Much is at stake when we choose a word for a form of violence: whether a conflict is labeled civil war or genocide, whether we refer to “enhanced interrogation techniques” or to “torture,” whether a person is called a “terrorist” or a “patriot.” Do these decisions reflect the rigorous application of commonly accepted criteria, or are they determined by power structures and partisanship? How is the language we use for violence entangled with the fight against it? In Naming Violence, Mathias Thaler articulates a novel perspective on the study of violence that demonstrates why the imagination matters for political theory. His analysis of the politics of naming charts a middle ground between moralism and realism, arguing that political theory ought to question whether our existing vocabulary enables us to properly identify, understand, and respond to violence. He explores how narrative art, thought experiments, and historical events can challenge and enlarge our existing ways of thinking about violence. Through storytelling, hypothetical situations, and genealogies, the imagination can help us see when definitions of violence need to be revisited by shedding new light on prevalent norms and uncovering the contingent history of ostensibly self-evident beliefs. Naming Violence demonstrates the importance of political theory to debates about violence across a number of different disciplines from film studies to history.

Essays tell the stories of battered lesbians and discuss community organizingctivities, support groups, and the possible causes of this form of domesticiolence.

Words like 'terrorism' and 'war' are no longer capable of encompassing the scope of cntemporary violence. With this book, Cavarero effectively renders such terms obsolete. She introduces a new word, 'horrorism', to capture the experience of violence.

***2015 National Jewish Book Award Winner*** In this powerful and timely book, one of the most admired and authoritative religious leaders of our time tackles the phenomenon of religious extremism and violence committed in the name of God. If religion is perceived as being part of the problem, Rabbi Sacks argues, then it must also form part of the solution. When religion becomes a zero-sum conceit—that is, my religion is the only right path to God, therefore your religion is by definition wrong—and individuals are motivated by what Rabbi Sacks calls “altruistic evil,” violence between peoples of different beliefs appears to be the only natural outcome. But through an exploration of the roots of violence and its relationship to religion, and employing groundbreaking biblical analysis and interpretation, Rabbi Sacks shows that religiously inspired violence has as its source misreadings of biblical texts at the heart of all three Abrahamic faiths. By looking anew at the book of Genesis, with its foundational stories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Rabbi Sacks offers a radical rereading of many of the Bible’s seminal stories of sibling rivalry: Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, Rachel and Leah. “Abraham himself,” writes Rabbi Sacks, “sought to be a blessing to others regardless of their faith. That idea, ignored for many of the intervening centuries, remains the simplest definition of Abrahamic faith. It is not our task to conquer or convert the world or enforce uniformity of belief. It is our task to be a blessing to the world. The use of religion for political ends is not righteousness but idolatry . . . To invoke God to justify violence against the innocent is not an act of sanctity but of sacrilege.” Here is an eloquent call for people of goodwill from all faiths and none to stand together, confront the religious extremism that threatens to destroy us, and declare: Not in God’s Name.

A timely exploration of the links between religious faith and global violence--and how to break them.

Reclaiming the notion of literature as an institution essential for reflecting on the violence of culture, history, and politics, Violence and Naming exposes the tension between the irreducible, constitutive violence of language and the reducible, empirical violation of others. Focusing on an array of literary artifacts, from works by journalists such as Elena Poniatowska and Sergio González Rodríguez to the Zapatista communiqués to Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives and 2666, this examination demonstrates that Mexican culture takes place as a struggle over naming—with severe implications for the rights and lives of women and indigenous persons. Through rereadings of the Conquest of Mexico, the northern Mexican feminicide, the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, the disappearance of the forty-three students at Iguala in 2014, and the 1999 abortion-rights scandal centering on “Paulina,” which revealed the tenuousness of women’s constitutionally protected reproductive rights in Mexico, Violence and Naming asks how societies can respond to violence without violating the other. This essential question is relevant not only to contemporary Mexico but to all struggles for democracy that promise equality but instead perpetuate incessant cycles of repression.

