Representation, Politics and Violence. CAPPE international conference 2013

Abstracts

Sadiya Akram, University of Canberra, Australia, Representing the riot

In 2011 the UK experienced rioting in six cities including in London and Birmingham. These occurred against a backdrop of riots that took place in 2005 (Birmingham), 2001 (Oldham, Burnley, Bradford) and 1981 (Tottenham, Brixton, Handsworth). Rioting has also notably occurred in Sweden (2013), France (2005) and in Australia (2005). Images of burning cars and disaffected youth clashing with the police dominate in the media when such acts occur. Whilst incidents of rioting have increased, there is little consensus on their meaning, yet the representation of riots as criminal behaviour by bored and inactive youth, as community insurrections (Gilroy 1978/1992), or as the power of the crowd mind (Le Bon 1897) persist in popular accounts and in the extant literature on this subject. This paper argues that there is a significant contradiction between the representation of riots and the act, which risks undermining the significance of riots as political acts. I argue that riots are politics acts and rioters are politically motivated actors, who operate in a manner, which challenges conventional modes of political action. I suggest that it is difficult to deny the grievances and, in turn, the political motivations of rioters given that riots have exclusively occurred in areas with large ethnic minority populations, which are disproportionately affected by socio- economic inequalities. The central dilemma in explaining the riot is the tension between the spontaneity of the act and the lack of explicit political strategy expressed by those involved given that articulated political strategy usually involves considered and organised actions. I suggest that in order to better understand riots, we need an improved theorization of agency, which incorporates an understanding of how political motivations may occur at a pre-conscious and unarticulated level, which clearly differs significantly from more conventional understandings of political participation.

Albayati Dhyaa, Griffith University, Australia, Presenter: Ahmed Hassin, Deakin University, Australia, The impacts of terrorism and security concerns on an urban from and residents’ behaviour

War and terrorism pose significant challenges to activities and the form of cities. Despite an increase in research examining the implications of war and terrorism on urban form and activities, there are many unknowns. For example, in countries like Iraq, war and terrorist acts have mainly been directed towards urban form and civilian targets and these have dramatically influenced urban life and activities. These unusual events have generated a range of responses, which vary based on urban form. This paper focuses in detail on these responses, to better understand the implications of terrorist acts on urban form and individual behaviour within three Baghdad neighbourhoods. The research divides the responses into two categories: formal planning responses including governmental and institutional responses; and informal planning responses that involve individual actions.

The research used questionnaires to collect data from 281 individuals in three Baghdad neighbourhoods. These neighbourhoods differed in terms of their form and structure. The questionnaire included questions about urban form, structure, design, and materials used over the past decade. It also included questions about the activities and behaviour that individuals used to cope with unstable security conditions. Quantitative analysis was used to analyse and compare the three study areas.

The research findings highlighted that the behaviour of individuals and government responses were different across the three Baghdad neighbourhoods, and that they influenced urban form.

Lene Auestad, University of Oslo, Norway, Public memory and figures of fragmentation

This paper questions some public memorials of the Holocaust in relation to trauma, especially in its aspects of physical suffering, and to the possibility or impossibility of mourning. I begin by reflecting on the potential functions of art in this context, and move on to recounting the phenomenology of trauma, mainly as described by Ferenczi. Three sculptures or installations are discussed in relation to their communication to the spectator as an embodied, physical being; Anthony Gormley’s chairs in Oslo, Peter Eisenman’s memorial in Berlin and Rachel Whiteread’s memorial in Vienna. These sculptures, it is argued, are not mimetic in the sense of depicting something recognisable. Rather, the spectator is the one who is put in the position of doing the mimesis, as the monuments evoke some of the sensations – physical and mental – related to trauma. Cast in a position of being addressed by an overwhelming, confusing absence, the spectator is made to experience the sensations of being dropped, being trapped, being lost, and of non- responsiveness. These sculptures turn the spectator into an object in relation to them, constituting a relation to something that does not relate back, as if speaking to someone who neither listens nor answers.

Nazim Balci, Bahcesehir University, Turkey, Crimini di Pace: Sarah Kane’s Blasted and social Violence

This paper, which can be located under the title ‘Literary and Artistic Responses to Violence’, focuses on the British playwright Sarah Kane’s 1995 play Blasted and addresses to the issues of social violence, representation of violence and the reactions the media and audiences have given to such representations. Framed within the concept of In-Yer-Face Theatre, a movement that fiercely dominates the stages of the 90s, the paper juxtaposes text with theory by scrutinizing what Aleks Sierz and Slavoj Žižek have to tell about theatre and violence. With the observable rise of the mainstream (social) media’s discriminative discourses such as labelling, racism and sexism, and therefore with the characterization of the public by what they are made to see and read, modern humanity has evolved into less tolerant beings towards others’ proximity to one another. Thus, in this paper, some pages are allocated to the general representations of people of low rank on the media in order to analyse how, through this, the public gradually becomes more ignorant and complacent about the others, and under the pretence of love for one’s nation, how one can gradually plant the seeds of social violence in peace times, no matter verbal or physical. Altogether, by basing on Žižek’s theory of subjective violence in which people are made believe into the neutrality of violence and is a form of violence inherent in the capitalistic ruling system, the paper analyses the tactics In-Yer-Face Theatre employs to hold the audience by the scruff of the neck and shake it until it gets the message, as Sierz puts it. As a result, the relationship between the ignorant creator of violence and what is actually created is examined by referring to Žižek who explains today’s ideological landscape to be one thing being both the reason and result of the other.

Ryszard Bartnik, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland, David Park’s The Truth Commissioner and Gillian Slovo’s Red Dust as parallel responses to political breakthroughs in Northern Ireland and South Africa

Northern Ireland after the Troubles and post-apartheid South Africa resemble each other insofar as they have adopted a corresponding strategy of democratic dialogism that aims at bridging the gap between former antagonists. Its eventual result is to facilitate the process of healing old wounds as well as tackling traumatic experiences. The dialogic interchange, as strongly resonant in recent Northern Irish and South African narratives, finds its thematization both in David Park’s momentous novel The Truth Commissioner and Gillian Slovo’s Red Dust. This paper, then, on the basis of these two authorial attempts focuses on a general [in]effectiveness of the idea behind the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as such and its potential applicability to the post-Troubles reality. A single legal case, as construed by Park and Slovo respectively, indicates how challenging, yet needed a symbolic descent into the ghastly underworld of the past in fact might be. While such confrontation with the bygone horrors by no means is questioned, its calculated effects, namely the absolute truth and genuine reconciliation are rather distrusted. Therefore, Park’s and Slovo’s texts are to be presented as a template for the inquest on the value of institutionalization of both a personal/historical guilt and trauma processing.

Rodion Belkovich, National Research University – Higher School of Economics, Russia, The importance of being earnest: bias and contempt in contemporary academia

The paper (drawn mostly on Russian experience) focuses on the problem of cultural and political rigidness of contemporary Academia and the widespread practices of intellectual violence still innate to it. I am going to focus on a few examples from both research and teaching fields within Russian Academia which form altogether a distinctive pattern. The examples include: study materials, which provide the students with the questions in such a form which eliminates a possibility of an answer dissenting from a pre-arranged scheme; opinions published in the academic journals, which deny the right of an author to engage in the study field not of his own; publicly expressed accusations of bringing in some alien, pro-western, “pre- paid” ideas; the practice of intellectual duress within a classroom forcing a student to change his opinions in order to graduate; government-initiated committees for “counteracting the falsification” of history, which lack any authority except an authority to ridicule etc. These methods of harassment exist despite the absence of official state ideology or any discernible financial reasons, and they lead to the steady re- creation of the atmosphere of intellectual servility within Academia. This atmosphere presupposes not only the impossibility of some unpleasant answers, but (sometimes to the larger extent) of some questions too. It doesn’t mean, however, that this practices are initiated only by the conservative academic establishment. “Scholars in opposition” tend to resort to the same mode of behaviour within their own domain. The important thing being the logic of the system, we need to ask ourselves to which extent do we personally participate in this intellectual violence?

Konstantinos Blatanis, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece,The politics of violence and compromised urban spaces on stage: Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 and José Rivera’s Marisol

Interest in this paper centers on exemplary cases of two entirely different modes of dramatization and theatrical practice aimed at a critical reconsideration of the ways in which political issues surrounding intensely violent events that have marked American mega cities over the past two decades routinely succumb to the hegemony of monolithic and sterile media representations. Anna Deavere Smith’s vigorous exploration of the reserves of documentary drama and theatre in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 is read alongside and juxtaposed to José Rivera’s innovative and exceptional use of magic realism for the stage in Marisol. The question of political efficacy in both cases is thoroughly examined here in relation to how profitably these works showcase acts of interrogating mass media appropriations of identified city riots and instances of social unrest. Attention is devoted to the ways in which Smith’s verbatim documentation of the city in turmoil as well as Rivera’s surreal and dystopian account of liminal experiences of disenfranchised urban subjectivities may lead audience members to reassess their own habits of negotiating political demands and relating to moments of crisis. Furthermore, the evaluation of the two playwrights’ investigation of consequentially compromised and highly de-realized aspects of urban geography inevitably accentuates questions concerning the restrictions and limitations the contemporary American stage encounters whenever it undertakes the challenge to accommodate the political.

Julia Boll, University of Konstanz, Germany, Violence on stage and staged violence

The efficiency of public violence derives from the staging of power and legitimacy. This performative quality is amplified by the performance’s high visibility, usually staged in a public arena. Of course, violence has also always been a vital part of the performing arts: the element of scopophilia is as important as the fact that the theatre can use actual bodies for the representation of violence, thus highlighting the bodily experience of both performer and spectator. Stating that ‘[t]heatre is an art of bodies witnessed by bodies’, Simon Shepherd argues that the act of witnessing signifies a person attesting ‘to the truth of something that is or was present for them.’ Through the physical presence of the bodies on stage the acts of violence one has been aware of in an abstract way, in the form of statistics and reports, become again connected to actual bodies. Obviously, it is not genuine violence that is witnessed when it is performed on the theatrical stage: it echoes the features of violence but remains a mere approximation, raising questions about representation: is the attempt to acknowledge violence by witnessing the representation of violence the only way we can possibly understand the experience of violence without being subjected to it ourselves? I will explore the relationship between publically staged violence and violence represented on stage, and, drawing from Kelly Oliver’s theory of an ethics based on witnessing and from recent plays such as Zecora Ura’s Hotel Medea and Dea Lehor’s Life on Praça Roosevelt, will discuss how the theatre might be seen as the art form best suited to enable ‘witnessing beyond recognition’.

Gary Bratchford and Huw Wahl, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, Negotiating representation in Israel and Palestine

This paper will address the weekly anti occupation protests that occur in Israel and the Occupied territories (OT) with specific focus on the production and dissemination of images depicting ritualistic resistance by Palestinians against Israeli forces. The paper will primarily consider the ‘academic/activist interface’ through active field research, considered against the conceptualization of protests as events to be witnessed, documented and disseminated.

Lastly, this paper will offer a critical analysis of current visual practices related to how the Palestinian demonstrations are framed or staged with subsequent insight into the emergence of academic/activist research and the role of the camera.

