States of Violence

Posted on August 7, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Coronil, Fernando and Julie Skurski, eds. 2006. States of Violence. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. [Ch. 1-3]

This brilliant collection edited by Fernando Coronil and Julie Skurski critiques one of the main stories that modernity likes to tell about itself: The rise of modern nations entailed the containment of violence through the monopolization of violence by the state. In fact, show the authors of these essays, the making and transformation of modern nations was—and continues to be—an incredibly violent process. “By illuminating the links between violent ruptures and the routine maintenance of order, [the essays] expand as much as they redefine the conceptual field within which political violence is viewed. Seen from this perspective, practices and discourses of violence, like currents that shape the ocean floor, sculpt social landscapes, imperceptibly chiseling their configuration and casting life chances” (3). Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Bandits, Boundaries, Everyday Life, Frontiers, Gender, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Land, Law, Nation/Nationalism, Post-Colonial, Sovereignty, Spatiality, The State, Violence | 1 Comment

What Makes Peasants Revolutionary?

Posted on August 6, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Skocpol, Theda. 1982. “What Makes Peasants Revolutionary?” Comparative Politics 14(3): 351-375.

In this review essay, Theda Skocpol basically argues that studies of peasant-based revolutions have focused too narrowly on the peasants themselves. She argues for a more holistic approach that takes into account relations between peasants and elites, peasant relations and differentiation, and most importantly the politico-institutional relations of states and relations between states. The discussion is framed by the contributions made by Eric Wolf, Jeffrey Paige, Joel Migdal, and James Scott along with a few references to Barrington Moore. Works by all these authors have been or soon will be featured in this blog. Continue reading →

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Guevara: Guerrilla Warfare

Posted on August 4, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Che Guevara’s manual for guerrilla warfare was published a year after his bearded rebels marched triumphantly into Havana. Rebels across the world have thumbed its pages for tactics and strategies aimed at defeating their much more powerful foes. Unfortunately, it seems Che himself failed to abide by some of the text’s more logical insights in his disastrous (and mortal) mission to Bolivia. And yet, the Bolivia mission was par for the course of Che’s life; in the preface, he applauds his fallen comrade, Camilo Cienfuegos, for embodying Danton’s maxim that revolutionary movements require “audacity, audacity, and more audacity” (7).* The Cuban Revolution, he writes, proved that rebels could indeed defeat an army, that a small insurrectionary group (a guerrilla foco) can create and deepen revolutionary conditions, and that the “terrain” of armed struggle in underdeveloped parts of the Americas is fundamentally the countryside (14). Continue reading →

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On the Postcolony

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press. [Intro, Ch. 1-2]

In On the Postcolony, Achille Mbembe writes against the making of Africa (and Africans) as a monstrous place, a timeless netherworld suspended from the forward march of modernity and progress. Africa becomes, in a word, nothing; “no more than a lacuna” (9). What happens, he asks following J.F. Bayart, when we instead think about African society in “relation to nothing other than themselves”? For Mbembe, this approach must begin with considering practices and expressions as imbued with meaning, which is also a process of the production of self and subject. The sites and moments of subjective individuation are inseparable from meaning, and they are just as much bound to the way this subjectivity is produced in the historical soils—the multiple temporalities—of everyday life. Continue reading →

Posted in Boundaries, City, Drugs, Everyday Life, Frontiers, Historical-Geographies, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Land, Law, Nation/Nationalism, Political Economy, Post-Colonial, Power, Sovereignty, Spatiality, Territory, The Body, The State, Violence | 2 Comments

Insurgent Collective Action

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Wood, Elisabeth J. 2003. Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Elisabeth Jean Wood’s book explores why some Salvadoran peasants decided to collectively thrust themselves toward that country’s insurgency in the 1970s-1990s. Through a series of subnational, ethnographic case studies conducted over several years and oral histories, she finds three main reasons: participation, defiance, and the pleasures of agency. As for the latter, she means “the positive affect associated with self-determination, autonomy, self-esteem, efficacy, and pride that come from the successful assertion of intention” (235). Her account undermines rational-actor theories of collective action based on material incentives and gains. Far from material benefits, Salvadorans that supported or actively participated in guerrilla groups faced extraordinarily high risks without any foreseeable material gains. Continue reading →

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Fighting for the Rain Forest

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Richards, Paul. 1996. Fighting for the Rainforest: War, Youth and Resources in Sierra Leone. Oxford: James Currey.

