Abstract
Despite violence being a major theme in the humanities and social sciences, and the subject of a great deal of research, these disciplines are much less likely to tackle the issues of exiting violence and violence prevention. While knowledge on these issues does exist, it primarily comes from actors, professionals, and experts: judges and lawyers provide expertise on the related legal and judicial topics, such as transitional justice; while doctors, psychologists, or even psychiatrists shed light on what makes someone turn to violence, or help us to understand victim trauma and possible methods for overcoming it. Consultants, diplomats, political leaders, United Nations staff, NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), and community activists who have taken part in “peacebuilding” or “conflict resolution” processes, along with social workers with practical experience on the ground, are equally important sources of knowledge on these issues, to which humanities and social sciences research has thus far paid little attention.
Violence seeks to make up for this shortcoming, as well as playing a role in making violence prevention and exiting violence a full-fledged research field. It will do so by recognizing the skills and knowledge of actors, and by engaging them in dialogue. The multidisciplinarity that is so vaunted today must not be limited to the humanities and social sciences but must be open both to other academic disciplines, and to the potential contribution of actors and professionals. And it must not weaken the traditional disciplines but encourage communication between them.
Violence is often difficult to describe and its dynamics difficult to capture. Academics and practitioners sometimes narrow the processes of violence in order to focus on one particular aspect or another. The journal is thus conscious of how other media and methods can provide insight into violence that research cannot. It will also embrace other perspectives on violence, particularly from the arts or literature: reading Dostoevsky certainly helps us to understand terrorism in a different, if not better, way than academic articles, and cinema, painting, music, theater, and poetry not only greatly contribute to the understanding, including sensory understanding, of violence but can be utilized in practical ways to exit from or prevent it. As a journal, Violence will look to draw on these different sources and give them the attention they deserve.
Who, and with whom, why, for whom, and how? A new journal essentially represents a project, directions, and choices; it fills a gap, opens up new lines and fields of inquiry, and endeavors to bring together an intellectual and academic milieu. We will therefore begin by outlining the circumstances and conditions from which it has emerged, and more specifically, the research program that revealed its utility, if not very necessity.
Violence emerged from a collaborative research project conducted by the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme (FMSH) against a background of two different but related concerns.
First, France had recently been subjected to violent events unprecedented in its history. On 7 January 2015, in the name of Al-Qaeda, the Kouachi brothers attacked the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which they saw as guilty of blasphemy due to its publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. Twelve people were killed. The following day, their accomplice Amedy Coulibaly killed a policewoman in Montrouge, near Paris, and then went on to kill four Jewish customers of a Kosher supermarket in Porte de Vincennes, a Paris neighborhood, in a hostage siege the day after. Also in Paris, on 13 November 2015, gunmen and suicide bombers claiming to be acting on behalf of ISIS killed 131 people—who this time were not targeted specifically. Among the victims were audience members at the Bataclan theater and concert hall, the customers of cafés and restaurants in the surrounding neighborhood, and those in the area outside the Stade de France. As an institution dedicated to the humanities and social sciences and to tackling the key issues facing the modern world, FMSH felt it had to rise to the challenge represented by these attacks. Responding with emotion and solidarity was simply not enough: there was a need to understand, learn about, and analyze this global, deadly, and destabilizing violence at the level of both the country and the world more broadly.
Second, the strong ties that had always existed between FMSH and Latin America were about to be formalized by a research partnership agreement with the National Center for Historical Memory in Bogotá: an agreement that was finally signed at the institution in June 2015 with French Prime Minister Manuel Valls in attendance. Established in 2011, this unique center is dedicated to truth and justice, and in particular to understanding and contributing to the reparation of the victims of violence in Colombia. It is both a place of knowledge production and an institution specifically dedicated to research promoting peace. Meanwhile, a peace process was being held in Cuba that would ultimately lead to the signing of the Havana Accords between the Colombian government and the FARC guerilla movement. Colombia could finally hope for an end to the long years of bloody violence and for the transformation of the armed struggle into an institutionalized, non-violent political conflict. This was a second source of inspiration: the idea that research into violence must be combined with the academic study of activities relating to its prevention and exit.
The idea to launch Violence thus grew out of, on one hand, a wave of terrorism without precedent in French history—but one that many other societies have experienced—and on the other, the hope of an exit from violence. Alongside these two aspects, other developments have certainly made the journal’s launch more pertinent than ever, from the rise in initiatives to combat gender-based violence, previously shrouded in institutional secrecy (with the Catholic church, for example, facing accusations of pedophilia within its midst); the establishment of multiple Commissions and other “justice and reconciliation” initiatives; and the deadly nature of contemporary racist and antisemitic phenomena. This particularly charged context led FMSH to launch a major research program comprised of multiple different strands, including an international panel specifically dedicated to studying and exiting violence, and to violence prevention (the International Panel on Exiting Violence, IPEV), plus another research program on the impact of terrorism.