A collaborative investigation, this research is underpinned by fieldwork produced in the OT during summer 2012 by academic/photographer Huw Whal. By combining primary resources, interviews and theoretical discussions we investigate the role of the documenter and the effect repetitive imagery has on both the viewer from afar, and conversely the Palestinian, as a mediated and represented subject under occupation. It has been argued that a dialectic has arisen whereby the Palestinian is caught in a perpetual cycle of narrative driven representations of ‘iconic’ or ‘monolithic’ imagery. Campbell (2009) suggests that Palestinians locate their claims for justice in the immediate presentation of bodies and victims. However Allen (2004) suggests that Palestinians represent themselves to each other and to the international community via a human-rights framework, whereby rights that are seen to arise not from a political status but from the state of (human) nature. But how does the Palestinian see his or herself in the press? Through the fieldwork conducted a dichotomy has arisen related to how ‘true victimhood’ is represented when one considers peace activist photography against the visual construction of Palestine in the media.

Aneta Brockhill, University of Plymouth, UK, To what extent does structural violence and cultural violence explain the persistence of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict? The case of Israeli hydropolitics in the West Bank

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the world’s most intractable conflicts. Despite the numerous bilateral attempts and third-party interventions to bring an end to the conflict, peace between the parties has failed to materialize. This paper proposes a new analysis of the reasons of the continuing failure to achieve a peaceful solution to the conflict, based on the concept of structural and cultural violence. The aim of the study is to examine the impact structural and culture violence has on the protraction of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict. The study employs the conceptual and methodological framework of Johan Galtung’s triangle of violence, in which he identifies three types of violence: direct, structural and cultural. As unequal access to resources is one of the most common forms of structural violence, the case study the paper employs is Israeli hydropolitics in the West Bank. The paper argues that Israeli structural violence, evident in the stark differential in water distribution and consumption between the two groups, is justified by the Israeli belief of their chosenness and their belief of their biblical right to the Promised Land, Eretz Yisrael. Identifying and discussing the implication of structural and cultural violence in the conflict, the paper analyses the implications of the discussed acts of structural and cultural violence. The paper argues that structural violence can be considered as a root of the conflict, and direct violence, the enduring feature of the conflict, can be seen as a manifestation of the conflict rather than its cause. The resolution of the conflict would then require the cessation of structural violence. The second part of the paper seeks to examine whether, and to what extent, structural and cultural violence has been addressed during the peace negotiations. A content analysis of peace initiatives, such as the Oslo Peace Process, will be carried out. The paper argues that all peace attempts to resolve the conflict have constituted in negative peace and they failed as they did not address structural and cultural violence. Consequently, the failure to address it has significantly contributed to the persistence of the conflict, and it remains one of the main impediments to the future coexistence between the two parties. The removal of structural disparities between conflictual groups is necessary for the successful process of peace building, and consequently, lasting peace.

Catherine Brown, New College of the Humanities, UK, Representing torture in Zero Dark Thirty

This paper explores the representation of torture in Kathryn Bigelow’s 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty – a 157 minute feature film concerning the tracking down and murder, in May 2011, of Osama Bin Laden by American forces. A number of scenes in the first part of the film depict torture of detainees by American CIA officers. These have provoked much comment and controversy. The controversy is orientated around several distinct but related questions: whether or not the torture as represented resembles the events as they actually occurred; whether or not the events as they actually occurred should be or should have been represented; whether or not the torture in the film, verisimilitudinous or otherwise, was presented in a way which attempted to justify it; and whether or not the film, if it did indeed present torture in a manner which attempted to justify it, should have done so. The director insisted that the film did not support torture, but merely depicted it; a majority of professional film critics have disagreed with her. The controversy raises a large number of questions which bear on the topic of this conference: what is involved in representing torture; the similarities and differences between the direction and the display of actual and fictional torture; and how political and ethical responses to such representation are represented in the media. My investigation of the film is contextualised by references to a wide range of other filmic and literary representations of torture as a form of political violence, ranging (in time, space, genre, and politics) from Peter Weiss’s 1964 tribunal play based on transcripts of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, Die Ermittlung (The Investigation), to the James Bond films Casino Royale (2006) and Skyfall (2012). These comparanda range from the ambitiously literary to the popular and conventional. I point out that representations of torture can reinforce or else undermine readers’ or viewers’ attitudes towards what is represented; victims can be reduced by depiction to literary convention, or else given agonized life in the reader’s imagination; narratives can be aligned with the inflictors of pain or with the afflicted. Literary and film criticism assumes a peculiar responsibility in distinguishing between them, and in this sense this paper will make a small intervention in what might – but shouldn’t – be called a ‘War on Torture’.

Bahar Senem Çevik, Ankara University, Turkey, Media framing and societal perceptions: Representing the Syrian conflict

The uprisings in the Middle East have demonstrated the power of masses and demand for democracy. Although the Arab Uprisings took the West by surprise the remains of post Cold-War skepticism still has a certain presence in countries such as Turkey where rhetoric and memories on imperialism linger on in the collective memory. There has been a constant competition between rival political camps on constructing and disseminating messages to shape the perceptions of various audiences throughout the MENA uprisings. As the Syrian crisis turns into a deadlock the media representation of the conflict proves to be an area of struggle not only between the opposition and the Syrian government but also between other regional powers such as Iran and the Gulf States. In this sense regional, ethnic and sectarian politics play a vital role in framing the news and therefore shaping societal perceptions. The current conflict and violence in Syria is represented in two separate frames in Syria’s neighboring country Turkey where the print media is dominated by mainly secular or conservative groups, both focusing on their own agenda. In this regard, various newspapers in Turkey frame the news that inadvertently support the violence in Syria for domestic political motive. Although both media elements use narratives on secularism, imperialism, democratization and integrity of the state, which are also key socio-political arguments in Turkey, they employ dissimilar arguments in backing their political position. This proposed paper will analyze the influence of Syria on framing the current conflict in Turkish print media and the narratives that are employed. The paper will take into account the major opposition newspapers by using a content analysis and will examine how these arguments represent a renouncement of violence through shaping perceptions.

Padmaja Challakere, Metropolitan State University, US, The humanitarian war and the Afghanistan novel

The current essay that I am working on, “The Humanitarian War and the Afghanistan Novel,” is part of a larger project that is engaged with three broad questions: “How does literature represent violence? What are the ethics and politics of the representation of violence? This particular article/chapter is concerned with the humanitarian war which has become a central feature of our political landscape. As Uday Mehta describes it in Liberalism and Empire, “war prospers under the constant injunction to be avoided, the logic of its exigent necessity always trumping the effects of its tragedy.” In this essay, I focus on the representation of the Afghanistan War in literature to ask what emotional and aesthetic logic governs the representation of violence in the genre that has come to be known as the ‘Afghanistan Novel.’ Sensational novels like Khaled Hosseini’s Kite-Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns and even serious literary novels like Nadeem Aslam’s A Wasted Vigil (2008) and Philip Hensher’s A Mulberry Empire (2002) that are set in the backdrop of Taliban-era Afghanistan novels produce a televisual feeling for history wherein Afghanistan is figured as the Lockean “state of nature” filled with the imminence of violence, disorder, chaos.

My essay argues that the immense energy spent in transforming the “Afghanistan War” into a narrative about “the Afghanistan tragedy” has its own political history, one which shows this war to be, to quote Chomsky, “the most doctrinal and ideological war of our times.” The logic of the “humanitarian war” is not merely about differentiating between good violence (ours) and bad violence (theirs) but about producing new fictions of evil which stage narratives of innocence and blame, providing a salve to those most deeply implicated in the violence.

If war-time is more than time that is bounded by specific dates but rather an affecting experience that resonates far beyond, what is the nature of the affect produced by Afghanistan novels and memoirs? For instance, in Khaled Hosseni’s novel Kite-Runner which has sold 2 million copies and made into a Hollywood film, what seduces the reader is the oft-repeated signature phrase that allows the protagonist Amir “to be good again.” For all of our horror of what the Hossenni’s narrator does when he unprotestingly watches Hassan being raped by his peers, we (the readers) stand by Amir till the end. This mode of producing emotion for Afghanistan is the perfect antithesis of our political, historical, and ethical responsibility. This myth of “reversibility”–or what the blurb on the cover calls “redemption”– is at the heart of the novel’s appeal to its readers. Amir’s self observation is set up to negate his culpability. The narrative trajectory is more concerned with staging the protagonist’s assumed goodness and innocence than it is with showing a struggle that allows awareness about his liability and responsibility. Rather, what we see in these novels is what Mark Seltzer in True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity calls “traumatophilia” or “contemporary wound culture,” and what Lauren Berlant in Cruel Optimism calls “the affect of the political” or “the desire to skirt the political.”

In Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, Adriana Caverero has called for an aesthetic of “horror that curdles the blood and provokes repugnance or a fright that petrifies” so that “the experience of horror” rather than “the intentionality of terror” is the pivot by which contemporary violence is imagined. All Afghanistan fiction claims to do just this. Horrorism is what a novel like Wasted Vigil produces but it does not give us not what Caverero hopes for: “a shift in perspective from terror to horror” or “an anthology of the helpless and the vulnerable that will strengthen our human affiliations.” Rather, the emotionalism and sensationalism of the Afghanistan novel sells violence, justifies war, and legitimizes our aggression.

The evacuation of the NATO war on Afghanistan is a key trait in much of the representative fiction about Afghanistan. What is also missing in these books is the long history of US support for eight factions of the most violent and reactionary Islamist mujahideen who now go under the banner of Northern Alliance. A similar asymmetric structure is visible in the data that is available about the body count of the Afghanistan war. For the years between 2003 and 2006, for instance, there are no comprehensive estimates and tallies for Afghan civilian casualties, and only since 2007, with the work done by UNAMA (United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan) and ARM (Afghanistan Rights Monitor) that we have a more accurate documentation of civilian deaths available.

My essay shows that the Afghanistan novel is the fulcrum or the ghost in the war- machine. The sensational representations of “agency,” “self,” and “evil” in the spate of popular contemporary novels and memoirs about Afghanistan are not only obedient to dominant media-narratives about Afghanistan but enact an active refusal of truth or responsibility. My work proceeds from the idea that a formal and historical analysis of the Afghanistan war and the Afghanistan novel at this turning point in literary history yields productive insights into the relation between aesthetics and politics, especially in relation to the realist novel. The ideas I have generated about some of the governing motifs of the Afghanistan novel genre: blame, self- exoneration, and horrorism or sensational violence My project, which explores the mediation between the political discourse on Afghanistan and the fictional, is important to literary humanities because it focuses specifically on literary humanities’ relation with democracy.

Burak Cop, Istanbul Kültür University, Turkey, Changing forms of the Turkish state’s political violence under JDP rule

Throughout 1990s “unresolved” murders, torture and mistreatment related to political reasons were widespread in Turkey. ECHR’s convictions and the reports prepared by transnational organizations demonstrate the extent of the violation of even the most basic human rights in Turkey in that era.
Starting from the end of 1990s, the outlook seems to have changed though. There is neither unresolved political murder nor systematic torture since Justice and Development Party (JDP) came to power. The first three years of the JDP government was a period of legislative reforms for EU membership. The improvement of human rights in Turkey was praised by the European Commission too.

Along with the optimism related to the adoption of democratization reforms, the years between 2004 and 2006 however constituted a period during which new criminal and anti-terrorism codes were legislated. The new penal framework began to serve as an instrument for crushing different factions of the opposition with the start of JDP’s second term in power (e.g. those convicted with the charges of terrorism were 273 in 2005, and this figure rose to 6345 in 2009).

Accordingly, freedoms of expression, association and demonstration are constantly undermined and the police’s coercive presence is getting more and more visible in the public sphere. Use of techniques such as phone hacking, bugging and illegal filming has become widespread too, and the revelations based on them contributed to the consolidation of the state power in the hands of the executive and/or harmed the prestige of the opposition.

Compared to 1990s, the use of (fatal) physical force by the police declined, but a more sophisticated form of violence with political motive carried out by the state has become overwhelming in Turkey. After reviewing the theory about the state violence, this paper will seek to make sense of the sophistication of the Turkish state’s political violence.

Lars Cornelissen, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands, The problem of representation, learning from Rousseeau, Schmitt and Hardt & Negri

In this paper I analyze a problematic and paradoxical aspect of representative democracy that has already been identified by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. According to Rousseau, representative government will never be able to truly voice the general will, much less if those representatives are chosen through elections. Yet for effective government on a large scale, direct democracy is not tenable. Thus arises the need for representation, even though it is flawed.

I trace this problem through the works of Carl Schmitt and, later, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. In doing so I keep referring back to Rousseau and, in the case of Hardt and Negri, to Schmitt, in order to show how the argument has evolved and how it has remained similar. I then show how this problem has led these authors to reject representative democracy as such. Finally I use the work of Chantal Mouffe to argue that the rejection of representative democracy as a whole might be a bridge too far. With Mouffe I argue that these rejections might be too radical, but that we should not dismiss them altogether on that account. Instead, we should take the warnings of these authors seriously and try to learn from them.

James Ellison, Independent scholar, UK, Networked responses to violence: migration, anarchism and creativity

‘There would appear to be a direct link between the experience of first imagining things and then bringing them into being, on the one hand — (that is, the experience of certain forms of un-alienated production) — and the ability to imagine social alternatives, on the other, particularly the possibility of a society premised on less alienated forms of creativity.’ (David Graeber, 2007, p.306)

As a by-product of any armed conflict is the production of refugees. Those who seek a safe haven in countries far from their homeland. These people travel hundreds of miles, often clandestinely, risking arrest, racial stigma, and death, to escape violence in their home countries. Their aim is to find safety in the places that have, so often, profited from colonel wars and politics. How can we as privileged artists, and researchers, act in solidarity with these errant and subjugated peoples, without resorting to paternalistic charity? Is it possible to represent the violence experienced by a refugee from Afghanistan as they attempt to enter Fortress Europe? Can we understand the systemic mortality rate of those attempting to cross the straits of Gibraltar, without turning every death into a cold statistic? Is it viable to act in solidarity with people who face the forced eviction of their make-shift homes, without falling for the glorification of suffering?

As an anarchist, I feel unable to offer political or artistic representation for anyone other than myself. This may stem from the privileged position of a white European male but it explicates the need to find strategies beyond representation. Encompassing the tactics of civil disobedience and horizontality, the space of art can become a place for the prefigurative organisation of mutual aid. One of the best examples of this is the NoBorder network or the artwork of Heath Bunting.

Michele Fenzl, University of Bologna, Italy, Democracies, political violence, and freedom of the press: The importance of state’s social purpose

One great puzzle about political violence is to understand why and when democratic polities are not able to settle conflict within institutionalised procedures. Drawing upon studies of international relations, the present paper refers to John G. Ruggie’s notion of social purpose. In his seminal article, Ruggie specified that the legitimisation of international regimes – and hence their peaceful preservation – depended on the distribution of power among international actors and on the degree of sharing of its social purpose. Within domestic politics – where power is concentrated in a central authority – the concept of social purpose and its legitimacy might then help explaining political violence. Indeed, the present study argues that social discontent is more likely to be settled through institutionalised procedures only when governments grant political outcomes that underlie their purpose. Hence, one might understand why, for instance, policy brutality often triggers further political violence: once the state betrays its role as guarantor of its citizens’ security, then the social purpose of the state is also undermined. However, the state cannot be understood only in Hobbesian terms. Indeed, and especially in Europe, the purpose also involves the welfare of its citizenry, and this is why so-called austerity measures can trigger political violence. Underlining the importance of state’s social purpose also highlights and explains the relevance of the media, since they are the main intermediary between citizenries and authorities. Interestingly, this study argues that the likelihood of political violence is inversely proportional to media freedom. Indeed, a free press, by giving more information to the society, will also create many more occasions for protests and political bargaining able to be gradually resolved through institutional arrangements. Instead, media censorship, by taking out opportunities of progressive adjustments, might create sudden mismatches between state’s social purpose and state’s political outcomes, increasing the incentives for violent actions.

Joanna Gardner-Huggett, DePaul University, US Talkin’ taboo: Joy Poe’s Rape Performance (1979)

At the opening of Joy Poe’s exhibition “Ring True Taboo,” visitors were unaware that they were about to witness a staged rape of the artist. Intended to accompany an installation addressing women and sexual violence entitled A Matter of Degree, Poe wanted to create an experience that made this issue more tangible and arranged for a male friend to simulate her rape. Not surprisingly, this event divided the feminist community of Chicago, especially the women artists’ cooperative Artemisia Gallery where the performance took place. A founding member of Artemisia, Poe clearly felt that the space provided the freedom to experiment, but a majority of the membership felt violated.

Deemed a feminist failure both artistically and ethically by critics and historians alike, Rape Performance remains an example of shock art in art historical literature. However, the event provides an opportunity to assess the role of violence in artistic representation. By using Poe’s work as a case study, this paper will consider whether women can ever use their own bodies as victims in art. Further, Poe’s work reflects the increased demands made on viewers in contemporary art and prompts the question of to what degree does audience “antagonism,” as theorized by Claire Bishop, engender productive dialogues regarding women and violence.

Rosa Gilbert, Independent Scholar, UK, Framing violence in Northern Ireland

The recent conflict in Northern Ireland – ‘the Troubles’ – provoked debates over how violence emerged in the late 1960s, and exploded into a full-blown conflict in the early 1970s. The idea that violence emerged from a dearth of political participation and exclusion of a minority (Catholic, nationalist) community implies an understanding of violence as a form of political participation and representation. This is an important contemporary issue – objections are often loudly raised when former combatants take on political or state- funded roles, illustrating the refusal of the state, the media and the public to understand violent acts as politically motivated.

I propose to provide an insight into the core features of violence in Northern Ireland. The most crucial is the role of the media. During recent oral history interviews I carried out with ex-combatants, most were satisfied with the peace and reconciliation process with former enemies but were still troubled that journalists, who had been active participants in framing the conflict, were not part of this. Language played a significant role in the framing of the conflict: journalists’ descriptions of ‘Chicago style shootings’ implied widespread criminality which avoided discussion of the political issues. More recently, the word ‘dissident’ has been used as an umbrella term to describe those who are not in favour of the Belfast Agreement and political settlement, even if entirely peaceful, effectively dismissing those with objections.

Northern Ireland illustrates the difficulties in labels of violence and non-violence as binary opposites. The prison protests and hunger strikes in particular – as with the Red Army Faction in West Germany, ETA in Northern Spain and PLO in Palestine – were non-violent acts that maintained and internalised the violent conflict. In exploring this issue, I hope to provide a deeper understanding of the nature of political violence in Western states in terms of the violent acts, the framing by the media and the historical repercussions of violent conflicts.

Lelia Green, Edith Cowan University, Australia, What does the Boston Marathon bombing tell us about representation, politics, children and lethal violence?

“September 11, 2001 was one of those seismic moments, a day when the planet seemed to shudder and shift on its axis … [creating] a sense of before and after cataclysm”, so said Rod Usher (2001) for Time magazine. He was referring, naturally, to the almost 3,000 people killed on American soil as a result of the 9/11 ‘attacks on America’. The sense of the shuddering planet, shifting on its axis, may have been lost, however on the survivors of many of the atrocities punctuating the previous decade: those mourning the 800,000 people killed in the Genocide in Rwanda, for example, or the 7,300 Muslim men and boys slaughtered by Christian soldiers in Srebrenica in 1995.

Yet it would not be necessary for citizens of the USA to look overseas for comparisons. In the two decades prior to 9/11, since 1979, the annual toll of gun deaths averaged 32,000 American dead per year (Smith, 2002, p. 73), including murder, suicide and accident. In 1999, the most current data available at the time of 9/11, there were 28,874 gun deaths (Gun control network n.d.); the first time the figure had fallen below 30,000 (Gun deaths decline n.d.). Even the USA road toll, at 43,000 deaths at that point, had failed to shudder the earth.

Many years on, following what transpires to be the first extremist political attack upon Americans in over a decade, the same sense of proportion is evident in the coverage of the Boston Marathon victims. The death of any civilian is to be mourned, but the disparity between the mourning seen in the USA over the death of 8 y.o. Martin Richard and the sense of responsibility or otherwise over the deaths of civilian victims of the 300 or so drones authorised by President Obama in since he came to office speaks volumes about the power of representation and politics to amplify or minimise violence.

Arda Gucler, Northwestern University, US, Re-presenting Alevi Kurds: A Specter in Turkish Politics

Since early 2000s the Turkish politics have gone through a democratization process. The two
most prominent pillars of this phenomenon has been the integration of the Islamic constituencies into Turkish politics and the recent democratic opening towards the Kurdish constituency. While acknowledging the democratic significance of these events, this paper chooses to focus on the other side of the picture and studies those who have been left out of the process. It is with this objective in mind that I make the Kurdish Alevis the centerpiece of my inquiry. I demonstrate how this community, which belongs to a heterodox denomination of Islam, has been repressed by the current hegemonic articulation of
Sunni Islam. The more interesting finding is that such repression is being exercised not only by the Turks, but also by the Kurds since the majority of this population tends to identify Kurdish identity with the
Sunni tradition. I conclude that the Kurdish Alevis hold a paradoxical position in the context of the
recent democratization processes in contemporary Turkish politics. That is, in an environment where religion and ethnicity has attained an unprecedented presence in the public discourse in Turkey, this particular community remains in a political limbo where it can claim neither its religious nor its ethnic identity.

Zana Gulmohamad, University of Sheffield, UK, The current sectarian violence in the Middle East

This paper focuses on the reasons behind the sectarian violence and war in Iraq and Syria. It illustrates the collision between the sects (the Shia-dominated government and the Sunnis who form the opposition), ethnicities (Arabs and Kurds), political parties and movements, within a fragile political structure built around a dubious democracy in post-Saddam Iraq. It further brings out the motives of the rebels (the majority of whom are Sunnis) against the minority regime (members of the Alawit offshoot of the Shias) in the struggle for dominance in Syria. It traces the involvement of various regional powers in the sectarian war in both countries, and brings out its implications for both of them. Finally, it highlights the media war, particularly online, between the Syrian rebels and the Assad regime, seen especially on Youtube.

The study relies on an analytical approach applied to the relevant information extracted from the literature available on the subject, including documents and articles available from various books, journals and websites.

For decades, the societies in the conflicting nations across the Middle East struggled under authoritarian regimes which denied them their basic rights. They were significantly impacted by 9/11, the US-led invasion of Iraq and the Arab spring, events that led to the end of some of the tyrant regimes and left others struggling to survive. As an unforeseen consequence, the collapse of the firm dictatorial structures has exposed the deep-rooted conflicts of these societies, which are now facing a threat of elimination by each other due to distrust and suspicion. The clashes within the societies are evident in Iraq and Syria, where the ideological, communal and tribal disputes have escalated the conflict. In both these countries, minority communities had been in power for decades, enjoying privileges and suppressing the majority.

