Violence & security. Paradigms and debates (73220041FY)
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Violence and Security, Paradigms and Debates, midterm summary 2023
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Violence & security. Paradigms and debates (73220041FY)
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Universiteit Van Amsterdam (UvA)
Hello. This is a summary of the lectures and readings for the course Violence and Security, Paradigms and Debates for the midterm. Bachelor's of Political Science at University of Amsterdam
Violence & security. Paradigms and debates (73220041FY)
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VIOLENCE AND SECURITY: PARADIGMS AND DEBATES
Week 1 Readings:
Organized violence 1989–2020, with a special emphasis on Syria (Therése
Pettersson et al. : 2021):
The two largest wars of the past decade, Afghanistan and Syria, both de-escalated in
2020. At the same time, violence in other areas escalated as old tensions, having
simmered for years or even decades, flared up in conflicts such as the one over
government power in Ethiopia, pitting the Addis Ababa regime against TPLF (Tigray
People’s Liberation Front) and the separatist conflict over Artsakh (Nagorno-
Karabakh) in Azerbaijan.
In recent years, there has been a clear regional shift from the Middle East to Africa
now driving the trend in organized violence. Completely dominant in one-sided
violence, and the location of more than half of all state-based armed conflicts in the
world, Africa witnessed its bloodiest year since 2014.
Africa is now home to more than half of all state-based armed conflicts in the world.
Non-state conflict increased in 2020, in terms of both the number of active conflicts
and the number of deaths incurred in fighting between non-state groups.
UCDP recorded 39 actors carrying out one-sided violence in 2020. This is an
increase by eight since 2019, and the highest number noted since 2004.
The falling trend in fatalities stemming from organized violence in the world,
observed for five consecutive years, ceased in 2020 and deaths in organized violence
seem to have settled on a high plateau.
CONCEPTUALIZING VIOLENCE
Johan Galtung:
- Direct violence: Behaviour carried out by a clearly identifiable agent with the
intent to inflict bodily harm
- Structural violence: Violence as present when humans systematically cannot
fulfil their physical and mental potential. Violence does not require intent and does
not require a clear agent
- Political violence occurs in wartime (conflicts where there as 1000+ related
battle-related deaths in a given year) and in times of ‘’peace’’ (ex: electoral
violence, ethnic riots)
Conceptualizing peace
- Negative peace: absence of direct violence
- Positive peace: a self-sustaining condition that protects the human security of a
population
What do we mean by ‘paradigms’?
- The idea of paradigms comes from Thomas Kuhn (1962)
- Paradigms or theoretical frameworks are lenses through which we see the world
- They contain assumptions about:
- The most important actors, as well as their behaviours and motivations
- What leads to war and violence
- What allows for peace and security
,PARADIGMS AND APPROACHES TO VIOLENCE AND SECURITY
1. Approaches to interstate conflict
2. Approaches to intrastate conflict
REALISM
- Actors: The state is the principal actor of international politics
- NATURE OF THE STATE:
- - The state is a unitary and rational actor seeking to maximize its own interests
- National security is a first order preference
- UNDERSTANDING OF CONFLICT/ ORDER:
- The international system is characterized by anarchy, which means that security is
not guaranteed
- Power (generally defined as material capabilities) is a central concern to realism
because it is key to security
- The likelihood of war is shaped by the distribution of power in the international
system
LIBERALISM
- Actors: State and non state actors are important
- Nature of the State: State preferences are an aggregate of preferences of a wide
range of state and societal actors
- Preferences not necessarily opposing
- National security not always the most important consideration
- UNDERSTANDING OF CONFLICT/ORDER:
- Conflict is not inevitable; cooperation and mutual gains are possible
- Order is possible through:
- 1. Economic interdependence and free trade
- 2. International institutions
- 3. Democratic institutions
CONSTRUCTIVISM
o Actors: Actors and the interests that drive them are socially constructed
o Assumptions about agent behaviour:
o Political action is shaped by identities and interests
o Who the actor shapes what they view as appropriate actions
o Conflict and peace are therefore shaped by the content of identities and
interests, which is why norms are so important to social constructivism
INSTUMENTALISM
- Elites as the primary explanatory variable for the presence/ absence of conflict
- Assumptions of instrumentalism:
- Elites seek to maximize political power and other material gains and will foment
violence to meet their interests
, INSTITUTIONALISM:
- An approach seeks to understand how political struggles are mediated by the
institutional setting in which they take place
CONSTRUCTIVISM
- Groups as socially constructed and groups are not unitary actors
- Violence as a means of delineating and asserting group boundaries
Week 1 Session 2 Readings:
War Making and State Making as Organized Crime (Charles Tilly: 1985):
At least for the European experience of the past few centuries, a portrait of war
makers and state makers as coercive and self-seeking entrepreneurs bears a far
greater resemblance to the facts than do its chief alternatives: the idea of a social
contract, the idea of an open market in which operators of armies and states offer
services to willing consumers, the idea of a society whose shared norms and
expectations call forth a certain kind of government.
This essay, then, concerns the place of organized means of violence in the growth
and change of those peculiar forms of government we call national states: relatively
centralized, differentiated organizations the officials of which more or less
successfully claim control over the chief concentrated means of violence within a
population inhabiting a large, contiguous territory.
The trimmed-down argument stresses the interdependence of war making and state
making and the analogy between both of those processes and what, when less
successful and smaller in scale, we call organized crime. War makes states, I shall
claim. Banditry, piracy, gangland rivalry, policing, and war making all belong on the
same continuum - that I shall claim as well. For the historically limited period in
which national states were becoming the dominant organizations in Western
countries, I shall also claim that mercantile capitalism and state making reinforced
each other.
"protection" calls up images of the shelter against danger provided by a powerful
friend, a large insurance policy, or a sturdy roof. With the other, it evokes the racket
in which a local strong man forces merchants to pay tribute in order to avoid damage
governments organize and, wherever possible, monopolize violence. It matters little
whether we take violence in a narrow sense, such as damage to persons and objects,
or in a broad sense, such as violation of people's desires and interests; by either
criterion, governments stand out from other organizations by their tendency to
monopolize the concentrated means of violence.
Legitimacy, according to Stinchcombe, depends rather little on abstract principle or
assent of the governed: "The person over whom power is exercised is not usually as
important as other power-holders."1 Legitimacy is the probability that other
authorities will act to confirm the decisions of a given authority.
: Power holders' pursuit of war involved them willy-nilly in the extraction of
resources for war making from the populations over which they had control and in
the promotion of capital accumulation by those who could help them borrow and
buy. War making, extraction, and capital accumulation interacted to shape
European state making. Power holders did not undertake those three momentous
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