In this companion volume to The Roots of African Conflicts African scholars analyse a number of conflicts and their resolution - demonstrating the importance of their resolution and their impact on the wider continent '...The studies in these two books seek to advance our understanding of African conflicts by going beyond the conventional and fashionable analyses of Africanist scholarship, often inflected with, if not infected by, Afropessimism, or the simplistic stereotypes conveyed in the western media that is infused with Afrophobia....these conflicts must be understood in comparative perspective, not in isolation. Violent conflict in Africa is indeed part of the human drama, but the tendency to impose universalist models of conflict driven from stylized western experiences or faddish theorising must be resisted... such paradigms lead to poor analysis and bad policy. Conflict is too serious a matter, and its costs too grave, for glib modeling or lazy journalistic speculation uninformed by the histories of, and unmindful of the concrete conditions in, the societies under scrutiny.' - From the introduction to The Roots of African Conflicts by Paul Tiyambe Zeleza 'The search for peace is too important to be left to outsiders, however well-intentioned. It is encouraging to see that a growing number of African scholars are interested in exploring and engaging this crucial subject'. - From the introduction to The Resolution of African Conflicts by Paul Tiyambe Zeleza North America: Ohio U Press; South Africa: Unisa PressBR>

As Myanmar's military adjusts to life with its former opponents holding elected office, Conflict in Myanmar showcases innovative research by a rising generation of scholars, analysts and practitioners about the past five years of political transformation. Each of its seventeen chapters, from participants in the 2015 Myanmar Update conference held at the Australian National University, builds on theoretically informed, evidence-based research to grapple with significant questions about ongoing violence and political contention. The authors offer a variety of fresh views on the most intractable and controversial aspects of Myanmar's long-running civil wars, fractious politics and religious tensions. This latest volume in the Myanmar Update Series from the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific continues and deepens a tradition of intense, critical engagement with political, economic and social questions that matter to both the inhabitants and neighbours of one of Southeast Asia's most complicated and fascinating countries.

Individuals seek ways to repress the sense of violence within themselves and often resort to medial channels. The hunger of the individual for violence is a trigger for the generation of violent content by media, owners of political power, owners of religious power, etc. However, this content is produced considering the individual's sensitivities. Thus, violence is aestheticized. Aesthetics of violence appear in different fields and in different forms. In order to analyze it, an interdisciplinary perspective is required. The Handbook of Research on Aestheticization of Violence, Horror, and Power brings together two different concepts that seem incompatible-aesthetics and violence-and focuses on the basic motives of aestheticizing and presenting violence in different fields and genres, as well as the role of audience reception. Seeking to reveal this togetherness with different methods, research, analyses, and findings in different fields that include media, urban design, art, and mythology, the book covers the aestheticization of fear, power, and violence in such mediums as public relations, digital games, and performance art. This comprehensive reference is an ideal source for researchers, academicians, and students working in the fields of media, culture, art, politics, architecture, aesthetics, history, cultural anthropology, and more.

Mass shootings continue to occur today and affect the public's sense of safety and security. Examining the nature of shooters and law enforcement responses when shootings occur offers further understanding in effective crisis response management and development. Assessing and Averting the Prevalence of Mass Violence provides advanced insights into the social implications and the cultural and political natures of violent events. The content within this publication explores gun violence, crisis management, and public policy. It is a vital reference source for law enforcement professionals, criminal justice students, sociology researchers, policymakers, and government researchers seeking coverage on topics centered on mass violence prevention, assessment, and intervention.

Law is a multi-dimensional aspect of modern society that constantly shifts and changes over time. In recent years, the practice of therapeutic jurisprudence has increased significantly as a valuable discipline. Therapeutic Jurisprudence and Overcoming Violence Against Women is a comprehensive reference source for the latest scholarly research on the strategic role of jurisprudential practices to benefit women and protect women's rights. Highlighting a range of perspectives on topics such as reproductive rights, workplace safety, and victim-offender overlap, this book is ideally designed for academics, practitioners, policy makers, students, and practitioners seeking research on utilizing the law as a social force in modern times.

Written during the Northern Ireland peace process and just before the Good Friday Agreement, The Politics of Antagonism sets out to answer questions such as why successive British Governments failed to reach a power-sharing settlement in Northern Ireland and what progress has been made with the Anglo-Irish Agreement. O'Leary and McGarry assess these topics in the light of past historical and social-science scholarship, in interviews of key politicians, and in an examination of political violence since 1969. The result is a book which points to feasible strategies for a democratic settlement in the Northern Ireland question and which allows today's scholars and students to analyse approaches to Northern Ireland from the perspective of the recent past.

Despite its ubiquity, revenge is a surprisingly understudied subject. We're all familiar with the urge for payback, but where does that urge come from? Why is it so hard to give up? And why can some people only satisfy it through extreme and brutal acts? This book addresses these questions, and by developing the concept of radical revenge it gives some meaning to what might otherwise appear to be senseless acts of violence. The author explores some of the most egregious examples of radical revenge in contemporary society, including mass shootings, internet trolling, revenge porn, and contemporary populist politics. Drawing on psychoanalytic ideas about shame, envy and thin-skinned narcissism, she discusses why some people feel compelled to engage in these sorts of destructive acts of radical revenge. She looks too at examples such as the work of Artemisia Gentileschi and David Holthouse, to show that in exceptional cases, revenge can be an act of creativity rather than destruction.