Paul Richards main aim in Fighting for the Rain Forest is to argue against what he calls the “New Barbarism” thesis, which presents violent conflict in Africa as being driven Malthusian determinants and cheap weaponry or, as he puts it, “Malthus-with-guns” (xiii). Using ethnographic methods and looking into the political ecology and economy of conflict, Richards shows how war in Sierra Leon is “a drama of social exclusion” (xiv). And “although the local history of resource acquisition is relevant to understanding the war there is no run-away environmental crisis in Sierra Leone. Young people caught up in the dispute specifically point to political failures as a cause of the war, and deny the relevance of Malthusian factors” (xvi). Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Bandits, Boundaries, Drugs, Everyday Life, Forests, Frontiers, Historical-Geographies, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Land, Law, Nation/Nationalism, Peace, Place, Political Ecology, Political Economy, Post-Colonial, Power, Primitive Accumulation, Scale, Sovereignty, Spatiality, Territory, Terror, The Body, The State, Violence | 1 Comment

Inside Rebellion

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Weinstein, Jeremy M. 2007. Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jeremy Weinstein’s Inside Rebellion seeks to reveal why some insurgencies are far more violent against civilian populations than others. In other words, why are some civil wars so much more brutal than others? His explanation centers on the organizational challenges associated with insurgencies—particularly, their access to material resources. Rebel organization poses five main challenges: recruitment, control (of fighters), governance (of civilians), violence, and resilience. His theory is that “rebel groups that emerge in environments rich in natural resources or with external support of an outside patron tend to commit high levels of indiscriminate violence; movements that arise in resource-poor contexts perpetrate far fewer abuses and employ violence selectively and strategically” (7). Continue reading →

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Shattering Silence

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Aretxaga, Begoña. 1997. Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism, and Political Subjectivity in Northern Ireland. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Begoña Aretxaga explores the problems and promise of feminist change in Northern Ireland with the start of the “Troubles” in the wake of the 1969 civil rights movement there. She explores the relations of power and politics through the entwinements of gender, class, republican nationalism, and colonialism. The place of working-class women in the Irish republican struggle has been both silenced and misrecognized, not only in terms of their actual participation, but also in terms of how their experience structured the politics of the struggle both directly and indirectly. The political subjectivity of these working-class nationalist women was both incited/constituted, experienced, and changed through the—nevertheless, male-dominated—struggle they helped define. More than this, the book also explores “the effects that such subjectivity can produce on a political culture and on a gendered universe” (9). Continue reading →

Posted in Boundaries, City, Everyday Life, Gender, Hegemony, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Law, Nation/Nationalism, Place, Post-Colonial, Power, Race & Ethnicity, Spatiality, Terror, The Body, The State, Violence | 1 Comment

Formations of Violence

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

It makes sense to me.

Feldman, Allen. 1991. Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Formations of Violence came highly recommended, and I was not disappointed. The overly dense theoretical introduction and Allen Feldman’s overly complex writing style made me skeptical at first, but the material and the argument kept me engaged throughout the book. Feldman examines 1970s political violence in Northern Ireland through the narrative of the body, but more than a “mere” lens, he argues that the body itself became a prime site and weapon for the deacade’s violent interactions. The account is also deeply spatial: “Wherever encountered in the book, the shrinkage of the space of political enactment corresponds to the expansion of the acting subject—the increasing correlation of personhood to historical transformation” (10). The book traverses—by chapter—various spaces: the city, the neighborhood, the jail, the jail cell, the body of the hungerstriker, and at each scale of spatial framing the body is shown to be a pivotal political agent; political violence achieves and works through the “instrumental staging and commodification of the body” (9). Continue reading →

Posted in Boundaries, City, Everyday Life, Frontiers, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Law, Michel Foucault, Nation/Nationalism, Peace, Place, Post-Colonial, Power, Race & Ethnicity, Scale, Sovereignty, Spatiality, Territory, Terror, The Body, The State, Violence | 2 Comments

Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Beckett, Ian FW. 2001. Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies: Guerrillas and their Opponents Since 1750. New York: Routledge.

Ian Beckett’s Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies provides a sweeping yet surprisingly detailed, if rather conventional, historical survey of insurgency and counter-insurgency. Despite the book’s subtitle, one gets the sense that insurgency and counterinsurgency, as Beckett understands it, emerged as mainly a twentieth century phenomenon and that insurgency is practically synonymous with guerrilla warfare. Continue reading →

Posted in Bandits, Historical-Geographies, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Law, Sovereignty, Terror, The State, Violence | Comments Off on Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies