Conflict and trauma remain among the most prevalent themes in film and literature. Comics has never avoided such narratives, and comics artists are writing them in waysthat are both different from and complementary to literature and film. In Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War, Harriet E. H. Earle brings together two distinct areas of research-trauma studies and comics studies-to provide a new interpretation of a long-standing theme. Focusing on representations of conflict in post-Vietnam War American comics, Earle claims that the comics form is uniquely able to show traumatic experience by representing events as viscerally as possible. Using texts from across the form and placing mainstream superhero comics alongside alternative and art comics, Earle suggests that comics are the ideal artistic representation of trauma.Because comics bridge the gap between the visual and the written, they represent such complicated narratives as loss and trauma in unique ways, particularly through the manipulation of time and experience. Comics can fold time and confront traumatic events, be they personal or shared, through a myriad of both literary andvisual devices. As a result, comics can represent trauma in ways that are unavailable to other narrative and artistic forms. With themes such as dreams and mourning, Earle concentrates on trauma in American comics after the Vietnam War. These works include Alissa Torres's American Widow, Doug Murray's The'Nam, and Art Spiegelman's much lauded Maus. These works pair with ideas from a wide range of thinkers, including Sigmund Freud, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Fredric Jameson, as well as contemporary trauma theory and clinical psychology. Through these examples and others, Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War proves that comics open up new avenues to explore personal and public trauma in extraordinary, necessary ways.

Engendered Death: Pennsylvania Women Who Kill is an historical and interdisciplinary study of women who kill in Pennsylvania from the 18th century to the present. It is not an examination of what motivates women to kill, although the reader may deduce that from the case studies included. Instead, it is an examination of how society perceives women who kill and how the gender-lens is applied to them throughout the legal process in the media and in the courtroom. What makes this work particularly unique is its combination of both scholarly analysis and narrative case studies. As such, it will appeal to both the scholar and the reader of true-crime non-fiction. If we are to recognize the complex variables at play in all criminal offenses, we will need to understand that the laws of a community, its social values, its politics, economics, and even geography play a factor in what laws are enforced and against whom they are enforced. The decision to define and label certain behaviors and certain people was based on social, political, and economic considerations of each community. Thus, the commission of murder by a woman in Arizona may have a variety of factors associated with it that are not present in the case of a woman who murdered her husband in Maine. This study, in part because of the volume of cases and in part to limit the variables affecting the cases, has limited its scope of women killers to the state of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is the ideal state to study because of its long and stable legal and political traditions, its historically diverse population, and the large number of newspapers that will help us gauge the public's view of women and women who kill. By limiting our scope to one state, we know that the legal definitions are fairly consistent for all of the women during a certain period and we can more easily identify the shifts in social values regarding women, homicide, and so forth.

This volume presents an innovative new analytical framework for understanding the dynamics of violent conflict and its impact on people and communities living in contexts of violence. Bringing together the findings of MICROCON, an influential five year research programme funded by the European Commission, this book provides readers with the most current and comprehensive evidence available on violent conflict from a micro-level perspective. MICROCON was the largest programme on conflict analysis in Europe from 2007-2011, and its policy outreach has helped to influence EU development policy, and supported policy capacity in many conflict-affected countries. Whilst traditional studies into conflict have been through an international /regional lens with the state as the primary unit of analysis, the micro-level perspective offered by this volume places the individuals, households, groups and communities affected by conflict at the centre of analysis. Studying how people behave in groups and communities; and how they interact with the formal and informal institutions that manage local tensions, is crucial to understanding the conflict cycle. These micro-foundations therefore provide a more in-depth analysis of the causes and consequences of violent conflict. By challenging the ways we think about conflict, this book bridges the gap in evidence, allowing for more specific and accurate policy interventions for conflict resolution and development processes to help reduce poverty in the lives of those affected by conflict. This volume is divided into four parts. Part I introduces the conceptual framework of MICROCON. Part II focuses on individual and group motivations in conflict processes. Part III highlights the micro-level consequences of violent conflict. The final section of this volume focuses on policy implications and future research agenda.

