The crime of homicide has long animated academic debate, community concern and political attention. The discussion has often centered on the perceived (in)adequacy of legal responses to homicide, questions of culpability, and divergent representations of victims and offenders. Within this, notions of gender, responsibility and justice are pivotal. This edited collection builds on existing scholarship by examining these concerns not only in the context of the 'private' world of domestic murder but also in the more 'public' world of the state, the corporation, war, and genocide. In so doing this book draws from key frameworks of criminological thought, legal analysis and empirical evidence to critically examine the relationship between homicide, gender and responsibility. Bringing together leading international criminology and legal scholars, this collection provides a unique contribution to the academic and policy engagement with what is, more often than not, an ordinary and mundane crime. Analysing the crime in a variety of different social contexts alongside an in-depth and critical analysis of the interconnections between the ordinary act of lethal violence, gender and notions of responsibility, this book will be of interest to students, scholars and policymakers working in criminology and socio-legal studies.

Transitional justice studies typically focuses on how nations remember, face and deal with histories of past violence. This book, however, shifts the frame from national discourses of transitional justice onto local memory actors who attempt to engage with these broader systems of meaning from below. The case study is based on the memory struggles of individuals and groups who are attempting to gain access to the discourses and benefits associated with dominant memory identities of 'victim' and 'veteran' in the context of post-transition South Africa. They share a common history of squatter resistance in the Western Cape in the 1980s and a common struggle for inclusion in dominant memory frameworks. The main theme of this book is the politics of memory, as it relates to the conversation between national and local memory. Integrated within this theme is the further theme of alternative histories and counter-memories of struggle from below. In focusing on counter memories of violence and transition this book aims to tell a different version of South African liberation history in relation to the dominant narrative. It analyses local memory actors' attempts to bring their lived histories into conversation with national discourses of reconciliation and the national liberation struggle. In doing so it unpacks a memory paradox occurring within these narratives, which highlights the politics of inclusion and exclusion within the frames of transitional justice knowledge. On the one hand this alternate story exposes the paradox between local and national memory while on the other hand it brings into focus the local experience of the intersection between international transitional justice discourses and national transition politics. This book will be of local and international interest to scholars and students in the field of transitional justice, memory politics, national liberation struggle and South African historiography. It will also be of interest to a broader South Africa public, as it offers a deeper understanding of South Africa's history, which challenges taken for granted transitional justice frames of knowledge.

This book questions gendered readings of violence by analyzing how this paradigm has become normalized in Italy since the feminist term 'femminicidio', or 'femicide', entered the mainstream media during the 2013 general election. It also sheds light on discourses of contestation on the part of family activists, men's rights campaigners and divorced fathers' groups. Two counter-discourses emerge. The first is what the author terms an 'ideology narrative', for which discourses built around the conceptual category of 'gender' normalize simplistic representations of relationships between men and women. The second is a 'female violence discourse', which sheds light on under-represented aggressor-victim relations and modifies dominant representations of femininity and masculinity. The author argues that integrating these two discourses into public debates helps to reappropriate the complexity and biological dimensions of (violent) relationships between men and women, often overshadowed by gender/feminist perspectives. In this way, she concludes, we can address neglected social issues that contribute to violence beyond gender. This thought-provoking book will appeal to students and scholars of sociology, critical discourse studies and gender.

The British became the dominant power in the Arab Gulf in the late eighteenth century. The conventional view has justified British imperial expansion in the Gulf region because of the need to supress Arab piracy. This book, first published in 1988, challenges the myth of piracy and argues that its threat was created by the East India Company for commercial reasons. The Company was determined to increase its share of Gulf trade with India at the expense of the native Arab traders, especially the Qawasim of the lower Gulf. However, the Company did not possess the necessary warships and needed to persuade the British Government to commit the Royal Navy to achieve this dominance. Accordingly the East India Company orchestrated a campaign to misrepresent the Qawasim as pirates who threatened all maritime activity in the northern Indian Ocean and adjacent waters. Any misfortune that happened to any ship in the area was attributed to the 'Joasmee pirates'. This campaign was to lead eventually to the storming of Ras al-Khaimah and the destruction of the Qawasim. Based on extensive use of the Bombay Archives, previously unused by researchers, this book provides a thorough reinterpretation of a vital period in Gulf history. It also illuminates the style and method of the East India Company at a critical period in the expansion of the British Empire.

