful protest; global justice movement; protest; social movements.
Mathias Albert: Conflict in World Society Theory
This article argues that although the notion of conflict barely features both in Luhmannian as well as in other theories of world society, most of those theories indeed have something to say about the dynamics and sources of conflicts in world society, if only implicitly so. The article first briefly introduces four different world society theories and the role in which conflict plays in them before it turns to Luhmann’s theory. It shows that conflict occupies two places in this context: first, conflict itself is conceptualized as a kind of communication; second, the theory of social differentiation allows us to identify structural sources of conflict in world society. The article then argues that particularly when it comes to identifying sources of conflict in world society, Luhmannian style theory could incorporate a number of insights from other traditions of world society theory, particularly pertaining to the analysis of overlapping forms of differentiation and the role of organizational change in world society.
Keywords: Conflict; English School; Heintz; Luhmann; social differentiation; Stanford School; world society theory.
Garrath Williams: Dangerous Victims: On Some Political Dangers of Vicarious Claims to Victimhood
As we have seen in the cases of Serbia and Israel, collectives can be mobilised to perpetrate grave wrongs on the basis of patently ideological claims about the harms they have suffered. This article seeks a theoretical understanding of this troubling phenomenon. It does so, first, by contrasting mobilisation based on vicarious victimhood with revenge. The groups in question do not exhibit the contact with reality and clear sense of agency that are prerequisites for revenge. However, these evasions of agency and reality are not specific to group identities centred on victimhood. Second, therefore, the article considers the attractions of such an identity and how it reinforces groups’ tendencies to myth-making and irresponsibility. Among its more harmful effects, it obscures the realities of state power and forecloses meaningful accountability to those outside the group. It also sets in train a vicious circle, whereby the group discovers perverse incentives to harm others - and to harm itself. Yet these harms only reinforce the group’s self-anointed status as victim: as always done by, never doing to.
Keywords: Collective agency; collective responsibility; Israel; myth; nationalism; Serbia; victimhood.
Guri Waalen Borch and Kirsti Stuvøy: Practices of Self-Legitimation in Armed Groups: Money and Mystique of the FARC in Colombia
This article addresses practices of self-legitimation within insurgent social orders, and asks in what ways are legitimacy claimed and how do these claims construct an understanding of self? We discern what such practices are and how they function by examining the insurgent order of the FARC in Colombia. The FARC has through its existence shown persistent abilities to generate support as well as resources for its cause, and allows for consideration of changes and stability in an insurgent social order over time. Our concern is to illustrate empirically how an engagement with practices of self-legitimation enables an understanding of how these practices function to create a coherent understanding of self and its reproduction. The FARC has through such practices successfully contributed to establishing and reinforcing over time a form of symbolic power expressed by the group’s revolutionary mysticism. Recent developments in the FARC suggest that the pressure on the FARC is strong, and the question is if the group will be as able to adapt as it previously has. We here outline the practices that have characterized the dynamism of the insurgent order in the past, and suggest that the external pressure may over time infuse a re-description of self.
Keywords: Armed groups; FARC; insurgency; self-legitimation; social orders of violence.
Thor Hvidbak: The Contingent Necessity of the State: On the Irrelevance of Radical Critique
This article explores the relation between violence and political order from the perspective of the state as an emergent political entity. Based upon a genealogy of raison d’État juxtaposing the accounts of mainly Luhmann and Foucault, it proposes to analyze the emergence of politics as an autonomous sphere and rationality, an art of government irrevocably tied to the state and its status as both an abstract regulatory idea (in the Kantian sense) as well as a set of concrete practices and institutions. The problem of state violence is discussed in relation to ideas of state necessity and the phenomenon of coup d’État. The article asserts that the question of state-induced exceptions can be given new perspective through a scrutiny of the 16th and 17th-century debates, where the issue was discussed with specific relation to the emerging state complex. The state formula evolves as a contingent necessity with increasing complexity and elaborate measures for contingency control. Political legitimacy is bound to the state and in a sense an internal construction of politics, a self-description which always can be deconstructed. However, critical deconstructive portrayals of contemporary political order as inherently violent or as a permanent state of exception fail to analyze the workings of this order; they overemphasize exceptions and misunderstand the point of contingent necessity. Taking Agamben as the most notable representative of such critique, this article contends that his speculative and ahistorical approach not only fails to understand basic features of societal order, but also risks political irrelevance due to its misplaced focus.
Keywords: Agamben; Foucault; Luhmann; political order; political violence; raison d'État; state formation; state of exception.
Rasmus Ugilt: The Potential Ontology of the Society of Terror
The present article discusses the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11 2001. It is argued that the inclusion of certain ontological considerations in the discussion can help further our understanding of the events themselves as well as the social and political reactions that followed them. Specifically, two different paradigms of ontology should be considered. These are identified as the ontology of actuality and the ontology of potentiality. It is argued that the attacks of 9-11 can be interpreted along the lines of the ontology of potentiality, and furthermore that the potentiality of these events is causing a certain kind of desperation in the ideological structures, which are inherent to the ways societies and states are dealing with terrorism.
Keywords: Actualization; Giorgio Agamben; ideology; potentiality; reality; September 11; terror; virtuality; Slavoj Zizek.
Hauke Brunkhorst: Democratic Solidarity under Pressure of Global Forces: Religion, Capitalism and Public Power
Since the 1970s, not only the economy but also religion has become global. In particular the network religions (loosely coupled sects) and the old global church of Rome belong to the winners of globalization. Yet the prize is high, and it has to be paid by the nation state that loses control over markets as well as over global religious networks. For this reason the article opens with a reflection on secularization and the possible dependency of modern democracy on religious sources of solidarity. Whereas the article rejects the thesis that modern democracy can never stand alone, only relying on the sources of enlightenment and a completely secularized world view, it presumes that there is an inner linkage between monotheist Messianism of redemption and the utopian spirit of modern democracy, and that without this spirit democracy will vanish from earth. The solution of this problem is important for the understanding of the coming global crisis of democracy, which is discussed in the last parts of the article.
Keywords: Capitalism; democratic solidarity; globalization; nation state; religion; secularization.
Manni Crone, Ulrik Pram Gad and Mona Kanwal Sheikh: Review Essay: Dusting for Fingerprints: The Aarhus Approach to Islamism
This article reviews the Aarhus approach to the study of Islamism as presented in a series of articles by Mehdi Mozaffari and Tina Magaard. The core contribution of the Aarhus approach - the argument that Islamism constitutes yet another form of totalitarianism - is found to be forceful and thought-provoking. The academic utility of this approach is difficult to evaluate, however, since empirical evidence in the form of structured comparisons is not provided. This is partly due to the lack of a definition of totalitarianism to facilitate comparisons with Nazism, Fascism and Stalinism, and partly due to a lack of interest in comparisons along other relevant dimensions, including manifestations of radicalized/securitized religion drawing on the vocabulary of religious traditions other than Islam. It is argued that the definition of Islamism as totalitarianism is upheld by methodologically privileging texts over practice and definitional claims over empirical evidence. As such, the approach reflects an anthropological and sociological deficit excluding analyses of practices from textual reading and a hermeneutical deficit excluding various existing interpretations. Most importantly, these criteria for demarcating Islamism have important consequences for security political strategies for uncoupling the relations between Islamism and violence.
Keywords: Islamism; radicalism; securitization; terrorism; totalitarianism.