The IPEV has received support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York foundation, and from various French institutions including the French High Council for Strategic Education and Research and the French Commission for Regional Equality, and in its initial phase, around 100 researchers were involved across 10 working groups, each dedicated to a particular aspect of violence and exiting violence. The overall integration of the research was ensured by plenary meetings held at the beginning, over the course of, and end of the process, with a final report published in November 2019. A decidedly international and multidisciplinary conference program consisting of several highly successful sessions also accompanied the project. As for the research program on the impact of terrorism, it has received support from the Open Society Foundations.
Led by a team of researchers who have been involved with the IPEV, the journal Violence seeks to continue and increase the momentum they have created, taking the view that the international enthusiasm for this project, which is currently embarking on its second phase, must be nurtured and sustained.
Research does not necessarily need to be applied to ultimately be of use, and Violence has the utmost respect for those researchers who resolutely maintain their distance from the public debate, and for actors who work to combat violence in both the public and private spheres: from government and political leaders to judges and lawyers, diplomats, NGOs, consultants, experts, and social workers. But this does not mean that it is hostile to collaborative approaches in which researchers and actors coproduce knowledge.
Our journal therefore welcomes analyses of all forms of violence, both physical and symbolic. For the purposes of the journal, violence means all forms of harm that are rooted in political, social, collective, and military processes. Violence thus includes, but is not limited to, manifestations of the deliberate infliction of harm on unarmed individuals, such as terrorism, the targeting of civilians in war, genocide, massacres, sexual violence, torture, assassinations, riots, and street brawls, among other forms of such violence. However, the journal equally welcomes studies of indirect forms of violence, such as structural violence and other forms of systematic deprivation, the use of coercion and threats of violence, and assaults on the conditions of life necessary for survival. And what applies to political, social, and criminal violence, and to riots and crime, whether the focus is individual or collective, also applies to the state, which as Max Weber noted in a striking statement, has the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Violence might emanate from militaries, the police, paramilitaries, militias, militants, party youth, husbands, and individual perpetrators. In short, the aim is to cast as wide a net as possible, while still remaining focused on violence as the center point for analysis. Violence will publish work that takes a theoretical, empirical, or conceptual perspective on violence. It will do so with openness as a guiding principle: the journal is not the official organ of a school of thought, a movement, or a theory, and still less the journal of a single discipline or region of the world.
The same applies to the concept of preventing or exiting violence, which can take many forms. The journal welcomes traditional approaches to these questions, in the sense of establishing the conditions for peace and the absence of futures in which the deliberate infliction of harm is a primary mode of politics. Similarly, exiting violence may take the form of wrestling with the past, of not only seeking accountability for past violence but also striving for mutual understandings that reduce polarization. Peacekeeping, mediation, and conflict management in its various forms are forms of preventing and exiting violence, as are forms of survival and resilience, of coping with the multiple legacies of violence, whether they be traumatic and debilitating or agentic and incentivizing for civic activism and political participation. The journal has no set conception of how to define and limit “preventing” and “exiting” violence but rather seeks to open the way for studies and analyses of those processes, broadly construed.
Research benefits from tackling violent (and many other) phenomena holistically, although this does not mean that specific national or local features should be underestimated. And the same is true of time: just as it is useful to make distinctions between the most general and the most local, or the most personal or specific levels, it is also useful to differentiate between periods of time, from the long term to the very short term. Violence will ensure this is the case in the work it publishes.
And in order for research, where necessary, to be relevant to a wider readership than the typical academic journal audience, academic rigor must be combined with clarity of expression, so that contributions can be followed by not only the most exacting researchers but also by actors or, quite simply, by “ordinary” men or women. This will be a particular focus for Violence.
Consensus in the humanities and social sciences is rare, and there may be major fundamental disagreements about most of the major issues that these disciplines tackle. Rather than shying away from debate, Violence will instead foster discussion within its pages.
Each issue of the journal will open with articles dealing with a wide range of issues and methods, a section which will enable researchers to showcase and raise awareness of their individual work carried out on their own initiative, rather than in response to a call for proposals from others. Also included will be a collection of articles on an important topic, with this first issue focusing on “Perpetrating violence.” Complementing these two sections will be contributions from both inside and outside of academia, debates, articles that take stock of the latest developments, and individual interviews with leading academic and nonacademic figures working on these topics.
Such is the intention of Violence: to be an academic journal that not only is mindful of multidisciplinarity but also respects academic disciplines; an international journal that is focused not only on violence but also on violence prevention and exiting violence, which it seeks to develop into a full-fledged research field that embraces literature and the arts. A journal that will quickly become an essential academic and intellectual hub.
The Violence editorial team consists of editors-in-chief Scott Straus (professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison) and Michel Wieviorka (professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, EHESS); associate editors Mohamed-Ali Adraoui (Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at the London School of Economics (Centre for International Studies) and Visiting Fellow at Oxford University (Rothermere American Institute)), Jérôme Ferret (lecturer at the University of Toulouse 1 Capitole), Sabrina Melenotte (researcher at the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development, IRD), and Paola Rebughini (professor of sociology at the University of Milan); and managing editor Charlotte Groult (éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme). Violence also has an international advisory board consisting of 35 researchers from around the world.