In No Middle Ground: Anti-Imperialists and Ethical Witnessing During the Philippine-American War, Erin L. Murphy argues that activists in the Anti-Imperialist movement against the Philippine-American War, led by the Anti-Imperialist League, followed an evolving path of ethical witnessing where leaders empathically considered the experience of imperialist violence as it was expressed by marginalized anti-imperialists. Murphy explores how the perspectives of marginalized anti-imperialists like white women, black women and men, and Filipino/as, led Anti-Imperialist League leaders, who were predominantly white men of some prominence, to evolve their activism from focusing on defending the U.S. Constitution through electoral politics and the legality of U.S. Empire to exposing the imperialist violence committed by the U. S. military as crimes against fundamental human rights. Activists believed that advocating for human rights held true to the principles in the U.S. Constitution while U.S. Empire only dismembered it. Murphy further analyzes the ways in which Anti-Imperialist League leaders and supporters began forming other organizations based on the principles of advocating for human rights and liberty, such as the National Association for Colored People, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, National Consumers League, American Civil Liberties Union, and the Ethical Society.

The troubles in Ireland are not new. They have taken a heavy toll in lives and, perhaps more importantly, in psychological health. From testing and interviews with the children, women, and men of Northern Ireland beginning in 1969, Fields has developed a case study of the long-term effects of stress on a population. She identifies certain social control mechanisms which produce a mixture of chaos and docility in the troubled North and argues that England has established these in order to destroy the identity of the people--a process of "psychological genocide."

This volume applies social-psychological theory to a concrete and ongoing situation in a way that is illuminating for the general reader and for the specialist. Fields has done what might appear obvious: to find out the effects of stress on a population by going to that population and observing what their lives are like. The remarkable fact is that until now, no one has done so.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been called the 'worst place in the world' for women, with reports of widespread and horrific incidents of rape and sexual violence and almost complete impunity for the perpetrators of such violence. However, despite the high profile media reporting on sexual violence in the DRC, and the widely publicized responses of the international community, there is still very little real analysis of the real situation of women in the country. This book provides such detailed analysis of gender relations in the DRC, and goes beyond the usual explanations of sexual violence as a product of conflict, to examine the complex and socially constructed gender norms and roles which underlie incidences of violence. The book benefits from a comprehensive account of men's and women's roles in conflict, violence, peace building and reconstruction, and evaluates the impacts of national and international political responses. In doing so, this book provides valuable new evidence and analysis of the complex and multilayered conflicts in the DRC.

'This book, written by people with an intimate knowledge of prisons and dangerous prisoners and their mental health and welfare, offers something of an antidote to the simply coercive and repressive. In the words of the editor, it offers 'a humane approach to working with dangerous people... It should be a basic tenet of psychological work with clients that we are prepared and able to be in sympathy with them, to have some understanding of their despair'. This volume offers a contribution to ways of thinking about dangerous people and their behavior and working with them constructively, respectfully and possibly redemptive. I sincerely hope that this book will be read by all those concerned with offenders in whatever capacity, from clinicians to politicians, from policy makers to managers. It will well reward their interest and attention.' Christopher Cordess, Psychoanalyst and Emeritus Professor of Forensic Psychiatry University of Sheffield

The gang today is seen as Britain's public enemy number one. This book tackles this gangland thesis head-on and refutes it, questioning how we think about and interpret violent street worlds and how and why we need to think about them in very different ways, pushing the boundaries of critical enquiry and providing a range of new ways of looking at disturbing realities. Through the novel use of authoethnography, the book contests the widely held thesis that urban gangs today represent a serious, novel and developing threat. In this guise, they have been blamed for causing the riots of 2011, most gun related crime, the sexual violation of women, and outbreaks of dangerous dogs. Hallsworth argues that when subject to critical scrutiny, there is always an excess to the violence blamed on gangs that is not gang related and explanations for problems blamed on gangs can be advanced without needing to evoke the gang as an explanatory factor. In light of this, the book considers how best we might understand the nature of violent street worlds without falling into the pitfalls of the discourse of gang talk, exploring questions such as 'How do we have a gang problem?' and 'How best do we avoid one?'This book is provocative, polemical and theoretical and one that seeks to make a significant intervention into both gangs studies and studies of urban violence more generally, commanding significant social attention in the academy and beyond.