The artificial borders drawn by Britain and France in the 1920s have added another dimension to the conflict, posing questions of identity, the loyalty of populations to their state and the relation of communities within the state. The political bodies seem to have only broken down the divisions between the sects and ethnic groups that now stand confronting each other and posing a threat of domination to others. The present sectarian violence and war, which has resulted in 80,000 deaths in Syria and 2000 in Iraq in the last two months only, show the failure of the nations in containing the political crisis. Published on 7th of June regarding the sectarian violence in Iraq, Link: http://www.opendemocracy.net/zana-khasraw-gul/who-is-responsible-for-iraq’s-sectarian-violence

Ahmed Hassin, Deakin University, Australia, Tribes and political representation: the case of post-war Iraq

Ten years have passed since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the political scene in Iraq is still blurry. Iraq was promoted to be the democratic example in the Middle East. The US came to Iraq to “create” a democratic system that can be a model for other countries in the region. A major factor in creating such environment is by changing the radical centralised totalitarian regime with a weak state that can give more space to building the civil society in new Iraq (Looney, 2003). Nonetheless, the socio-economic and political indicators of the newly installed political “democratic” system point to notable failures. Apart from poor socio-economic factors, the new political elite has either misused democracy for personal, ethno-sectarian or partisan gains or abused the system to ensure their long lasting presence in the decision-making arena. Corruption, disconnection from electorate, poor performance and carelessness of politicians and failing state service provisions have all made citizens question the feasibility of political participation in elections.

The electorate seem to have lesser faith in the political parties and blocs whose legitimacy of representation is at stake. Noticeably, tribes have stepped forward to mobilise people as a non-partisan and independent powerful social structure. They have been active in lobbying the state as well as encouraging their members for active participation. This paper discusses the extent to which Iraqi tribes are involved in political participation. It explores their roles in active citizenship and the way they represent and mobilise their members. It also probes whether tribes have the influence on shaping the political trajectory in Iraq.

Jeremy Hexham, University of Calgary, Canada,”We see a new Africa” – words of resistance and renewal. Protest and change in South Africa

When people discuss the collapse of the apartheid regime they often speak about the success of the ANC’s (African National Congress) “armed struggle” as its root cause. Thus the South African situation is frequently presented as a prime example of the way violence can end political oppression.

This interpretation overlooks the fact that there was nothing inevitable about the smooth transition to a post-apartheid society that avoided a Syrian type situation of horrific violence and repression. In fact, the collapse of apartheid was far more complex than most people realize. For example, the ANC explicitly rejected terrorism while endorsing armed struggle as a last resort.

This paper examines some of the non-violent factors that led to changes in both Black and White South African attitudes prior to 1989. It argues that these cultural changes were at least as important as the armed struggle even though they are overlooked in most popular accounts of the end of the apartheid era. In particular it examines the way literature, pop music, and television programs presented a new vision of a multi-racial society. This vision of a “New Africa” deeply affected young South Africans, including many Afrikaners, who in a relatively short time rejected the propaganda of the apartheid regime. Thus meaningful change, with relatively little violence compared to similar situations in other parts of the world, became possible.

Emma Heywood, University of Manchester, UK, One story, three storytellers: Russian, French and UK TV coverage of the Middle East

The daily interpretation and reporting by national television news channels of foreign conflicts and associated international intervention play a central role in informing the domestic audience about the channels’ construction of the apparent realities of the causes, protagonists and proposed solutions to a given war. This results in contrasting representations, from country to country, of a single conflict. My paper evaluates and compares the state of European reporting of foreign conflict in the post 9/11 and post- Cold War era. It investigates how the reporting is shaped by influences exerted by the cultural values, beliefs and practices of television news channels from three differing systems: BBC’s News at 10, representing a British public service broadcaster, nominally independent of government control; Vremya, from Russia’s Channel 1, an national, state-aligned broadcaster; and 20 Heures, from France 2, from a media system with a long history of state intervention. The analysis will discuss two years’ coverage of the Middle East Conflict (2006-2008) – a conflict selected because of its on-going presence in the news agenda, the sensitivities and controversies it raises and the particular relationship of the three countries to this conflict.

The coverage is examined from the theoretical perspective of news values and agenda-setting. By focusing on these two areas – which influence the shaping, length and positioning of broadcasts – news reports can be analysed both quantitatively (e.g. running order, airtime, number of items per programme and subject matter) and qualitatively, (e.g. the portrayal of news values and agenda-setting attributes displayed) illustrating nationally differentiated representations of both the events and those involved in the Middle East conflict from the viewpoints of UK, French and Russian television news providers.

Miranda Iossifidis, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, Reweaving past violence into the present: Counteracting political myths within the Athens Polytechnic Uprising memorialisation

Sarah Jankowitz, Trinity College, Ireland, Commemorating violence in Northern Ireland

In Northern Ireland, one can observe a multitude of commemorative practices aimed at remembering those killed as a result of ‘the Troubles’. The commemorative rituals range from official or state memorials like the George’s Cross RUC Memorial Garden to community based memorials found across the region and murals that decorate and delineate different neighbourhoods. In this case, representations of violence in these commemorations are often intended to assert one group’s victimhood in order to justify any number of political actions or even further violence against other groups. Due to the extent of division in Northern Ireland, these commemorations offer quite disparate representations of victims and victimhood depending upon group interests.

This paper seeks to compare commemorative practices established by the state with those by communities in Northern Ireland to understand the impact of these rituals on the social memories and subsequent grassroots and political action of their intended audiences. To do this I will employ my own framework for analysing social memory that I have developed for my PhD research. With it, I will examine the ways specific memorials or murals employ language as well as cultural and political symbols, represent or define group boundaries, relate past events to the present, and exemplify selective versions of the past. This will allow me to inquire deeper into a cross section of my own research, which is principally focused on memory, identity and victimhood in Northern Ireland. Whereas my research expands upon claims that the social memory of a group is paramount to how its members construct their identities, this paper affords me the opportunity to pinpoint and critically analyse the specific role commemoration, as a form of social memory, plays in guiding this process.

Wendy Jones Nakanishi, Shikoku Gakuin University, Japan, Representations of the politics of sexual violence in Japan

Japanese women’s traditional relegation to the status of second-rate citizens in Japanese society is reflected in the gender-biased nature of the Japanese legal system which signally fails to address such issues as sexual harassment and domestic violence that directly affect them. The social conditions of Japan tend to prioritize male point of view over the female in such cases, with the implicit assumption that the male experience is universal and objective.

Natsuo Kirino seeks to redress the balance in her books, which present ‘her story’ as opposed to ‘his(story)’. Natsuo Kirino is the pen-name of Mariko Hashioka, born in 1951, a prolific crime writer most famous for her 1997 novel Out, published in English translation in 2004. Her novels are not for the faint- hearted nor are they for westerners loath to abandon themm cultural stereotype of the Japanese woman as a delicate and beautiful oriental flower. Lacking legal redress or social status, the four female protagonists of Out, for example, are driven to acts of violence, collaborating in dismembering and disposing of the body of a philandering, abusive husband.

Kirino’s tales are not simple ‘who-dunnits’ but, rather, comprise a sociological analysis of a society that drives people to commit the most extreme of acts: murder. This paper looks at three of Kirino’s seventeen published novels, including Grotesque (2007) and Real World (2007) as well as Out. Each features female protagonists driven to violence by the selfish, greedy and aggressive male characters who populate Kirino’s portrait of contemporary Japan.

This paper places Kirino’s heroines in the context of Japanese society in which, despite the enactment of the Equal Opportunity Law in April 1986, women still routinely suffer from sexual discrimination in Japanese society in general and in the Japanese workplace in particular, and demonstrates how Kirino’s novels represent a form of female empowerment.

Ruth Kager, University of Vienna, Austria, Inappropriate/d worlds in the tension fields of domination and resistance: Critical public spheres translating political difference/the not-public

The main concern of my graduate thesis inscribes itself in the search for a critical concept of the public sphere. In the center stand the breakdown of western democratic representation capacities and the precarisation occurring at that same moment -as criticized by emancipatory voices. Combining different theoretical perspectives, I’ll investigate how such tension fields of domination and resistance are dealt with –becoming public – while working in multiple manners.

The theoretical frame of this question is based on a critique of Hannah Arendt that, referring queer-feminist, postcolonial and critical-materialist insights to each other, confronts the suppression of the private and reproductive sphere, the not-public. In my perspective, such political difference has to be transformed from the bottom –which is, of course, unavailable in its origin. That’s why I’ll critically refocus on Arendt’s terms of acting together in plurality through the notion of translation –un/translatability. In that way, her thinking about the political will be associated to the critique of relations of violence. This concerns the question of how to transform such relations in the context of precarisation and vulnerability.

As illustrating example, I’ll focus the protest movement in Notre-Dame-des-Landes which fights against the destruction of sustainable resources threatened by the construction of an international airport. It’s all about tension fields between domination and resistance, the possibilities of inappropriateness and emancipatory transformation. How do activists in Notre-Dame-des-Landes conceive of and act against precarisation and the non-representation of their goals? I’ll illustrate my theoretical discussion with some of their perspectives as to associate theoretical concerns to social and political struggles. Finally, this work aims at strengthening critical public spheres by establishing multiple theoretical dialogues.

Xander Kirke, Newcastle University, UK, Myth, securitisation and “legitimising” violence: The case of al-Qaeda

Securitisation Theory has become an increasingly prominent area of study within International Relations, primarily as a response to inflexible Realist approaches to security which privilege the study of military threats. Securitisation theory claims that, in “speaking security” through the declaration of a referent object as an existential threat, states seek to legitimise the enactment of emergency measures to ensure survival. The threat can be real or constructed; the actor just has to convince the audience of its validity. An analysis of the rhetoric deployed is therefore critical, especially when it serves as part of the legitimisation process for acts of exceptional violence and war via the construction of rigid binary distinctions between “self” and “other”. But is it sufficient to limit the study of Securitisation Theory to state actors? How can an inter- spatial non-state actor conduct these processes? How do they frame existential threats to their audiences?

I seek to answer these questions through an analysis of al-Qaeda as a securitising actor by critically engaging with the discursive processes which portray the West as an existential threat, thus legitimising acts of exceptional violence and terrorism. I argue that elites within al-Qaeda have traditionally attempted to subsume and homogenise divergent identities under a single conception of an inter-territorial political and religious order in which a desire to re-establish a Caliphate is promulgated. Violence is legitimised through a construction of binaries between inside and outside, reinforced by political myths which depict historical events in dramatic form in order to ground a sense of significance for individuals and groups within their present socio-political conditions. I explore how al-Qaeda frames these political myths to incite a “will to act” in the Sorelian sense in defence of their conception of a legitimate political order. I conclude that these processes are not wholly dissimilar from historical securitising moves enacted by states.

Andy Knott, University of Brighton, UK, Machiavellian Democracy: (re)presentation and (non)violence

John P. McCormick’s Machiavellian Democracy is not just a pivotal book in theoretical interpretations of Machiavelli, political theory, republicanism and democracy, but also in contemporary political practice. Central to Machiavellian Democracy is the exultation of the efficacy of class-specific institutions, which are the key feature of Machiavelli’s account of democratic republicanism. These class-specific institutions sit alongside extant (oligarchically-inclined) institutions, not only serving as a break on the latter, but are also capable of outflanking them. They serve as an institutional space in which the people can present themselves to challenge oligarchic representation, while also recognising the conflictual actuality of politics, and seeking to channel and contain that conflict such that it doesn’t spill over into naked violence.

