EDITORIAL Dr. Lars Cornelissen ISRF Academic Editor
O
ver the past year, the ISRF has invited its fellows and associates to think through the problem of violence. Without forcing anyone to confront it directly, we let this question guide our thinking around the 2019 Annual Workshop, held in Oxford, as well as a number of smaller workshops and study days. Alongside many generative discussions this gave rise to two issues of the Bulletin: Mind and Violence, published in June of this year, and the one before you now. Entitled Society and Violence, the present issue seeks to continue the line of questioning set out in the former. One of the key questions posed in Mind and Violence was how violence impacts upon the human psyche. Which immaterial traces do violent encounters leave? How do individuals and collectives negotiate the complex afterlives of destruction or humiliation? And, conversely, in what ways does the human mind contort itself when seeking to justify, legitimise or otherwise rationalise violence? As the title suggests, the present issue explores violence as a social— or indeed societal—phenomenon. Here, the key issue is not so much where in society violence resides. That way of framing the question casts violence as an unambiguous social relation, an empirical datum that can be located amidst all of the other relations that constitute the social. The essays that make up this issue dig a little deeper, viewing acts of violence not as given but as disputed. Their wager is that the question(ing) of violence is immanent to the social domain itself, as the enactment of violence is inevitably accompanied by its problematisation or its justification, its identification or its denial, its critique or its embrace—in other words, its contestation. Liberally misquoting W.B. Gallie we might then say that violence is an essentially contested reality.1 1. The allusion is of course to W.B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 (1955–1956): 167–198. 4
