Politics of Violence: Conflict, Borders, and the Carceral State

Catalog description

Politics of Violence offers an analysis of the role of the state, its mechanisms, and its structures in perpetuating, legitimizing, and facilitating political, racial and gender based violence worldwide. We will explore the connections and effects of nationalism, militarism, and heteropatriarchy (as structural and ideological elements of the state) as well as neoliberal assaults and practices in the normalization of violence against dissidents, incarcerated populations, refugees, workers, and indigenous communities. We will engage in a theoretical discussion on the salience of particular ideational and material experiences of race, ethnicity, indigeneity, gender and queer identities, political affiliation, in rendering state sponsored, political violence, and torture thinkable. The course aims to shed light on the power structures within militaristic and hypermasculinized state frameworks, and on biopolitical practices that legitimize structural violence against particular communities based on their political, class, gender, ethnic identities or precarious immigration status. In this seminar, we will examine violence, persecution, and dispossession as inherent phenomena of the sovereign nation state, in their continuities and ruptures, during war and conflict, but also in migratory, democratic, and transitional contexts. Students will examine historical and contemporary cases of state sponsored and political violence, systematic violations of human rights in the context of genocide, gendercide, racist violence, colonial terrorism, carceral regimes, and the securitization of forced migration. Lectures and readings provide a comparative, transnational perspective but focus on regional case studies, through a transdisciplinary lens, drawing on international relations, anthropology, gender studies, political theory, and history