In The Everyday Language of White Racism, Jane H. Hillprovides an incisive analysis of everyday language to reveal theunderlying racist stereotypes that continue to circulate inAmerican culture. provides a detailed background on the theory of race andracism reveals how racializing discourse—talk and text thatproduces and reproduces ideas about races and assigns people tothem—facilitates a victim-blaming logic integrates a broad and interdisciplinary range of literaturefrom sociology, social psychology, justice studies, critical legalstudies, philosophy, literature, and other disciplines that havestudied racism, as well as material from anthropology andsociolinguistics Part of the ahref="http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-410785.html"target="_blank"Blackwell Studies in Discourse and CultureSeries/a

Critical thinkers like Foucault, Benjamin, Derrida and Žižek have long challenged the liberal separation of violence and politics by highlighting the implicit violence within political and economic structures. But in an era of international terrorism and counter-terrorism, should we not also reverse the question to ask ‘what is political about violence?’ Using interviews with ex-militants from Italian leftist struggle of the 1970s and the Cypriot anti-colonial militancy of the 1950s, Heath-Kelly explores the political utility of violence. Studies of conflict and international politics rarely address how killing and injuring function to win wars or overturn regimes. But by rejecting conceptions of violence as a means-to-an-end found in the works of Clausewitz and Arendt, this book draws upon studies of pain to explore the ways in which armed struggle produces new political subjects and regimes, and discredits others, through experiences of violence. Using Elaine Scarry’s conception of pain as ‘world-destroying’ and Walter Benjamin’s delineation of violence as either lawmaking or law-preserving to frame ex-militant discussions of participation in armed struggle, the book contributes a pathbreaking empirical exploration of violence to international politics literatures - moving the study of political violence away from an understanding of violence as just a means-to-an-end. Drawing out insights that have a far wider resonance and significance for the analysis of the ‘politicality’ of political violence, this work will be of interest to students and scholars in areas such as international relations, security studies and international relations theory.

With contributions by internationally recognized specialists, this book, a perfect complement to courses in criminology and hate crime, provides a key resource for understanding how racism and homophobia work to produce violence. Hate-motivated violence is now deemed a ‘serious national problem’ in most Western societies. With contributions by British, Australian, American, Canadian, Irish, Italian and French researchers, this book addresses a wide spectrum of types of violence, including, genocide, urban riots, inter-ethnic fighting and forms of hate crime targeting gay and lesbian people. Contributors to this volume also consider the political groups responsible for outbursts of hatred, their modes of operation and the institutional aspects of hate crime. Opening up an interdisciplinary perspective on the ways in which certain groups or individuals are transformed into expiatory victims, this compelling book is an essential read for all postgraduate law students and researchers interested in hate crime and society.

When Bombay changed its name to Mumbai in 1995, it was the culmination of a long process that transformed India's primary symbol of modernity and cultural diversity into a site of intense ethnic conflict and violent nationalism. Wages of Violence is a startling account of how the city's atmosphere, dominant public languages, and power structures have changed since the 1960s. The book centers on how Shiv Sena, a militant Hindu movement, has advanced a new, ''plebeian'' political culture and has undermined democratic rule in India's premier city. Drawing on a large body of archival material and conversations with people from all walks of life, Thomas Blom Hansen paints a vivid picture of this dynamic and violent movement. Challenging conventional views of recent trends in Indian politics, Hansen shows that the xenophobic public culture of today's Mumbai has deep roots in the region's history and its contested identities. We are also given revealing insights into the city's Muslim communities and the authorities' understanding and control of the ethno-religious subcultures in the city. Hansen argues cogently that Shiv Sena's success represents the violent possibilities of the ''vernacularization'' of democracy in India. Unfolding at a juncture where the globalization of India's economy is having a deepening impact on the lives of ordinary people, this is a story that resonates with the directions urban growth is taking both elsewhere in India and beyond.