Many scholars of international relations in Asia regard bilateralism and multilateralism as alternative and mutually exclusive approaches to security co-operation. They argue that multilateral associations such as ASEAN will eventually replace the system of bilateral alliances which were the predominant form of U.S. security co-operation with Asia-Pacific allies during the Cold War. Yet these bilateral alliances continue to be the primary means of the United States' strategic engagement with the region. This book contends that bilateralism and multilateralism are not mutually exclusive, and that bilateralism is likely to continue strong even as multilateralism strengthens. It explores a wide range of issues connected with this question. It discusses how US bilateral alliances have been reinvigorated in recent years, examines how bilateral and multilateral approaches to specific problems can work alongside each other, and concludes by considering how patterns of international security are likely to develop in the region in future.

This book is a transnational study of rural and anti-Semitic violence around the triple frontier between Austria-Hungary, Romania and Tsarist Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. It focuses on the devastating Romanian peasant uprising in 1907 and traces the reverberations of the crisis across the triple frontier, analysing the fears, spectres and knee-jerk reactions it triggered in the borderlands of Austria-Hungary and Tsarist Russia. The uprising came close on the heels of the 1905-1907 social turmoil in Tsarist Russia, and brought into play the major issues that characterized social and political life in the region at the time: rural poverty, the Jewish Question, state modernization, and social upheavals. The book comparatively explores the causes and mechanisms of violence propagation, the function of rumour in the spread of the uprising, land reforms and their legal underpinnings, the policing capabilities of the borderlands around the triple frontier, as well as newspaper coverage and diplomatic reactions.

"His fascinating and ambitious book provides a fully developed theory of violence as the `heart and secret soul' of the sacred. Girard's fertile, combative mind links myth to prophetic writing, primitive religions to classical tragedy."--Victor Brombert, 'Chronicle of Higher Education.'

Images of covered women, together with stories of honor killings and forced marriages, continue to retain their currency in media representations of Islam. Moving beyond staid stereotypes, Gender and Violence in the "New" Europe draws new conclusions about the role of violence in determining Muslim women's participation in German public life. Combining cultural studies with theory, Beverly Weber contributes to the ongoing scholarly discussion about Islam in the West in two key ways. First, she demonstrates how current thinking about gender violence prohibits the intellectual inquiry necessary to act against a range of forms of violence. Secondly, she analyzes ways in which Muslim women participate in the public sphere by thematizing violence in literature, art, and popular media. By examining how violence is imagined, portrayed, and challenged, this timely book provides new strategies for action.

Injury is the leading cause of years of potential life lost in the United States, and one third of all fatal injuries are a result of intentional injuries or violence. Today, public health officials have identified violence as comparable in importance and impact to such previous epidemics as smallpox, tuberculosis, and syphilis. This volume offers a landmark assessment of the problem of violence from a public health perspective. Its aims is both to describe what is known about violence in our society, and to lead the way towards involving health professionals in both analysis and action. The authors, all internationally known experts in their fields, examine child, spouse, and elder abuse; sexual assault and rape; suicide; assaultive violence; and homicide. To each topic they bring an analysis of key issues in epidemiology, causal and risk factors, outcomes, and interventions. This timely work will be a valuable resource for public health professionals, criminologists, sociologists, social workers, educators, and all those concerned with violence in our communities.

Climate change caused by human activity is the most fundamental challenge facing mankind in the 21st century, since it will drastically alter the living conditions of millions of people, mainly in the Global South. Environmental violence, including resource crises such as peak fossil fuel, will lie at the heart of future conflicts. However, Genocide Studies have so far neglected this subject, due to the emphasis that traditional genocide scholarship places on ideology and legal prosecution, leading to a narrow understanding of the driving forces of genocide. This books aims at changing this, initiating a dialogue between scholars working in the areas of climate change and genocide. Research into genocide as well as climate change is a highly interdisciplinary endeavour, transcending the boundaries of established disciplines. Contributions to this book address this by approaching the subject from a wide array of methodological, theoretical, disciplinary and regional perspectives. As all the contributions show, climate change is a major threat multiplier for violence or non-violent destruction and any understanding of prevention needs to take this into account. They offer a basis for much needed Critical Prevention Studies, which aims at sustainable prevention. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Human Rights.