Scholars and lay persons alike routinely express concern about the capacity of democratic publics to respond rationally to emotionally charged issues such as crime, particularly when race and class biases are invoked. This is especially true in the United States, which has the highest imprisonment rate in the developed world, the result, many argue, of too many opportunities for elected officials to be highly responsive to public opinion. Limiting the power of democratic publics, in this view, is an essential component of modern governance precisely because of the risk that broad democratic participation can encourage impulsive, irrational and even murderous demands. These claims about panic-prone mass publics-about the dangers of 'mob rule'-are widespread and are the central focus of Lisa L. Miller's The Myth of Mob Rule. Are democratic majorities easily drawn to crime as a political issue, even when risk of violence is low? Do they support 'rational alternatives' to wholly repressive practices, or are they essentially the bellua multorum capitum, the "many-headed beast," winnowing problems of crime and violence down to inexorably harsh retributive justice? Drawing on a comparative case study of three countries-the U.S., the U.K. and the Netherlands-The Myth of Mob Rule explores when and with what consequences crime becomes a politically salient issue. Using extensive data from multiple sources, the analyses reverses many of the accepted causal claims in the literature and finds that: serious violence is an important underlying condition for sustained public and political attention to crime; the United States has high levels of both crime and punishment in part because it has failed, in racially stratified ways, to produce fundamental collective goods that insulate modern democratic citizens from risk of violence, a consequence of a democratic deficit, not a democratic surplus; and finally, countries with multi-party parliamentary systems are more responsive to mass publics than the U.S. on crime and that such responsiveness promotes protection from a range of social risks, including from excessive violence and state repression.

Whitewashing the South is a powerful exploration of how ordinary white southerners recall living through extraordinary racial times-the Jim Crow era, civil rights movement, and the post-civil rights era-highlighting tensions between memory and reality. Author Kristen Lavelle draws on interviews with the oldest living generation of white southerners to uncover uncomfortable memories of our racial past. The vivid interview excerpts show how these lifelong southerners reflect on race in the segregated South, the civil rights era, and more recent decades. The book illustrates a number of complexities-how these white southerners both acknowledged and downplayed Jim Crow racial oppression, how they both appreciated desegregation and criticized the civil rights movement, and how they both favorably assessed racial progress while resenting reminders of its unflattering past. Chapters take readers on a real-world look inside The Help and an exploration of the way the Greensboro sit-ins and school desegregation have been remembered, and forgotten. Digging into difficult memories and emotions, Whitewashing the South challenges our understandings of the realities of racial inequality.

Medieval Violence provides a detailed analysis of the practice of medieval brutality, focusing on a thriving region of northern France in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. It examines how violence was conceptualised in this period, and uses this framework to investigate street violence, tavern brawls, urban rebellions, student misbehaviour, and domestic violence. The interactions between these various forms of violence are examined in order to demonstrate the complex and communicative nature of medieval brutality. What is often dismissed as dysfunctional behaviour is shown to have been highly strategic and socially integral. Violence was a performance, dependent upon the spaces in which it took place. Indeed, brutality was contingent upon social and cultural structures. At the same time, the common stereotype of the thoughtlessly brutal Middle Ages is challenged, as attitudes towards violence are revealed to have been complex, troubled, and ambivalent. Whether violence could function effectively as a form of communication which could order and harmonise society, or whether it inevitably degenerated into chaotic disorder where meaning was multivalent and incomprehensible, remained a matter of ongoing debate in a variety of contexts. Using a variety of source material, including legal records, popular literature, and sermons, Hannah Skoda explores experiences of, and attitudes towards, violence, and highlights profound contemporary ambiguity concerning its nature and legitimacy.

Terrorism has returned to the streets of Northern Ireland. In the years after the 1998 Real IRA bombing of Omagh, which killed 29 people, violent dissident Republican groups have re-emerged as a major security threat to a region that has been denied peace, stability, and prosperity for too long. Those responsible have many names. They are breakaways, splinter factions, spoilers, and "residual" terrorists. The Real IRA, Continuity IRA, and Oglaigh na hEireann are only some of the groups now responsible for a growing wave of bombings, shootings, threats, and intimidation across Northern Ireland. Commonly known as "the dissidents," these are the rejectionists for whom there seems to be no negotiated settlement, no peace deal, no consensus solution that will convince them to accept the will of the majority of the people on the island of Ireland. Divided We Stand: The Strategy and Psychology of Ireland's Dissident Terrorists presents the results of meticulous research conducted by the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at the Pennsylvania State University. Since 2007, John Horgan, Director of the center, has led a research project to monitor the activities of Ireland's new terrorists. Drawing on one of the largest open-source militant databases ever assembled, Divided We Stand describes the activities, histories, motivations, psychology, and strategy of the small, dynamic, and rapidly evolving splinter groups that continue to erode peace, stability, and normalization in Northern Ireland.

Violence is rampant in America. It is ingrained in our history and our psychology, but what cultural similarities do high-violence areas share? It has been a question tackled by academics and members of the law community since the foundation of our country; and yet, are we any closer to an answer now than we were a hundred years ago? If we are closer, why has the crime rate steadily increased? Reason would conclude that in recognizing the cultural similarities of high-violence areas, we would be able to alter these similarities and deter criminal behaviors. Even so, the behaviors are not deterred. Crime has not lessened. Studies continue, but nothing changes. Should we therefore give up? Or should our hypotheses and conclusions merely change? Author Hassan Dibich says yes to the latter. "The Subculture of Violence" takes a close look at the psychological and cultural hypotheses of old. Dibich delves deeply into the science of homicide and how socioeconomic and even climactic conditions affect statistics. He looks closely at communities with a high number of newcomers and single parents. He goes so far as to disprove previous logic and call for fresh research. America is being swallowed by violence. It is time for new answers, as the old brought us no closer to peace.