Authors:Thakur M. Abstract: AbstractThere is limited understanding of cruelty in critical security studies. While cruelty tends to be conceptualized within the context of large-scale, violent conflicts and situations, it is helpful to consider cruelty through the lens of everyday forms of violence and subjugation. Understanding cruelty and its complex entanglements with overlapping frameworks of necropolitics, structural violence, and necrogeopolitics, and drawing on research from Nigeria, Jordan, and Myanmar, this article discusses the normalization of cruel, everyday “living death” and violence experienced by many in Global South. Overlapping marginalities of localized conflicts, political repression, gendered violence, marginalized livelihoods and precarity, climate change, and migration illustrate this entangled conceptualization of cruelty. This complex and entangled understanding of cruelty helps to better understand the lived experiences and situations of peoples and communities in the Global South. Further, everyday necropolitical violence and cruelty provide an understanding of the suffering, pain, and state of unease that many experience in the Global South and beyond, and this understanding of shared human vulnerabilities informs our common humanity. The main contribution of this analysis is to provide dialectical insights into the potential of radical empathy and compassion, rooted in decolonial humanism, as a means to ignite political consciousness, dismantle oppressive structures, and support emancipatory agency of peoples and communities globally. PubDate: Thu, 16 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/isagsq/ksac031 Issue No:Vol. 2, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Friedrich J. Abstract: AbstractThis article treats rituals of apology and reconciliation as responses to social discontent, specifically to expressions of anger and resentment. A standard account of social discontent, found both in the literature on transitional justice and in the social theory of Axel Honneth, has it that these emotional expressions are evidence of an underlying psychic need for recognition. In this framework, the appropriate response to expressions of anger and discontent is a recognitive one that includes victims of injustice in the political community by showing them that they are valued members. In the aftermath of injustices, such recognitive responses are thought to include acknowledgments of victim suffering, reconciliatory gestures, and rituals of contrition. I will argue, against this narrative, that treating victim anger as evidence of an underlying need for recognition threatens to depoliticize emotional responses to injustice by treating them as symptoms of psychic injuries instead of intelligible political claims. Discussing mainly the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation process set up to deal with the history of the Indian Residential School system, I show how rituals of reconciliation and apology, in the context of settler-colonial states and neoliberal politics, serve as a biopolitical management of “bad” emotions. This will serve as a critique both of the politics of reconciliation and of social–theoretic approaches that treat expressions of discontent exclusively through a lens of recognition. Instead, I argue, in politics as well as theory, we need to engage with emotional expressions as intelligible political claims that exceed the psychic need for recognition. PubDate: Wed, 25 May 2022 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/isagsq/ksac023 Issue No:Vol. 2, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Early B; Peksen D. Abstract: AbstractEconomic sanctions are coercive policies capable of inflicting social, political, and humanitarian suffering that go far beyond their economic effects alone. The United States employs economic sanctions more than any other government in the world. In this study, we analyze how US sanctions policies can inflict misery upon the states they target. Our contributions to the literature are two-fold. First, we introduce a new, consolidated measure called the Freedom from Misery index to capture the disparate, adverse effects of sanctions on socioeconomic and political conditions within target states. Second, we offer the first empirical analysis of the extent to which sanctions imposed by the United States increase the misery gap between the United States and targets of US sanctions. We theorize that high-cost sanctions and, counterintuitively, human rights sanctions will inflict significant amounts of misery on the states they target. Using data from 1971 to 2015 for over 145 countries, we conduct quantitative analyses to evaluate the degree that US sanctions, including those involving the United Nations, contribute to miserable living conditions in their targets. We find that US sanctions, particularly those inflicting major costs on targeted economies and those imposed for human rights reasons, immiserate their targets’ populations. Extensions of our main analysis further show that US sanctions widen the misery gap between the United States and target states, contributing to greater international inequality. PubDate: Thu, 31 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/isagsq/ksac013 Issue No:Vol. 2, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Ritholtz S. Abstract: AbstractThis article explores the ontology of cruelty in civil war. I argue that taking cruelty as the unit of analysis provides new insights into the dynamics of civil war. A focus on cruelty reveals both the physical and the ontological impacts of violence on civilian populations that cannot currently be identified in the existing literature. Cruelty as an analytical concept