Sonja Lavaert, Vrije Universiteit Brussels VUB, Belgium, Machiavelli’s example, the uprising of the woolworkers

In this paper I will focus on the introduction by Machiavelli of the ‘perspective’ in political knowledge. Concretely I point out its meaning, modalities and consequences by reading the Istorie Fiorentine, III, 13 in which Machiavelli recounts the social urban revolt of 1378, the Tumulto dei Ciompi. In this fragment he shows that the content of politics is the social question, the form is struggle and resistance, the grammatical subject/actor is the multitude of common people. He asserts that there are always two conflicting perspectives, and that everything is relative and changeable. This is not only a theory explaining revolution but it is itself revolutionary and leads to the procedure of the reversal as an exemplary tool. In the Machiavellian example the discontinuous view of time is essential, according to Negri, as also is the question of violence used (or not). Machiavelli’s theory contains the enlightened radical presuppositions that all humans are equal, also in the fact that they all have particular ideas, which they like to express in different ways. As an object of knowledge and representation political affairs require imagination. This is associated with people’s ambiguity and with the immanent ontology. To argue this interpretation, I will feed these proposals back to texts of Spinoza, Van den Enden and Koerbagh. I hold up the thesis that the radical enlightenment effectuated by these philosophers shows its political subversion and revolutionary potency in its analogy and familiarity with the mentioned texts of Machiavelli. The immanent thought of Spinoza makes itself clear while using the Machiavellian paradigm of time. The theory of the two conflicting perspectives shows its meanings and consequences in light of the distinction between the power of the multitude and the institutional power of authorities. This leads to reflections on the necessity of free thought and speech, and disobedience.

David Lea, American University of Sharjah, UAE, Carl Schmitt and C.B. Macpherson on “representation” and the democratic process

This paper explores the meaning of representation within the democratic context. As defined by Hanna Pitkin “Representation means the making present of something that is nevertheless not literally present.”‘
In a democracy government is said to consist of individuals who are said to represent the people. In other words we the people through our representatives are a present within government without actually having physical presence. The decisions taken by our representatives then become our decisions. It would seem to follow if this is the case that the decisions taken by our representatives reflect the preferences, interests of the people they are supposed to represent. In considering the insights of Carl Schmitt and C.B. Macpherson this paper explains why our current democratic institutions appear to act in ways inconsistent with the interests of the people or even the majority of the people. I subsequently compare and evaluate the different solutions promoted by Schmitt and Macpherson.

Anthony Leaker, University of Brighton, UK, The uses and abuses of violence in film: The Hurt Locker and 5 Broken Cameras

This paper will analyze and compare the ‘aesthetics of authenticity’ in the depictions of violence in the Hollywood film, The Hurt Locker, and the Palestinian documentary, 5 Broken Cameras. Many of the Hollywood films addressing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan adopt the techniques, imitate the style, and produce a kind of simulacra, of documentary realism. This ‘aesthetics of authenticity’ performs ideological work that manages to establish a discourse of ‘truth’, ‘accuracy’ and ‘realness’ in the mainstream media that commentators take seriously, whereas documentaries such as 5 Broken Cameras are immediately framed as biased, personal, polemical, and politically-motivated. This difference in critical reception as well as the blurred boundary between documentary and fiction films raises an important question: how can the value and importance of political documentaries be rescued from this narrow critical response, but more importantly, from the kind of post-structuralist, ideology critique of the aesthetics of authenticity that is useful for reading films such as The Hurt Locker, but less so for documentaries such as 5 Broken Cameras. In short, given that truth, authenticity and reality have been rendered deeply problematic through the poststructuralist interrogation of their construction, by what criteria can we establish that one film is more valuable, more truthful, more real than the other. Can we still refer meaningfully to the social and political reality that the documentary depicts while at the same time critiquing the propagandistic nature of films such as The Hurt Locker. Or do we need a different set of questions?

This paper will investigate the political importance of the real/authentic while at the same time critiquing the ideological dangers of the simulacrum of the aesthetics of authenticity. By contrasting these two films I hope to demonstrate the dangerous cynicism and postmodern vacuity of Hollywood while promoting the political force of non-mainstream documentaries.

Frieder Lempp, Massey University, New Zealand, A logical representation of conflicts

Conflicts can be represented as inconsistent sets of goals, values, beliefs, emotions, or the like. Conflict resolution, then, becomes a process of firstly identifying those inconsistencies and secondly transforming them. It is the task of conflict resolution practitioners to facilitate a process, which encourages parties to transform their goals, beliefs, values, and emotions into a consistent set that is more or less acceptable to all parties.

In the first part of this paper, I present a logical representation of conflicts which can help to identify the relationships between conflicting parties’ claims, in particular, whether or not two claims are inconsistent with each other. Underlying this representation is the assumption that goals, beliefs, values, and emotions can be reconstructed as propositional attitudes, i.e. relational mental states that connect an individual to a proposition.

In the second part, I show how a logical representation can be used to generate possible solutions to a conflict. Different solution algorithms can generate different types of solutions, such as compromise solutions, minimally invasive solutions, or solutions that are compatible with certain predefined norms. The generated solutions can serve as a source of inspiration for resolving a conflict and can be proposed to the parties for discussion.

The logical representation is simpler than game-theoretic models of conflict as it is not based on numerical utility functions. Due to its simplicity, it can be used within an integrative negotiation or mediation process to engage parties in a dialogue about their conflicting interests and preferred principles of conflict resolution.

In my presentation, I will use examples of real conflicts to illustrate how the model works in practice.

Emanuela Mangiarotti, University of Kent, UK, The politics of communal violence: Social boundaries and social order across religious, gender and socio-economic dimensions

Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the city of Hyderabad (India), the paper argues that narratives of violence are constitutive of the paradigm of communalism, configuring relations of power among different sections of society. Deconstructing the dichotomy of Hindu vs. Muslim, the paper offers a perspective on forms of violence through the institutionalization of communalism as the dominant paradigm of interfaith relations. Discourses and practices of violence play a role in demarcating religious communities’ boundaries and defining their mutual relations in conflict. However, narratives of communal violence also contribute to reproduce processes of domination and social polarization, displacing social tensions over gender and socio-economic relations into a narrative of Hindu-Muslim conflict.

The paper shows how representations of violent masculinities during religious festivals in Hyderabad become regulating principles for social relations within, between and across religious communities’ boundaries. It explores the ways in which specific urban areas become identified as “riot-prone” and “communally-sensitive” in the political, media, scholarly and everyday language, reproducing forms of super/subordination in society. In this context, the experience of bomb blasts in the city and the introduction of a narrative of “terrorism” in the political discourse get entrenched in the paradigm of communal violence, perpetuating religious difference as a dominant socio-political category and gender and socio-economic differentials as fundamental dimensions in the identification of the potential “terrorist”.

By analyzing narratives of violence, the paper proposes an understanding of communal conflict as a paradigm in which multiple social tensions intersect and are absorbed. In that context, violence and the “religious community” are mutually constitutive and implicated in a social order of domination and social polarization across religious, gender and socio-economic dimensions.

Vivienne Matthies-Boon, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, The Egyptian revolution: Memory, trauma and social change

The Egyptian revolution inaugurated a process of complex change and transformation in Egypt’s political, social and cultural landscape. Often the revolution is cast in terms of democratic transition or securitisation paradigms, which not only maintain the Western ideological status quo but also overlook the deep social and psychological impacts of the revolution, its origins and aftermath. By looking at social trauma and narratives of memorisation, this paper will seek to expose some of the deeper underlying movements for social change which profoundly challenges dominant paradigms of analyses.

Aidan McGarry, University of Brighton, UK, Roma pride and prejudice: Mobilization and the identity dilemma

Roma communities across Europe endure symbolic and actual violence at the hands of the majority including political elite. This paper explores the nascent Roma Pride movement and examines how a persecuted minority group challenges negative ascription of their identity. The purpose of Roma Pride is to improve visibility in the public sphere, raise group consciousness, challenge negative stereotypes and stigmatization, and to resist persecution. It is too soon to determine the impact of recent pride protests but such activities reveal interesting insights about challenging stigmatization and combating violence. Roma Pride also reveals two dilemmas for Roma activists: first, Roma are extremely heterogeneous and even the endonym ‘Roma’ is extremely contested, thus building solidarity is difficulty; secondly, how do activists transform the meaning and content of a group identity which is so vilified? Pride protests are about representing the group in the public sphere but the perception of Roma is so negative thus activists must change how the majority understands Roma group identity. This paper addresses conceptual issues concerning stigmatized identity and persecution of Roma, and focuses on the how Roma activists have begun to mobilize against negative ascription of their group identity.

Mark McGovern, Edge Hill University, UK, Shame, empire and after

When ‘empire’ and ‘shame’ are discussed it tends to be in terms of whether or not a history of empire is something of which to be ashamed. That is surely the case, but it is not the focus here. Rather, the aim is to examine how shame has been (and is) deployed as a tool of imperial rule, and the practices (such as torture) through which such rule is enforced. Shame has become a subject of concern for those inquiring into the roots of conflict and the ways in which societies emerging from conflict deal with their past. However, shame as something other than a problem faced by individuals, or as an aspect of empire and its legacy is far less well explored. Indeed, when shame is discussed in post-conflict contexts it is often in terms of a deeply troubling idea of ‘civilisation’ and ‘civilising processes’. Why there is a need to challenge such ideas and take an alternative approach to thinking about dealing with the legacy of the ‘shame of empire’ will be the subject of this talk.

Ronan McKinney, University of Sussex, UK, In the situation room

The ‘Situation Room photograph’ of President Barack Obama and his advisers receiving ‘an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden’ is both ‘a photo for the ages’ and an icon of our time. It suggests a decisive American victory in the ‘War on Terror’ begun in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001. This paper will explore the conjunction of history, rhetoric and visuality in the Situation Room photograph, arguing that it stages contemporary visuality as a form of counterinsurgency founded upon a conception of thought as targeting. Nicholas Mirzoeff (2011) has described visuality as ‘a technique for waging war appropriated as a means to justify authority as the imagining of history’. The photograph thus stages U.S. hegemony through the unrivalled capacity to visualise the theatre of operations, isolate and target an enemy, and thus to control populations through what Achille Mbembe (2003) has called a ‘necropolitics’. However, the photograph also inverts the structure of contemporary visuality by staging the place of surveillance whilst obscuring the targeted other. Its deployment of visuality to secure authority is markedly ambivalent: witness Obama’s oddly subdued appearance and Hillary Clinton’s ambiguous gesture, which recalls the visual archive of 9/11. The photograph thus bears witness to a national and cultural trauma in the very act of warding it off. It stages the aesthetic and necropolitical power of counterinsurgent visuality, and also the tensions which threaten to undermine that project even in its moment of imperial hegemony. The symptomatic reading of a key image from the ‘War on Terror’ offered herein thus raises some key questions around the intersection of politics and contemporary media cultures.

Patricia McManus and Cathy Bergin, University of Brighton, UK, ‘Literature’, the state and sexual violence

“Who has what sort of say about violence, and in particular about political violence?” Recently the ConDem government has, at least in part, answered this question by moving to render ‘criminal’ certain representations of sexual violence. There is of course nothing new in the state moving to discipline, by legislation, certain forms of sexuality. The historical novelty here are the representations it is moving to criminalise. This paper will explore how the politics of class, sexuality and race enter into those representations of sexual violence the state finds obscene (morally corruptive) and those the state can allow happen because they fall into a category of ‘the literary’.

