Rethinking Political Violence

At the time of drafting the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention), the drafters were hopeful that the document will be the response needed to ensure that the world would never again witness such atrocities as committed by the Nazi regime. While, arguably, there has been no such great loss of human lives as during WWII, genocidal incidents have and still take place. After WWII, we have witnessed the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, to name only a few. The responses to these atrocities have always been inadequate. Every time the world leaders would come together to renew their promise of ‘Never Again’. However, the promise has never materialised. In 2014, Daesh unleashed genocide against religious minorities in Syria and Iraq. Before the world managed to shake off from the atrocities, in 2016, the Burmese military launched a genocidal campaign against the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. This was followed by reports ofever-growing atrocities against Christian minorities in Nigeria. Without waiting too long, in 2018, China proceeded with its genocidal campaign against the Uyghur Muslims. In 2020, the Tigrayans became the victims of ethnic targeting. Five cases of mass atrocities that, in the space of just five years, all easily meet the legal definition of genocide. Again, the response that followed each case has been inadequate and unable to make a difference to the targeted communities. This legacy does not give much hope for the future. The question that this books hopes to address is what needs to change to ensure that we are better equipped to address genocide and prevent the crime in the future.

This book examines the nature of everyday peace mobilised in post-conflict settings. It specifically aims to examine the reconstruction of relationships between local communities and former Khmer Rouge leaders in Cambodia, using social reconciliation as an indicator of peace. Based on the empirical examination, this study will reveal key features of everyday peace like plurality, connectivity and subtlety, and local communities’ agency for peacebuilding. Research questions that will be examined include what does everyday peace look like? What forms of everyday practice have community members developed and utilised? How is the local process for relationship building related to the wider peacebuilding and governance contexts in the country? And how have community members handled and destabilised the mainstream narratives related to the Khmer Rouge in the process? The volume will present new conceptual and theoretical innovations relevant to the central debates on everyday peace, withan empirical examination of Cambodia.

Most recent works about the efforts of local communities caught up in a civil war have focused on their efforts to remain places of security and safety from the violence that surrounds them—neutral peace communities or zones. This book, in contrast, focuses on local peace communities facing new challenges and opportunities once a peace agreement has been signed at the national level, such as those in South Africa, the Philippines, Burundi, East Timor, Sierra Leone, and the present peace process in Colombia between the FARC and the Colombian Government. The communities’ task is to make a stable and durable peace in the aftermath of a violent civil war and a deal on which local people have usually had little or no influence. Such agreements seek to involve them in both short and longer term peace-building, and expect local communities to cope with problems of armed ex-combatants, IDPs and refugees, law and order in the absence of much state presence, high unemployment and the need for widespread and massive reconstruction of physical infrastructure damaged or destroyed during the war. How local communities have coped with the demands of “peace” is thus the theme that runs through each of these individual chapters, written by authors with direct experience of grassroots communities struggling with such “problems of peace.”  

This open access book provides a comprehensive analysis of the Maidan massacre in Ukraine. It uses a theoretical framework of rational choice, moral hazard, state- repression backfire, and Weberian ideas about rational action to explore the massacre.

The book draws on publicly available videos, photos and audio recordings of the massacre in English, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and other languages, along with several hundred individual testimonies and revelations from the Ukrainian investigation and a trial and its verdict. By examining which parties were responsible for the massacre, the book analyses its implications for not only Russia’s war on Ukraine but also political developments across the globe.

This open access book explains why southern European countries with significant Muslim communities have experienced few religiously inspired violent attacks – or have avoided the kind of securitised response to such attacks seen in many other Western states. The authors provide a unique contribution to the literature on violent extremism – which has traditionally focused on countries such as France, the US and the UK – by studying the causes of relatively low rates of radicalisation in Greece, Italy and Spain.

The book explores many of the dynamics between (non) radicalisation and issues such as socioeconomic inequality, experiences of conflict, and systemic racism and other forms of discrimination. It establishes a new analytical framework for the development of, and resilience against, violent radicalisation in the region and beyond.

Perpetrators within? provides the first ethnographic account of the experiences of military families of the Argentine dictatorship (1976-83). At the crossover of multiple disciplines, this groundbreaking study brings advancements in the fields of military and conflict studies, Latin American history, transitional justice and ethnographic methods.

The military juntas that seized power in Argentina in 1976 waged a brutal 'dirty war' against communism, leading to seven years of authoritarian rule that claimed thousands of lives. The regime suppressed political opposition through kidnapping, torture, and clandestine executions. Although efforts to bring the military to justice began in 1985, legal obstacles delayed prosecutions for over 20 years. It wasn't until 2005 that trials resumed, resulting in the conviction of hundreds of former officers for crimes committed during the dictatorship. Perpetrators within? questions these unique subjects directly. For the first time, the military of the dictatorship are approached as a community of families and comrades (which includes spouses, children and ‘brothers in arms’) better to understand the personal and collective experiences of those linked to the regime's violent past. Based on extensive research with former junior officers –many now imprisoned – their wives and adult children, the book unveils the social and family life of the military of the 1970s, it investigates the everyday unexceptional scenarios of repression, and it

describes the long road to justice from the point of view of military families involved in the trials. A vital contribution to understanding the workings of kinship, military power and violence, this book offers a deeper ad original perspective on one of the darkest chapters in Latin American history.

This book explains the evolution of nuclear doctrines along the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st in an evolving geopolitical context, particularly the potential use of nuclear weapons to blackmail or aggressively sanctuarize territorial gains, as it has been demonstrated by Russia in Ukraine.

After five decades of the Cold War, known as the first nuclear age, the world attempted to eliminate nuclear weapons through treaties and disarmament initiatives. This marked the second nuclear age, where peace efforts fostered hope that these weapons might become obsolete. However, during the first decade of the 21st century, cracks began to appear in this ambition, notably with North Korea’s withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Today, the nuclear factor dominates the geopolitical landscape in a new and alarming way. New players have emerged, some of whom do not adhere to the rules established during the Cold War. Russia, for example, resorted to nuclear blackmail against the West in the early days of its invasion of Ukraine. This marks the onset of a third nuclear age—characterized by greater complexity, increased volatility, and the presence of new actors who are dangerously navigating their learning curves.

This book answers the question of why and how people form bonds with each other and with insurgent groups in fragile state contexts. It develops an overarching framework depicting a political social contract, presents the Grievance-Driven Pathway as one way through which a reformist insurgency-society contract can form, and conducts a systematic comparison using two novel case studies not yet evaluated in insurgency literature, the UFDR in the Central African Republic and the SLM/A in Darfur, Sudan. The core claim is that perceptions of legitimacy across the four social contract elements lead to consent to form the intangible “bond” and foster societal and political trust. Studying social contracts—specifically the interaction between state-society contracts and reformist insurgency-society contracts—facilitates a greater understanding of what constitutes legitimacy in the twenty-first century and how perceptions of illegitimacy can lead to a breakdown of trust and the outbreak of violent conflict.