bridges debates surrounding the instrumental use of violence and its impacts during civil war. Acknowledging the physical–ontological connection of cruelty produces a new methodological approach that can link different approaches to the study of civil war. To explore the ontology of cruelty and develop an associated analytical approach, I first start by conceptualizing cruelty and then comparing it to related concepts. From there, I review the closest scholarly subfield of civil war studies: research that centers violence against civilians as the unit of analysis. In this article, I argue that although these literatures document acts of cruelty, they fail to accurately consider their variation and impact. After reviewing these literatures, I then return to cruelty and explore its ontological impact on civilians in order to further flesh out its analytical potential. This potential shines in its capacity to highlight the interactions between established analytical variables of war as well as consider more deeply civilian perspectives in order to understand the socially transformative potential of violence. I then operationalize these insights by applying them to the existing analyses of massacres during the Colombian civil war.En este artículo, se explora la ontología de la crueldad en la guerra civil. Sostengo que considerar la crueldad como unidad de análisis brinda nuevos conocimientos sobre la dinámica de la guerra civil. Un enfoque en la crueldad revela los impactos tanto físicos como ontológicos de la violencia en las poblaciones civiles que actualmente no se pueden identificar en las publicaciones existentes. La crueldad como concepto analítico une los debates sobre el uso instrumental de la violencia con sus impactos durante la guerra civil. Reconocer la conexión física y ontológica de la crueldad aporta un nuevo enfoque metodológico que puede vincular diferentes enfoques para el estudio de la guerra civil. Para explorar la ontología de la crueldad y desarrollar un enfoque analítico asociado, primero conceptualizo la crueldad y, luego, la comparo con conceptos relacionados. A partir de allí, analizo el subcampo académico más cercano de los estudios sobre la guerra civil: la investigación que centra la violencia contra los civiles como unidad de análisis. En este análisis, sostengo que si bien en estas publicaciones se documentan actos de crueldad, no se considera con precisión su variación e impacto. Después de analizar estas publicaciones, retomo el concepto de crueldad y exploro su impacto ontológico en los civiles a fin de profundizar en su potencial analítico. Este potencial brilla por su capacidad para destacar las interacciones entre las variables analíticas establecidas de la guerra, así como para considerar con mayor detalle las perspectivas civiles con el objetivo de comprender el potencial socialmente transformador de la violencia. Luego, pongo en práctica estos conocimientos al aplicarlos en los análisis existentes de las masacres durante la guerra civil colombiana.Cet article explore l'ontologie de la cruauté dans les guerres civiles. Je soutiens qu'utiliser la cruauté comme unité d'analyse offre de nouveaux renseignements sur les dynamiques de guerre civile. L'accent mis sur la cruauté révèle les impacts physiques et ontologiques de la violence sur les populations civiles qui ne peuvent être identifiés dans la littérature existante. La cruauté en tant que concept analytique établit un pont entre les débats sur l'utilisation instrumentale de la violence et ses impacts durant une guerre civile. Reconnaître la relation physique/ontologique de la cruauté produit une nouvelle approche méthodologique qui permet d'associer différentes approches à l’étude de la guerre civile. Pour explorer l'ontologie de la cruauté et développer une approche analytique associée, je commence d'abord par conceptualiser la cruauté puis par la comparer aux concepts associés. J'examine ensuite le sous-domaine intellectuel le plus proche des études de la guerre civile: les recherches centrées sur la violence contre les civils en tant qu'unité d'analyse. Dans cette analyse, je soutiens que bien que ces littératures documentent les actes de cruauté, elles ne parviennent pas à prendre précisément en considération leur variation et leur impact. Après avoir examiné ces littératures, je reviens à la cruauté et j'explore son impact ontologique sur les civils afin de continuer à étoffer son potentiel analytique. Ce potentiel brille par sa capacité à mettre en évidence les interactions entre les variables analytiques établies de la guerre ainsi qu’à considérer de manière plus approfondie les perspectives civiles afin de comprendre le potentiel de transformation sociale de la violence. J'opérationnalise ensuite ces idées en les appliquant aux analyses existantes des massacres qui ont eu lieu durant la guerre civile colombienne. PubDate: Wed, 23 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/isagsq/ksac014 Issue No:Vol. 2, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Sajjad T. Abstract: AbstractViolent border practices against irregular migration are not new, although increasing xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiments have drawn greater attention to such practices in recent years. Such measures—both in and at the borders—constitute organized violence on migrant bodies, making them permanently insecure. This is particularly striking in the context of European liberal democracies with its established discourse of human rights, which have since the 1990s consolidated a formidable architecture of deterrence and which have intensified such efforts with the 2015 “migrant crisis” with increasing sea interceptions, restrictive anti-immigrant measures, and the criminalization