Les Mitchell, University of Fort Hare, South Africa, Supporting the longest war

Worldwide sixty thousand million nonhuman animals are abused and killed each year in the farming industry. Many millions more suffer and die in vivisection laboratories or spend their lives in harsh working conditions, dying long before their natural life span.

In farming, especially in industrialized countries, the whole process is carefully managed from conception to killing, dismemberment and the disposal of body parts. This violence against certain earth communities dwarfs by many orders of magnitude anything ever perpetrated by humans against humans and has been taking place for thousands of years. Despite the fact that this is a global phenomenon, information is easily available and physical evidence of the violence is everywhere, good, sympathetic, socially aware individuals seem to find this a matter of little or no concern. Indeed the majority of people in society support the industry by purchasing its products.

In what way do we rationalise this violence so that it is acceptable to us; how do we justify the suffering we so obviously cause and how do we morally disengage from the outcomes of our actions?

I suggest that one answer might be related to the ways we, consciously or unconsciously envision nonhuman animals and their existence in the universe. This paper uses critical discourse analysis to examine how farmed nonhuman animals are socially constructed in the electronic newspaper media in the UK, USA and South Africa. It seeks to uncover possible ideologies which might be embedded in everyday discourses which can facilitate moral disengagement and thus be used to justify the violence.

Sini Mononen, University of Turku, Finland, Stalking, music and enchantment – auditive stalking representations in film

Stalking alters the victim’s experience of life. According to forensic psychology and most legislative texts certain behavior is defined as stalking if it inflicts fear, and is reasonably understood as frightening.

Audiovisual art, namely film, has been representing stalking as we recognize it today, since 1970s.
In my paper I will focus to the representation of stalking in Rainer Werner Fassbinder film Martha (1974). It is a portrait of a woman in her thirties, Martha Hoyer (Margit Carstensen). She ends up marrying a violent man Helmut Salomon (Karlheinz Böhm): Helmut is determined into making Martha his own through constant surveillance, following and controlling.

In the film the representation of stalking as domestic violence turns into interesting portrait of a violence penetrating into Martha’s living spaces and altering her experience of life very profoundly. This can be seen and heard when focusing on how the conventions of melodrama are used in the film, particularly what it comes to film’s music. One can also hear the influences of 18th century opera in the stalking representation of the film Martha.

I will anchor my listening of the film to the concepts of enchantment and re-enchantment: re- enchantment of the world has been used in post-humanities in order to search new ethics (see Bennett 2001). Re- enchantment can also been studied as a motivation for violent acts (see Magnani 2011). Thus the concept of re-enchantment serves also as a powerful tool in analyzing how experience of life alters under long-term violence and how it is represented in audiovisual art, such as film.

Aleksandra Mucha, Opole University, Poland, Can violence be a part of life? – Living in Belfast in Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street

Eureka Street, published in 1996, one year after the cease-fire in 1995 was announced by both sides of the Troubles in Northern Ireland i.e. Irish nationalists and republicans. It is a story of two ordinary men – an educated and sensitive Catholic – Jake and his friend – not well-educated and not so much sophisticated Protestant – Chuckie. Both have lived in Belfast since childhood and witnessed the development and then an unstable end of a military, political and social conflict. They experience people’s hatred and distrust deepened by unstable political situation and military violence. Politics pervade every aspect of life of Belfast’s citizens from education through daily work to personal issues.

The presentation aims to show the Troubles seen through the eyes of the ordinary Catholic and Protestant shortly before and after the cease-fires of 1994 and 1995. Although the novel may seem more satirical at first, it shows in fact, the sober view of people who happen to live in this reality.

Amber Murrey, University of Oxford, UK, The visible invisibility of structural violence along the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline

This paper interrogates the scholarly notion that structural violences are mostly invisible. Using examples from fieldwork in two towns in Cameroon, I show that the violent structures of this pipeline (as well as those of concurrent neoliberal projects) are visibly invisible to local people. This visible invisibility is quite similar to local conceptions of la sorcellerie (witchcraft), in which the principal actors and processes of la sorcellerie remain largely out-of-sight (like structural violence) but are acknowledged as functioning in mystery and under the cover of darkness. Through this local framework, structures and actors do not need to be rendered visible to be understood as existing and effecting violence in everyday life. Drawing from works by Frantz Fanon and Mahmood Mamdani, I consider the ramifications of visibly invisible structural violence for local resistance practices along the pipeline.

Kate O’Donnell, Griffith University, Australia, From ecotage to eco-terrorism: the framing of radical environmentalists

In the more than three decades since the term “eco-terrorist” was coined and then deliberately and strategically applied by industry groups and governments to animal rights and environmental activists, it has become an entrenched, yet deeply divisive part of the political, legal, scholarly, environmental and media lexicons. Whereas radical environmentalists frame their activities within the construct of an environmental crisis in ways such as ‘the “blitzkrieg” of logging operations’, ‘the “war” on animals’, and the “battle” for life, (Hays, Esler, & Hays, 1996, p. 171), post-9/11 their activities have been drawn into the “war on terror” (see for example Jackson et al., 2005). Conflating “terrorism” with “ecotage” (sabotage in the name of the environment) has produced a powerful weapon aimed at radical activists: the labels “eco- terrorist” and “terrorist”. This paper explores how labels and language have framed radical activists as both eco-terrorists and terrorists and how scholars have been complicit in this framing.

Hadley, J. (2009). Animal Rights Extremism and the Terrorism Question. Journal of Social Philosophy, 40(3), 363-378. Hays, S., Esler, M., & Hays, C. (1996). Radical Environmentalism and Crime. In S. M. Edwards, T. D. Edwards & C. B. Fields (Eds.), Environmental Crime and Criminality: Theoretical and Practical Issues (pp. 163-181). New York, NY: Garland Publishing Inc.
Jackson, B. A., Baker, J. C., Cragin, K., Parachini, J., Trujillo, H. R., & Chalk, P. (2005). Aptitude for Destruction: Organizational Learning in Terrorist Groups and its Implications for Combatting Terrorism (Vol. 1). Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation
Smith, R. (2008). “Ecoterrorism”?: A Critical Analysis of the Vilification of Radical Environmental Activists as Terrorists. Environmental Law 38, 537-576.
Sorensen, J. (2009). Constructing terrorists: propaganda about animal rights. Critical Studies on Terrorism, 2(2), 237-256.

Lianne Oosterbann, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Sexual violence with or without gender: Rapes in northern, rural India

Sexual violence is usually considered separately from non-sexual violence and is usually explained in relation to gender (roles). Using the case of rapes in northern, rural India, I want to explore these binaries (sexual/non-sexual and man/women) to see whether gender should be an aspect taken in consideration when discussing violence. Multiple scholars claim that patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity create a superiority of men over women, which allows men to use and abuse their power, often resulting in the use of violence against women. However, other scholars, like Felson (2002), explicitly states that violence against women should not be explained differently than violence against men. Other scholars like Butler(1990), take it even further in questioning the gender binary as such. By questioning the gender binary, explaining sexual violence in light of gender will be impossible. Also, by using the gender binary for explaining violence, the category of women and men are unrightfully generalized to two homogenous categories.

I will discuss the writings that give masculinity and patriarchy as the main cause of violence against women, because this perspective puts women in a helpless, victimized position, thus reinforcing the idea that men are more powerful than women. By doing that, however, I will not argue that sexual violence is indifferent from non-sexual violence, because his arguments legitimize the perception that men have a biological reason to use violence, and thus places the use of violence in their nature, or outside of their own choice. I will partly side with Butler (1990) in challenging the gender binary as a means to support the above criticisms. Challenging the gender binary, however, is unsatisfactory in the discussion of the occurrence of rapes in northern, rural India, because the binary is culturally constructed and accepted and thus very real in society.

Maya Oppenheimer, Birkbeck, University of London, UK, Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments and alternative forms of representing conflict

This paper considers specific spaces designed to investigate historical truth. Interrogations require a broad spectrum of props and accessories to complete the performance of evidence- based inquisition. Some features – bullet-proof enclosures, judicial cloaks and wigs, uniforms – heighten the drama of the inquest. The tactics of verifying political and social histories are enlivened in these material spaces. Subsequently, the impression of institutional power, knowledge, and in some cases penalty, becomes imbedded in these objects and representations thereof.

Social science laboratories also have a place in this discussion. They rely upon a similar mandate of analysing and framing a subject’s conduct in a specific context. One experiment in particular supports a focussed study of material space and instruments used not only to understand human behaviour but to represent conflicts from the historical record: Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority experiments conducted at Yale University (1960-1963).

Milgram was interested in researching what he recognised as a tendency for individuals to obey authority despite knowing their actions would harm others. He contextualised his research using a cocktail of references: the Holocaust, the massacre at My Lai, Arendt’s writing on Eichmann, Sophocles’s Anitgone.

The experiments involved an elaborate apparatus. An unwitting subject was ordered by a complicit experimenter to shock a complicit victim along an increasing level of electric shocks. While the subject could hear reactions of pain and objections from the other ‘participant’, it was not until afterwards that the entire apparatus was revealed as artifice: the shock generator was a complicated fake, the victims’ cries were pre-recorded, the experimenter and victim both were operating from a precise script.
The research method cannot be verified due to ethical regulations, however, the Milgram paradigm has become a powerful vehicle for probing and delineating difficult truths about human behaviour and their manifestation in the historical record. Aspects of the experiment, especially images of the shock generator, have become troubled visual representations that mediate discussions of traumatic social and political histories. Milgram’s apparatus has been re-enacted in galleries, performed on stage and re-addressed by ethicists, curators, writers and psychologists.

In this way, I approach the conference theme of alternative forms of representations of war and conflict as well as presentation, re-presentation and representation.

Hilla Peled-Shapira, Bar-Ilan University, Israel, The representation of political violence in twentieth-century Iraqi communist literature

In the middle of the twentieth century the Communists in Iraq suffered very harsh persecution, imprisonment and torture. Communist writers naturally gave expression to their sufferings and channelled their reactions to these persecutions in their writings. I propose to examine the artistic expression given in these writings to the tense relationship between opposition intellectuals and the regime and analyze the rhetorical and literary devices used by these writers in order to express the regime’s violence.

The examples will be taken from the works of prominent Iraqi authors and poets who were even forced to emigrate from their homeland because of the persecutions. The discussion will take ideological, physical and artistic aspects of their exile into consideration, and how these aspects are represented in their writings.

Ruhanie Perera, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, Herstory’: Finding a place of/for truth

“… truth and reconciliation mean different things to different people in different cultures at different points in time, particularly at moments of crisis; more critically, I would emphasise that the relationship between truth and reconciliation is essentially volatile. And yet, this would not appear to be the case when we see these terms coupled together as it were, bound by a seeming causality. At a normative level, an exposition of truth would seem to result in the possibility of reconciliation… (Between Truth and Reconciliation: Experiments in Theatre and Public Culture, Rustom Bharucha)

This proposed study seeks to explore the archive Herstory, an evolving travelling archive and exhibition based in Sri Lanka that brings into focus the lives, experiences and narratives of women – mothers – situated in the North and South of the country. The frame that will be used in this analysis will be that of ‘presentation, re-presentation, representation.’