The popular "Mediator's Handbook" presents a time-tested, adaptable model for helping people work through conflict. Extensively revised to incorporate recent practice and thinking, the accessible manual format lays out a clear structure for new and occasional mediators, while offering a detailed, nuanced resource for professionals. Starting with a new chapter on assessing conflict and bringing people to the table, the first section explains the process step-by-step, from opening conversations and exploring the situation, through the phases of finding resolution deciding on topics, reviewing options, and testing agreements. The "Toolbox" section details the concepts and skills a mediator needs in order to: Understand the conflict; Support the people; Facilitate the process; Guide decision-making. Throughout the book, the emphasis is on what the mediator can do or say NOW, and on the underlying principles and core methods that can help the mediator make wise choices. Long a popular course textbook for high schools, universities, and training programs, this Handbook is also a valued desk reference for professional mediators, and a practical guide for managers, organisers, teachers and anyone working with clients, customers, volunteers, committees or teams.

Violence is a prevalent and persistent theme in all aspects of human affairs. A comprehensive understanding of violence therefore requires exposure to the research coming out from all the disciplines in the social sciences: their different methodologies, findings and insights. This book promotes the merits of an interdisciplinary agenda. By bringing together scholars of violence working in political science, political theory, international relations, economics, philosophy, sociology, psychology and public health, this book explores the complexity of violence and the interface between the empirical and normative dimensions central to this problem. The aim is to investigate the ways in which a correct understanding of this phenomenon must deal with both empirical and normative issues. There is a tendency for scholars of violence to work predominantly within the narrow parameters of their own discipline: philosophers tend to read fellow philosophers on violence; criminologists tend to rely on the work of fellow criminologists; sociologists tend to trust the writings of fellow sociologists; and so on. This book invites the reader to embrace an interdisciplinary approach towards the universal problem of violence. (178 words)

The use of violence within relationships, families or communities is a major public health issue across the world. As such, it will continue to require global, strategic and preventative measures across educational, social care and criminal justice systems. This book draws on the author's gritty practice experience, social work values, knowledge and research to provide detailed guidance on how to best respond directly to those who carry out this common violence. Eight face-to-face conversations between a social worker and the person using violence are depicted and used to present the necessary elements for a dialogue which continually seeks to promote non-violence. These conversations pick up on some key messages from the successful Northern Ireland Peace Process and are firmly rooted in social work practice. They will also contribute to the difficult risk decisions that always need to be taken when violence is being used. The reader is offered choice and discretion as to how these conversations can be used by social workers, from short opportunity-led interactions to a lengthier, more structured interventions - promoting non-violence. Offering a positive response to the challenge of 'common' violence in a clear and accessible manner, this book should be considered essential reading for students, researchers and practitioners. The author's royalties will be donated to a third world charity project working with victims of domestic violence.

Youth violence is a pressing social concern and this book examines several elements of youth violence prevention. It offers state-of-the-art research on several different topics including: the relationship between bullying offending and victimization; the relationship between race and the code of the streets explanation for violent offending; and how differences in methodology affect the validity of the multiple marginality theory of gang membership. It also examines an understudied population: gay gang members as well as providing an analysis of the degree to which risk factors for gang membership and violent offending are sex-specific. The critical component of this text is the melding of research with practical implications for youth violence prevention specialists. As such, the book should be useful to both academic and practitioner audiences.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the "Journal of Crime & Justice.""

This study explores the 'imaginary of disaster' that appears in popular fictions about the apocalyptic breakdown of society. Focusing on representations of crime, law, violence, vengeance and justice, it argues that an exploration post-apocalyptic story-telling offer us valuable insights into social anxieties.