of solidarity efforts. This article asks: How does the European Union (EU) legitimize violence in its border regime and reconcile this regime with its core identity as a defender of human rights and a “normative superpower”' By drawing on critical discourse analysis and reviewing policy statements, speeches, and press releases, it identifies the discourse topics, discursive strategies, and linguistic means through which EU migration discourse seeks to legitimize its sprawling architecture of strategic cruelty against irregular migration. This article argues that the purpose of the resulting discourse is to “absolve and resolve”—absolving the union as a whole of guilt and resolving the cognitive dissonance between the professed identity of the EU as supremely humanitarian and the observable inhumane acts of itself and its member states. This explains how the EU can employ strategic cruelty to mitigate the arrival of migrants while simultaneously maintaining moral standing to chastise individual members for “violating” the hegemonic collective identity of the union. PubDate: Thu, 10 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/isagsq/ksac008 Issue No:Vol. 2, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Marlin-Bennett R; Jackson S. Abstract: AbstractCruel memes spread messages of hate via social media. The Internet itself extends the memes’ geographical reach, and many such cruel memes circulate across borders. This article examines the activities of cruel memeing—practices of creating, commenting on, reinforcing (“liking”), sharing, remixing, and otherwise endorsing cruel memes—as microscale hostile engagements in global politics. This is a politics of the everyday that is accessible to people in their ordinary lives and that is designed to be entertaining as well as cruel. The research draws on a large dataset of memes, comment threads, and related information from two opposed Reddit communities, r/TheLeftCantMeme and r/TheRightCantMeme. The power-flow theoretical framework structures an interpretive analysis of how cruel memes circulate within the social media space. We examine content (including narrative, degree of cruelty, and other components), and velocity of information flow, as well as access to the flow. Focusing on racism, antisemitism, and disdain for political opponents, we draw on interpretive methods to analyze the flow of information that spreads hate. We find: (1) normalization of divisiveness, derisiveness, and bigotry; (2) justifications of violence; and (3) emergence of agents despite pseudonymity. Cruel memeing activities combine with the structure of the online communities to spread hatred far beyond social media platforms. PubDate: Wed, 09 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/isagsq/ksac002 Issue No:Vol. 2, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Farias D; Casarões G, Magalhães D. Abstract: AbstractIn this article, we explore cruelty under populism, focusing on radical right populism. We develop our argument by introducing a two-dimensional model of cruel behavior in politics, in which cruelty is conceptualized as a dependent variable defined in terms of empathy (how the leader addresses those who suffer) and action (how the leader acts to alleviate suffering). This framework provides a nuanced understanding of how cruelty and populism connect, providing an original and cutting-edge contribution to both bodies of work. We use our two-dimensional model of cruel behavior to shed light on the different ways radical right populists (RRP) embrace cruelty as part of their political strategies. We have come to three “ideal” types of RRP cruel behavior: downplaying, blaming, and conspiring. In order to advance our ideas, we rely on the qualitative analysis of Brazil's far-right populist President Jair Bolsonaro and his (in)actions regarding COVID-19, who once asked about the soaring number of dead from COVID-19 simply answered: “So what' What do you want me to do'.” Using this case study, we empirically illustrate different ways in which how cruelty can manifest itself in practice and what real-life consequences it can have. PubDate: Fri, 04 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/isagsq/ksab048 Issue No:Vol. 2, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Austin J. Abstract: AbstractCruelty is a historical constant across world politics. Nonetheless, something has changed. Today, it is possible to observe death, massacre, torture, police brutality, terrorist attacks, drone strikes, and more, in high-definition video. Sometimes, we can watch live. In this article, I ask what it means when the historical sanitization of cruelty, injustice, and violence is stripped away. I do so in three ways. First, I explore how digital media has transformed how knowledge of violence is produced, circulates, and affects those who witness it. I focus in particular on how this visibility of cruelty affectively fractures our ontological security, undermines societal solidarity, and amplifies polarization. Second, I describe how this process is marked by substantive global inequalities vis-à-vis who is “protected” (or not) from exposure to graphic imagery. Third, I ground my discussion empirically through participant observation conducted with members of the militia group Hezbollah that focused on their emotional, affective, discursive, and political reactions to watching videos circulating on social media depicting members of their own group committing war crimes in Syria. The article concludes by dwelling on the worrying possible political futures these dynamics appear to be opening up. PubDate: Fri, 04 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/isagsq/ksac001 Issue No:Vol. 2, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Dubinsky S; Starr H. Abstract: AbstractAs part of a larger project studying language conflict, this paper documents ways in which the oppression of language use on the part of a dominant language/ethnic group is instrumentalized as a tool to inflict gratuitous societal pain and punishment upon nondominant ethnolinguistic groups and their individual members. Our arguments will be illustrated primarily by three contemporary cases: (1) the Uyghur minority in the PRC, (2) the Kurdish minority in Turkey, and (3) the Hungarian minority in Slovakia. This article also seeks to provide an example of ways in which important empirical questions in the political science/international relations literature might be more fully addressed with the help of linguistics, which is a focus of our ongoing language conflict project. PubDate: Fri, 04 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/isagsq/ksab051 Issue No:Vol. 2, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Koren O. Abstract: AbstractOur understanding of cruelty's impact on global human security and socioeconomic outcomes is still limited, especially with regard to how these effects unfold at the local, as opposed to the country, level. In this study, I first review literature on the impact of conflict, and violence against civilians specifically, on economic and political development globally, explicating potential adverse impacts, and highlighting the possibility of such violence increasing resilience in the long term. I then identify and discuss pathways linking political violence with lower socioeconomic activity locally. I hypothesize that violence disturbs socioeconomic activity in multiple ways, including by hurting businesses and laborers, scaring away tourists, and decreasing local investment, while additionally arguing that if no new atrocities happen, any impacts generated by these pathways will be relatively short term. Empirically, to operationalize local socioeconomic activity, I rely on nighttime light emissions; to operationalize atrocities, I rely on data from the Worldwide Atrocity Dataset, which measures all events that resulted with at least five civilian deaths by location. To test my expectations, I estimate both ordinary least squares and generalized methods of moments (GMM) models on a grid—(0.5 × 0.5-degree resolution) year level sample for the years 1997–2013. I find that, on average, an additional atrocity event corresponds to a decrease of 3–10 percent in local development levels the following year, compared with the baseline, but that such impacts disappear by the fourth year after the incident. Building on these findings, I discuss in detail research and policy implications. PubDate: Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/isagsq/ksab042 Issue No:Vol. 2, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Han Y; Nantermoz O. Abstract: AbstractThe prohibition and prosecution of core international crimes are understood as a liberal response to particularly cruel acts that shock the conscience of humanity. But what is the nature of this cruelty and how does it relate to liberalism' Rather than seeing liberalism as monolithic, we examine the different relationships between liberal logics and cruelty and how they manifest in processes of international criminalization. We develop a three-pronged typology of liberalism(s) based on their constitutive relationship to cruelty. The first logic expands upon Judith Shklar's theory of “Liberalism of Fear” that sees cruelty as detrimental to liberal society, foregrounding particularly acute forms of physical and affective cruelty in liberal politics and law; the second logic, “Racial Liberalism,” understands cruelty as a condition of possibility for the liberal order built on the exploitation of racialized others; and the third conceives of cruelty as produced by the market logic of trade-offs, referred to as “Sacrificial Liberalism.” Based on this framework, we examine two processes of international criminalization: the crime of genocide (widely considered to be the “crime of crimes” and thus an emblematic case of criminalized cruelty directed against collective identities) and the crime of aggression (which followed a more complicated criminalization trajectory). By tracing how different liberal logics interrelate, come into tension, and thus shape the processes of international criminalization, we not only illuminate the shifting legitimations and normative priorities of the liberal international order but also confront the normative value of criminalizing cruelty. PubDate: Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/isagsq/ksab049 Issue No:Vol. 2, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Goetze C. Abstract: AbstractIn 2018, the Trump administration separated thousands of families arriving at the US–Mexico border to ask for asylum in the framework of its “zero-tolerance” policy. This extraordinary act of cruelty violated several provisions of international human rights, refugee, and family protections, many of which the United States itself had drafted, initiated, and championed. The article asks about the understanding of sovereignty that underscored the zero-tolerance policy. Drawing on Max Weber's distinction of several forms of legitimating political authority, the article develops the argument that this policy reflects a patrimonial understanding of sovereignty and how this understanding intersects with notions of family and nation. It specifically discusses these intersections in the case of United States’ sovereignty developing in a settler colonial state and in contested borderlands. By developing this perspective, the article draws out the conditions of possibility under which