“The project has collected 270 oral histories recounting personal histories, experiences and hopes – some through hand-written letters; some through photo essays; some through short video; and some through collective timelines and memory mapping, and visual story telling exercises such as the ‘tree of life’. They have been translated and are available in English, Sinhala and Tamil.” – herstoryarchive.org

In a country where, in a post war context, there has been a state-led ‘Reconciliation’ mechanism that, in the articulation of its title – the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission – displays the displacing of truth. And, in the larger context of Truth Commissions, the frenetic energy of truth-seeking, truth-telling mechanisms and the accumulating perceptions of social healings associated with these mechanisms, this paper seeks to locate the truth of the margin, the alternative truths that make up counter narratives. It seeks to read the archive’s attempt at the performative and its objective to create a ‘textured history,’ reading the dynamics of memory and evidence, victimhood and resistance and silence and articulation through the narratives encountered.

A curatorial note of the work reads: “It is impossible to engineer the construction of empathy to an archive such as this.” And, in this respect, it becomes interesting to read narrative truth (as opposed to ‘factual’ truth) in the light of responding to violence, initiatives that struggle with the creation of affect, the possibility to forgive (and reconcile), the exilic experience of violence and violation and the multiplicity of story.

Marta Resmini, University of Leuven, Belgium, Truth in politics: Audience democracy vs. Parresia

This paper wants to point at two different ways to make use of persuasion in politics. I categorize the two ways as a ‘negative’ and a ‘positive’ use of persuasion, within the context of a democratic society, or, better, of a society whose organization tends as much as possible towards the ideal of real democracy, understood as government by the people for the people. The aim of this analysis is to show that ‘positive’ persuasion is not only ethically preferable to its ‘negative’ counterpart, but also, and most importantly, that the former is politically more effective than the latter.

First, I consider and explain the ‘negative’ use of persuasion. I exemplify this first type with Bernard Manin’s notion of ‘audience democracy’, while also linking this notion to contemporary populism. With the help of Pierre Rosanvallon’s analysis of populism, I tell why the type of persuasion proposed by populism, and/or in a context of audience democracy, fails to serve democratic purposes in a fundamental way. Among other things, this kind of persuasion masks real power and prevents power from becoming an important factor in the struggle for the democratic development of societies.

Second, I make use of the Gramscian notion of hegemony in order to describe a possible ‘positive’ way to make use of persuasion. Following Gramsci, we can elaborate upon a notion of persuasion that is in sharp contrast with populism and audience democracy. The type of persuasion linked to hegemony refers to the bottom-up self-representation of a community of people, rather than to a top-down imposed representation of society. Put it differently, persuasion can be looked at as a legitimate force of cohesion within the context of a community’s struggle for power. In this way, persuasion as an instrument of hegemonic struggle unveils power instead of masking it, and can be transformed into a positive force of empowerment for societies that aim at democratic self-government.

Paul Reynolds, Edge Hill University, UK, Parrhesia, intellectual virtue and the contradictions in the radical political intellectual

Democratic politics gives a special role to the intellectual, in both contributing to the self-constitution and constitutive discourses of the democratic agent and in fulfilling the special role of intellectual labour. If democratic agency is to be cultivated, and democratic agents have the skills and knowledge to engage in meaningful democratic participation, then the intellectual has a particular role to play and, more problematically, a particular set of contradictions to live and to engage in continual negotiation with. Against neo-liberal, elitist and sectional interests, institutions and orthodoxies, the intellectual is subverted from that role and riven by those contradictions into inertia and constraint.

In thios paper, I want to draw from three traditions – Foucault’s parrhesia, Aristotle’s intellectual virtues and their articulation in MacIntyre’s contemporary analysis, and the reflections on the intellectual by Lenin and Gramsci – to sketch what the radical political intellectual looks like today, and how they should respond to the contradictions that beset them and play that essential role in supporting the making of the democratic agent, participating in a democratic polity.

Madeline Román, University of Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico, Ubiquity of violence and crisis of distinction

Violence has become a unifying signifier, in which we placed all sort of diverse and different phenomena. This has contributed to a crisis of distinctions; we collapse different kind of violences into each other, making it increasingly challenging the singular consideration of particular states of violence. The mass media, as an industry of excess, have also contributed to this crisis of distinctions; both in its standardized treatment of news (reporting everything at the same semantic level), and in its reiterative elements that have the effect of condensation of meanings. The net effect of these two combined processes is the ubiquity of violence, violence everywhere, and the inability to produce distinctions, which contribute to an increase in the production of knowledge on violence. The ubiquity and indistinctness of violence provoke both erosion and an overuse of the concept of political violence. From a closer observation, there is no violence that has no political dimension and, at the same time, at the global political perspective, perhaps, violence is the only being. This conference is an attempt to distinguish between the media produced ubicuity of violence and the one derived from the world as it is. That is, reality as complexily constituted. It is a nomadic journey through various fields of current theorizing in its connection with an analysis of contemporary media.

Aleksandra Rozalska, University of Lodz, Poland, Post-9/11 television discourses: Women, violence, and the War on Terror in American TV series

Drawing from postcolonial studies feminist studies, and their engagement with representations in popular culture, this paper aims at analyzing the discursive construction of gender in selected American television series in the post 9/11 era. I claim that the media narratives of gender have been crucial to create and maintain the dominant discourse on the war on terror, with its notion of patriotism, nation, Enemy/Other, traditional masculinity, and legitimization of violence. As J. Melnick states in 9/11 Culture: America Under Construction, “The work of celebrating ‘real men’ after 9/11 has been done across many media and in political discourse, but nowhere in so focused or sustained a manner as in mainstream Hollywood film and television” (2009, 124). In my paper I examine the consequences of the (re)emergence of the traditional masculinity in the moments of crisis and threatened security and its influences on visualizations of violence in television narratives.

In her book Casting Out: the Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics (2008), S. Razack reveals the post-9/11 logic of thinking about race and gender by analyzing three figures connected to the war on terror: “dangerous” Muslim men, “imperiled” Muslim women, and “civilized” Europeans. Razack’s considerations will be the point of departure to examine the position of women in television narratives; however, I am interested not only in how selected visual texts rely on nationalistic myths of the Enemy/Muslim Other that represent Muslim men as, among others, oppressors of Muslim women—victims of culture and custom that need to be “saved,” but also I want to have a look at representations of American women and their roles in maintaining/contesting the dominant discourse on the war on terror and the violence it perpetuates. The post-9/11 rhetoric undoubtedly has brought a huge backlash to feminist accomplishments which has been clearly visible in the media, as emphasized by, among others, Susan Faludi in her book Terror Dream (2007). In this context, I look critically at such television productions as 24 (2001-2010), Sleeper Cell (2005-2006), and Homeland (2011-date).

Pollyanna Ruiz, LSE, UK, Police, protesters, publics; representing resistance in mainstream news media

So, in sum: the media are not the holders of power but they constitute by and large the space where power is decided’ (Castells, 2007, p.242).

The contemporary media landscape is characterized by a fractured unevenness that unsettles the clearly demarcated boundaries, which constitute classical models of the public sphere. While the loss of these boundaries offers a more rhizomatic understanding of mediated space, it also means that the political traction required for resistance can become dissipated or lost. It is therefore necessary to think about how one can keep the conflictual dynamic that underpins the notion of resistance whilst also accommodating the flux and flow which characterizes the contemporary public sphere.

This paper will examine representation of resistance with particular reference to the legitimating potential of shifting us/them boundaries. Police and protesters are traditionally represented in mainstream news coverage as occupying a binary in which the police are trusted and law-abiding and the protesters are not. Research into the way in which the relationship between police and journalists shapes mainstream representation of ‘violent’ protest has already been undertaken. Similarly the theoretical and actual potential of mobile and digital media to unsettle and challenge these top-down narratives has also been the subject of much academic attention. However, the way in which mainstream representations of the police force in general, and acts of police violence in particular, have impacted upon the demarcation of boundaries between citizens and protesters has yet to be explored.

This paper will examine these dynamics and argue that the police’s ability to frame protest is being undermined by technological, cultural and structural changes. Firstly, the advent of mobile technologies is challenging the police’s ability to control mainstream news narratives. Secondly, the findings of official enquiries into the deaths of Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson have eroded public trust in the police. And finally, the Hillsborough and Leverson enquiries have exposed the closeness of the relationship between police and journalists. It will conclude by suggesting that these changes are impacting upon the representation of the police in such a way as to unsettle the ‘citizenship line’ (Waddington, 1999, p.61) that exists between protesters and publics.

Claudia Salamanca, Universidad Javeriana de Colombia, Colombia, Kidnapping and representation: images of a sovereign-in-the-making: The kidnapping of 12 Assemblymen in Cali, Colombia

The Colombian conflict has been described as rural with few urban incursions. In reality, all social and political classes of the Colombian society have experienced a degree of vulnerability in regard to kidnapping. In Colombia, kidnapping, next to its media coverage and the international mobilizations against it, has become the main narrative through which the country’s vulnerability, governance and security are assessed. Putting an end to the “inhuman industry” of kidnapping figures prominently in the Democratic Security and Defense (DSD) policy; its statistics are used as indicators of good governance or political failure. Despite the fact that Colombia is far from being a kidnap-free country, these statistics claim that eight years of DSD policy have resulted in a decrease in kidnapping. DSD policy describes kidnapping as a crime that threatens each and every citizen of Colombia and their basic social rights.

This article puts forward different sets of arguments about kidnapping. Rather than depicting it as merely criminal, I inquire into what kidnapping reveals about the vulnerability, sovereignty and the space of war of the Colombia state. This so-called third world country has been striving to establish full sovereignty against the forces that effect its waning: flows of capital, technology, media, populations and by new forms of global and transnational governance in the areas of security, human rights, and civil law among others. I suggest that kidnapping is another such force. On the one hand, it consists in illegal capture through strategies of penetration, seizure and transfer in which the victim is relocated outside the reach of family and the state. But kidnapping also threatens the already contested space of authority of the Colombian state, by challenging Colombian citizenship, national identity and territory

I pursue this argument by analyzing images derived from political kidnapping. These images speak of and bring to the public eye an unreachable space, a space that escapes the authority of the Colombian state. Drawing on Paul Virilio’s contention that war is not so much as taking territory, or material goods but rather the appropriation of the fields of perception (Virilio 10), I inquire into the relation between these two spaces of war: the media space and the contested territory of the battlefield. My argument then is displayed through the analysis of images of kidnapping. They are not mere representations of this criminal activity but they constitute themselves as sites in which configurations of authority and power are constantly negotiated.

Specifically I analyze one particular event, the political kidnapping of twelve Colombian assemblymen from the Valle Region state legislature building in the city of Cali, who were in captivity for more than five years.

Rebecca Searle, University of Brighton, UK, The War Artists’ Advisory Committee and the bombing of Germany

This paper will consider how the War Artists’ Advisory Committee (WAAC) represented the bombing of Germany. The WAAC was responsible for the production of some of the most iconic images of the Second World War, such as Paul Nash’s Battle of Britain and Henry Moore’s shelter drawings. These well known images are however, a tiny fraction of a much larger collection that has received little serious study. Over the course of the war, the WAAC collected nearly 6000 works by more than 400 artists. Its official remit was that it should create an artistic record of the war on behalf of the state. This function was somewhat complicated by the fact that it was housed within the Ministry of Information, who believed that the committee should commission work that could be used in the propaganda war. The WAAC vehemently rejected this role and argued that propaganda was only an incidental function of the committee. Its primary role, they maintained, was as a recorder. This paper will explore this tension between record and propaganda by focussing on images of the bombing of Germany.

