EDITORIAL

EDITORIAL

Dr. Lars Cornelissen ISRF Academic Editor

Over 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

The inherent instability of the notion of violence is at the heart of Henrique Carvalho’s contribution, which questions our collectively shared intuitions about the nexus between violence and crime. He argues that our tendency to assume that crime is a (physically) violent act not only makes us overlook crimes that cannot straightforwardly be understood as (physically) violent but also leads us to assume that certain modes of behaviour or even forms of identity are in and of themselves violent and therewith criminal. This gives rise to a normatively charged and racialised conception of criminality that demands to be critically deconstructed.

Beth Epstein reflects in her essay on the social fabric of the communities populating the much-discussed (and indeed muchmisrepresented) banlieues of France. Contrasting state-led discourse on ‘mixing’ (mixité) to the everyday reality of diversity and solidarity, she brings into focus the veritable abyss that separates the French state’s position on racial and cultural difference and the lived experience of alterity. Two worlds collide here, and violence may or may not attend the tensions and antagonisms that result. As Epstein holds out, much hinges on our capacity to listen carefully to the voices that come out of those communities.

Combining conceptual rigour with empirical depth, Jonathan Saha’s contribution reflects on violence’s tendency to accumulate. Taking elephant camps in colonial Myanmar as his case study, Saha traces how colonial practices were reliant upon the multiplication and reproduction of violence. Here, the collision of worlds is not merely premised upon past violent conquest; it also requires the maintenance of an economy of violence in the present, and likewise projects the unceasing accumulation of violence into the future.

Alongside these three pieces, which all present research funded by the ISRF, this issue also features two contributions that adopt a more reflective position. Andrew Robertson’s piece reports on the proceedings of the Oxford workshop, introducing the reader to the main themes addressed there and situating the debates that were had against the backdrop of current affairs. Playfully mobilising Louise Braddock’s definition of violence as ‘force-out-of-place,’ his reflections weave in and out of the workshop proceedings even as they keep track of emergent themes and—sometimes unspoken—common threads.

Elizabeth Frazer, finally, was invited to reflect not on the workshop proceedings but on the contents of the issue before you now. She departs from the observation that the concept of violence is riddled with ambiguities, partly because violent relations are messy and confusing, partly because their analysis and interpretation is, inevitably, emotionally and normatively laden. The challenge for critical thinking on violence, then, is to remain aware of these ambiguities, to make sure that they inform rather than obstruct our deconstruction of the social world.

Although she formulates it here specifically in relation to the question of violence, Frazer’s point resonates for all research that the ISRF funds. Indeed, insofar as real-world problems are by their very nature complex and acute, they are also, by extension, morally and analytically ambiguous. One of the key tasks of the ISRF is therefore to generate an environment in which the challenges that accompany this ambiguity may be faced collectively and constructively. As the Foundation is entering a period of no insignificant change, with its current (and first) Director of Research retiring in 2020, this mission will undoubtedly remain its foremost concern.

1. The allusion is of course to W.B. Gallie, “Essentially Contested Concepts,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 (1955–1956): 167–198.