Advertising and Violence identifies and analyzes the important issues related to violence in advertising and its overall effects on society. The book is based on a widely cited special issue of the Journal of Advertising and includes eight new chapters that expand the book's coverage. The objective of the book is to compile a compendium of current thinking, perspectives, theoretical viewpoints, and research relevant to the violence and advertising interface. The chapter authors, all notable experts in the field, take a multidisciplinary approach that incorporates perspectives from disciplines other than marketing in order to provide a broad-based view of how advertising and violence coalesce and the policy implications of this juxtaposition.

Building a Better Man presents a theory and science based discussion of masculinity in modern America, but it also does much more than that-it interweaves a diverse group of compelling personal stories with an exploration of aggression and masculinity in the socialization of boys and men. Where other programs tend to subtly denigrate men as perpetrators and focus on stopping the problematic behavior, Building a Better Man tries to understand the external forces that impinge on the developmental experiences of boys/men and broadens the scope of inquiry into their behavior by reviewing a range of external societal forces that contribute to the problems. Clinicians and group leaders will find that the approach laid out in Building a Better Man leaves clients feeling understood more than judged, which provides a different motivation for change and can set treatment on an entirely different and infinitely more productive path.

This book aims at a deeper understanding of social processes, dynamics and institutions shaping collective violence. It argues that violence is a social practice that adheres to social logics and, in its collective form, appears as recurrent patterns. In search of characteristics, mechanisms and logics of violence, contributions deliver ethnographic descriptions of different forms of collective violence and contextualize these phenomena within broader spatial and temporal structures. The studies show that collective violence, at least if it is sustained over a certain period of time, aims at organization and therefore develops constitutive and integrative mechanisms. Practices of social mobilization of people and economic resources, their integration in functional structures, and the justification or legitimization of these structures sooner or later lead to the establishment of new forms of (violent) orders, be it at the margins of or beyond the state. Cases discussed include riots in Gujarat, India, mass violence in Somalia, social orders of violence and non-violence in Colombia, humanitarian camps in Uganda, trophy-taking in North America, and violent livestock raiding in Kenya. This book was originally published as a special issue of Civil Wars.

Drawing on rich archival sources, explores the relationship between honor and violence in the Perigord region in prerevolutionary France. Historians and scholars across other disciplines have long sought an explanation for why late medieval and early modern Europeans experienced elevated rates of violent crime, and for why society apparently tolerated such high levels of interpersonal violence. Most of our existing explanations focus on the macro level, looking at causes like the rise of the state or the concomitant cultural shift toward civility. In this study, author Steven G. Reinhardt utilizes a more micro-level, descriptive approach to examine the intersection of honor and violence in prerevolutionary France, in particular in the Perigord region between 1770 and 1790. Drawing on archival sources (such as interrogations, petitions, and inquests), Reinhardt vividly conveys the texture of ordinary people's everyday experiences. Based on a sampling of criminal court cases from a region marginally integrated into the emerging capitalist economy, Violence and Honor in Prerevolutionary Perigord presents a series of extraordinarily rich narratives illustrating their subjects' understanding of the imperatives of the honor code. Combining careful scholarship with popular history, the book will interest historians of early modern Europe, legal scholars, and anthropologists of law, as well as students and general readers interested in the history of violence. Steven G.Reinhardt is associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Victimization has a long, cross-cultural history. The status of the victim has been the source of active and stirring controversy in cultural theory, criminology and legal theory, philosophy and psychoanalysis; it is of particular interest within feminist theory. Can the victim relation be refused? Are we all victims? The aim of this book is to analyze the intersection of gender and the victim, and the role of a libidinal enjoyment (jouissance) in knotting this relation. The enduring link between the construct of the victim and the sacrificial processes at its heart reveals something ultimately compelling about sacrifice. Legislating victimization out of existence will fail because the victim relation is central to the very formation of human subjectivity and implicated in the reproduction of social life. Lacanian psychoanalysis is used to interrogate the limits to arguments for resolving the problem of sacrificial violence: from Girard to Bataille, from Butler to Kristeva, from de Sade to Nietzsche. However, without denying the inevitable structuring power of the signifier, only its relentless reversion, or undoing, will expose the myths that sustain it, and create an opening within the social beyond this impasse. Such a break is theorized through a confrontation of Lacan with Baudrillard.