Burcu Toğral, Hamburg University, Germany,  Exclusion and rehabilitation of “abnormals”: Securitization and culturalization of integration practices in the EU

Migration, milestone of European history, – blessed by a vital role in the construction of European economies after the World War II, – has never been under such an extended focus of European political agenda. Previously seen as an “innocent” economic activity, welcomed and encouraged by European states, dealt with liberal asylum policies, migration, has been securitized in a way that it is has been framed as a security threat to homogenized cultural identity and socio-economic well-being of “native” population. This securitization process, which works through discourses and practices, has been reinforced in the wake of September 11 and subsequent attacks in Madrid and London. Especially, integration of Muslim communities and/or their alleged inability to integrate into European societies have become the focal point of a much larger sense of anxiety. In other words, the so-called ‘cultural differences’ of Muslim communities have been reified, and depicted as a striking destabilizing factor across the EU. In such a context, the latest integration discourses and practices have been designated as strategies of filtering, disciplining and rehabilitating these deviant “abnormals” or preventing them to gain secure “legal” status. In unpacking and problematizing these issues, this article, first, looks at the dynamics and history of securitization of migration in the EU. Second, it discusses the recent integration practices and discourses dominating the EU member states as well as the EU agenda with a special on the post-September 11 era. This analysis delineates particularly the securitization and culturalization process targeting Muslim migrants and communities through dwelling upon a Foucaltian approach. Finally, it suggests that this process has become a form of governmentality, and informed current approaches of multiculturalism and intercultural dialogue; thereby clouding very structural problems, such as racial discrimination, institutional racism, as well marginalization and hindering political struggles surrounding the issue of migration.

Camilla Tønnevold, University of Bergen, Norway, Mediated representations of the 2005 Paris Riots

In November 2005, France was hit by the worst riots in decades. The accidental death of two teenagers in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois had an explosive impact, and was the immediate cause making suburban youths take to the streets, in violence and vandalism, as a protest against French authorities discriminating and neglecting them, in their own eyes, the possibilities of a prosperous future.

The rioters and the events attracted an immense media attention. Across Europe, and the world, it was reported that “France is burning”, and about the fundamental failure of the “French model”, as the foreign media picked up on the rioters being mainly young men of immigrant background, and the suburbs being considered as almost lawless territories the French authorities seemed incapable to tackle. The presentation of the riots in the foreign media concerned the French media, and politicians, to the extent that international journalists were summoned to a meeting where French officials explained that the international media coverage of the events was incorrect.

The paper concerns the mediated representations of the 2005 Paris Riots, in the French media (selected actors) as compared to those of foreign media, perceiving the riots with the ’outsider’s perspective’, represented by a selection of Norwegian and UK newspapers. The main question is how the representations of the riots across national borders and national media could be so consistently similar in both focus and framing, and what this entails in terms of perceptions of the rioters and their actions of violence being established in the public sphere.

Ali Resul Usul, Istanbul Ticaret University, Turkey, The Gezi Park protests and state violence: New politics vs. old fashioned methods

This paper is about the recent protests at the center of Istanbul, Taksim square, which was initially started against an urban development plan in Taksim on 28 May 2013. The government has used extensive and disproportionate use of force by police and even increased the police violence against the protesters using extensive amount of tear gas and water cannons and other methods. However, it seems that the extensive and disproportionate use of force and police brutality to disperse nationwide anti-governmental protests has not been successful and the government had to change its policy to deal with these anti-governmental meetings. This paper will argue that the government misperceived initially the true nature of the Gezi park protests and protestors and believed that the anti-government protests were organized by old-political circles and parties that have not beaten the Justice and Development Party in the last elections. This paper will argue that the government misunderstood the very nature of the protests because of various reasons that will be analyzed in the paper, the extensive and disproportionate use of power by state agencies has caused a serious damage to the leadership of Turkey’s Prime Minister, Erdogan and his government. This paper will also argue that the Gezi protests represents a new type of politics, which is similar, to some extent, to other protests in Egypt, Brazil, Spain or the US. This kind of protests is a new phenomenon in Turkish politics that seems to be more widespread in the country in the coming days. The street protests and the methods that the government uses to deal with them in competitive semi-democratic regimes serve us interesting data to understand the nature of hybrid regimes. Therefore, this paper will also analyze the Gezi park protests and the governmental policies to handle the issue from the perspectives of democracy and democratization.

Konstantinos Vadratsikas, Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus Co-authors: Doudaki Vaia, Milioni Dimitra L. and Venia Papa, Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus, and Tsiligiannis Panagiotis, National & Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece Conflict as new and news as conflict: a multidimentional content analysis of TV news in Cyprus

The emergence of new political and social conflicts around the world (e.g. the “war on terror” or the recent protest movements against austerity) and the persistence of age-old but enduring tensions (e.g. the “Cyprus problem”) render the study of conflict, and its mediatization, highly relevant for contemporary societies.

This study adopts a dual perspective on conflict: conflict as news and news as conflict. The first strand of research focuses on the mediatization of conflict, examining how conflicts (from warfare to social confrontations) are represented in the media. Previous empirical studies have exposed several problematic aspects of this process, such as the episodic (instead of thematic) coverage, which consists in the presentation of de-contextualized information and over-simplified interpretations that detract attention from societal attribution of responsibility (Coleman & Perlmutter, 2005), with broader implications for power allocation in society (Fiske, 1987; Hall et al., 1978). Peace journalism literature shows how news reports often fall into a conflict-oriented model of journalism (Galtung & Ruge, 1965), which often results in the construction of conflictual narratives and oppositional Others (Carter et al., 2011). The second strand of research refers to news as conflict and focuses on news practices that tend to frame crises or simply opposing political views in mundane political news in terms of conflict, rendering conflict almost paradigmatic for presenting news that involve public officials in mainstream television (Lengauer et al., 2012). The dual approach that is applied in this study enables us to record and analyze not only representations of conflict in news media, but also situations that are framed by the media in a confrontational manner.

The present study focuses on the case of Cyprus. A representative sample of 102 newscasts, broadcasted between June 2012 and December 2012 by major Cypriot TV stations, is content analyzed to answer the following research questions:

• How is conflict represented in television news? What type of events get into the daily agenda, who are the actors involved, who gets to speak about conflict, and how is conflict framed and evaluated?
• How, and to what extent, does television news use conflict as a form of presenting news and describing reality to their audiences?

Besides painting a comprehensive picture of how news media deal with conflict in the understudied case of Cyprus, the study introduces a theory-informed analytical framework for studying televised conflict, which takes into account the dual function of conflict in the news and operationalizes, in quantitative terms, significant qualitative aspects of news analysis. In particular, it introduces the use of two composite variables (the “conflictual framing index” and the “conflict-oriented journalism index”), which can be applied to analyze conflict in the news in more depth and in various national contexts.

Mathijs van de Sande, KU Leuven, Belgium, Of actors and authors: some critical notes on the forgotten art of storytelling

When is a revolution over? What happens when the tent camps have been evicted and the occupied spaces cleared out, when the elections have been won (or lost), or when the dictator has finally resigned? What happens to ‘our’ revolution when it all seems to have come to an end – and more importantly: how do we make sure it is and remains ‘ours’ indeed?

At the backdrop of the recent protest movements that briefly shook our world in 2011, the aim of this contribution is to conceptualise the relation between political acts or events, and how these are (retrospectively) represented in stories, narratives and discourses. I will critically engage with Hannah Arendt’s position that within political action, a particular role is reserved for the storyteller, who, in Arendt’s words, ‘perceives and ‘makes’ the story’, and thus narrates what necessarily remains ‘hidden from the actor himself’.

Next to this, my political objective is to critically challenge our role as leftist academics, journalists and writers in the representation of these recent social movements (such as the ‘Arab Spring’, the ‘Indignados’ or ‘Occupy’). Unlike most right-wing intellectuals, we have somehow come to believe that ‘objectivism’ or the fetishization of ‘critique’ would serve our cause better than engagement or involvement with the activist movements closest to us. What these movements were lacking, according to our very own critique, is what we should have contributed to it: stories, narratives, articulated demands, and a political language.

In other words: this paper is on the forgotten art of storytelling. Why do stories matter, politically? What is their role in the representation of a political act or social movement? Why do we, perhaps more than ever, need to re-invent this political skill? And finally, coming back to a central question raised during last year’s CAPPE conference: what does all this have to do with our use or (re)appropriation of the word ‘revolution’?

Evert van der Zweerde, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands, Who is representing what and is representing whom? Reflections on democratic representation

One of the standard complaints of citizens of self-declared democratic polities is that they “do not feel represented”. The equally standard reaction is, practically, that something should be done to fill the gap between politics and citizens, and, theoretically, that people do not understand what representative democracy means, namely not that their preferences are somehow translated into, or aggregated in collectively binding decisions, but that their overall outlook –political ideology, comprehensive doctrine, etc.- is represented at the level of political institutions –at local, national, European level- by people that they, as citizens, have elected. The next step is that the “gap” is filled with the dead bodies of fake referenda and unfulfilled populist promises. One way or another, we will have to think differently about not only the “representative” part, but also the “democratic” part of “representative democratic government”. That we have to do this is widely recognized – the focus of my paper will be on the question why it is, apparently, so hard to do it. The answer, I venture, is a focus on the first out of three major political passions, viz. fear, love, and hope: fear is what keeps us (myself included) from thinking.

Phil Vellender, London South Bank University, UK, “We’re all Greeks”: Shelley’s interventionist politics of 1821

‘We’re all Greeks’ wrote the great radical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in his Preface to the poem Hellas (published in 1822). This paper examines Shelley’s interventions during the late Regency / post Napoleonic Wars period comparing and contrasting his representations of actual and potential revolutions in England and Europe. Starting in 1819, a year the late Paul Foot describes as one the most productive ever in the history of English literature, and concluding in 1822 with the Preface to Hellas, the context for our discussion will be provided by reference to Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy, his drama The Cenci, the unfinished political essays A Philosophical View of Reform and A Defence of Poetry, Prometheus Unbound and two of his shorter poems Men of England and People of England. How might the features of Shelley’s, and indeed Byron’s, differing ‘degrees of intervention’ in the revolutions of their time inform our attitudes to the situation confronting us in today’s austerity Europe?

A hand out will be made available at the session with relevant extracts.

Armela Xhaho, Central European University, Hungary Honor crimes against women in Albanian society: Boundary discourses on “violent” culture and traditions

Aim

The aim of this study is to explore the perceptions of two generations of men on the phenomenon of honor crimes of women in Albanian society, by analyzing in one hand discourses on cultural and regional boundaries in terms of factors that perpetuate crimes in the name of honor and by analyzing on the other hand, these crimes in the light of women’s human rights.

Methodology

The study was carried out in suburban areas of Tirana, Albanian capital city. I draw on the findings from 24 in depth interviews, with two generations of men and with representatives of key institutional authorities working in the respective communities.
Results

The results reached in this study suggest that, the ongoing regional discourses on honor crimes of women in Albanian society are still articulated by the majority of informants in terms of “violent” and “backward” cultural traditions, by exonerating the perpetrators and blaming the northern culture for perpetuating such crimes.

Conclusions

This study shows that cultural relativism is employed to excuse the violation of women human’s rights by inhumane practices which are against the international human rights law, because such crimes violate the right to life, liberty, body integrity, the right to freedom from gender discrimination and domestic violence. In the light of my analysis, I think that honor crimes of women in Albania are neither all about inherited “backward” traditions and customs of the past, nor all about “misogynistic” and “violent” culture, but they are about power and desire to control woman’s body, sexuality and all her patterns of her behavior . Therefore, I argue that the narrow construction on cultural understanding of honor crimes of women fails to acknowledge the gendered aspect of violence against women as a universal problem of women’s human rights across different cultures.