institutional and structural violence can tip into explicitly cruel policies like those of the US family separations of 2018. The article contributes, on the one hand, to analyze deeply the foundations of US understandings of the state's sovereignty and, on the other hand, to better comprehending which types of sovereignty enable cruelty against migrants and refugees at which points in time. PubDate: Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/isagsq/ksab050 Issue No:Vol. 2, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Aradau C; Canzutti L. Abstract: AbstractCritical scholarship in international relations, border, and migration studies has analyzed the cultures of suspicion that underpin border practices and have increasingly reshaped the politics of asylum globally. They have highlighted either the generalization of suspicion through the securitization of asylum or racialized and gendered continuities of colonial violence. We propose to understand the entanglements of continuity and discontinuity in the politics of asylum through “technologies of cruelty.” To conceptualize technologies of cruelty, we draw on Etienne Balibar's “topographies of cruelty” and Rita Laura Segato's “pedagogies of cruelty.” Empirically, the article argues that technologies of cruelty minimize, erase, undo, splinter, and devalue asylum seekers’ claims for protection in ways that objectify and dehumanize them. Methodologically, the argument is developed through an analysis of a corpus of asylum appeal decisions in the United Kingdom. Asylum appeals are a particularly important archive for the diagnosis of cruelty internationally, as they are both inscriptions of dominant knowledge and contestations over knowledge and claims to protection. They also allow us to trace how the politics of asylum is situated within global topographies of cruelty, shaped by technologies of cruelty and the deactivation of empathy. PubDate: Sat, 22 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/isagsq/ksab041 Issue No:Vol. 2, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Bashovski M. Abstract: AbstractThis article examines how attitudes and structures of indifference to oppression and global inequality—practices of cruelty—are cultivated at both macro (institutional) and micro (everyday life) levels. First, following (Inayatullah and Blaney 2010a, 2010b), I suggest that a core premise of classical political economy—the split between self and other—is depoliticized and rationalized by contemporary discourses of international political economy. This depoliticization is a condition of possibility for attitudes of indifference. Consequently, understanding attitudes and structures of indifference requires re-politicizing political economy as a cultural encounter structured through gendered and racialized hierarchies. Second, I argue that indifference to cruelty is cultivated through recourse to ethical rather than political imperatives, which foreground ethical action in ways that continue to depoliticize the cruelties of global inequality. Two sites animate this project and foreground a form of banal cruelty justified through the cultivation of political indifference: at the microlevel, a dystopian short story that takes an ethicized indifference as the basis for accounting for racialized and gendered labor migration (George Saunders’ “The Semplica Girl Diaries”), and, at the macro-level, Canada's Temporary Foreign Worker programs, which produce depoliticized justifications for systemic racialized exploitation. I argue that this ethicization of political relationships is a way of precluding engagement with the colonial politics of indifference and the everyday cruelties of political economy through which inequalities and exploitations are produced and reproduced. PubDate: Sat, 22 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/isagsq/ksab043 Issue No:Vol. 2, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Augsten P; Glassner S, Rall J. Abstract: AbstractGermany is considered a role model for dealing with past mass atrocities. In particular, the social reappraisal of the Holocaust is emblematic of this. However, when considering the genocide on the Herero and Nama in present-day Namibia, it is puzzling that an official recognition was only pronounced after almost 120 years, in May 2021. For a long time, silence surrounded this colonial cruelty in German political discourse. Although the discourse on German responsibility toward Namibia emerged after the end of World War II, it initially appeared detached from the genocide. That silence on colonial atrocities is to be considered a cruelty itself. Studies on silence have been expanding and becoming richer. Building on these works, the paper sets two goals: First, it advances the theorization of silence by producing a new typology, which is then integrated into discourse-bound identity theory. Second, it applies this theory to the analysis of the silencing and later acknowledging of the genocide on the Herero and Nama by German political elites. To this end, Bundestag debates, official documents, and statements by relevant political actors are analyzed in the period from 1980 to 2021. The results reveal the dynamics between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discursive formations, how those are shifting in a period of 40 years, and what role silence plays in it. Beyond our emphasis on the genocide on the Herero and Nama, our findings might benefit future studies as the approach proposed in this paper can make silence a tangible research object for global studies. PubDate: Tue, 18 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/isagsq/ksab040 Issue No:Vol. 2, No. 2 (2022)
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