Understanding America's Gun Culture focuses on building understanding of some of the issues associated with US gun culture and the contemporary debate about the availability and use of guns. This edited volume is unique in that it draws on a wide variety of disciplines and presents perspectives on both sides of the debate. Contributors hail from the academic disciplines of history, social work, criminal justice, sociology, religion, and theological ethics as well as policy agencies. Some chapters examine the issues social-psychologically to help readers better understand dynamics within the debate. Others pose important ethical and philosophical questions about gun culture. Still others address practical policy solutions for enhancing gun safety and minimizing gun violence, even bringing in international perspectives. Together, the chapters create a thought-provoking compilation that offers insightful findings, considers theoretical and practical implications, and invites further exploration of the topic.

Pathways to Pacifism and Antiwar Activism among U.S. Veterans seeks to answer the question of how and why some military personnel become antiwar activists. To examine this, the authors look at the stories of 114 veterans' pathways from a militaristic perspective to either a Just War or pacifist perspective. Identity theory provides a lens for exploring this process. The authors argue that this postservice process of identity transformation is not pathological but healthy, as it offers healing and verification of multiple roles and social aspects of the veterans' lives.

First published in 1937, Prison from Within is a first-person account of a prisoner sentenced to imprisonment for eighteen months for fraud. It is a linear narrative honestly recording the various facets of prison culture, along with candid character analysis. The book touches upon philosophical notions of sin and remorse; the social groups of prisoners and the camaraderie shared among them; the poor living condition of prisons and the exploitation of prison labour; and the general politics of the time. The book successfully humanizes criminals and is an excellent reminder of the fact that the prison industry has only worsened with time. Prisons were designed for the purpose of 'cleansing' bourgeoise society; therefore, it is important to revisit the institution and question its utility in modern times. This book will be of interest to students and teachers of history, sociology, criminology, criminal justice, literature, and penology.

The objective of this book is to quantify the social costs of gun violence in order to help policy makers determine how many and which violence programmes to support. Drawing upon the most detailed and extensive economic study of the cost of gun violence, Cook and Ludwig provide detailed information about how the burden of gun violence is distributed in the US. Drawing upon this data, the book draws out the important implications for public policy. The burden of gun violence in America is valued at about $100 billion annually, and this heavy cost is distributed much more evenly over the population than the victimization statistics would suggest. Cook and Ludwig's examination of these costs lead them to propose a multifaceted policy agenda that includes both law enforcement and gun control measures.

Mass violence and terrorism are a salient phenomenon in the late modern society, showing no sign of decline. Proactive results from the long, ongoing debate of how to address these issues are therefore increasingly necessary - not just in the context of prevention, but also in the context of the aftermath. Shared Experiences of Mass Shootings develops an understanding of the collective experience, consequences and recovery processes after mass shootings. Drawing from in-depth case studies of two mass shootings in Finland and comparing them with other international cases, it explores how communities work through violent tragedies employing social memory and memorialization practices that can be seen as either tools for recovery, or as something that needs to be restricted. Contributing a novel understanding of how experiencing mass violence is deeply gendered through the social patterns and narratives of men's and women's emotions, this timely monograph will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers, interested in fields such as: Sociology of Violence, Criminology, Social Work, Memory Studies, Media Studies and Cultural Trauma.

..".the ethnographies...are rich, nuanced and highly readable." . Anthropological Notebooks

Disorder and instability are matters of continuing public concern. Terrorism, as a threat to global order, has been added to preoccupations with political unrest, deviance and crime. Such considerations have prompted the return to the classic anthropological issues of order and disorder. Examining order within the political and legal spheres and in contrasting local settings, the papers in this volume highlight its complex and contested nature. Elaborate displays of order seem necessary to legitimate the institutionalization of violence by military and legal establishments, yet violent behaviour can be incorporated into the social order by the development of boundaries, rituals and established processes of conflict resolution. Order is said to depend upon justice, yet injustice legitimates disruptive protest. Case studies from Siberia, India, Indonesia, Tibet, West Africa, Morocco and the Ottoman Empire show that local responses are often inconsistent in their valorization, acceptance and condemnation of disorder.

Keebet von Benda-Beckmann is head of the project group 'Legal Pluralism' at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology at Halle, Germany. She is Professor of Anthropology of Law at Erasmus University Rotterdam and Honorary Professor at the universities of Leipzig and Halle. Her research focuses on legal pluralism, disputing, decentralization, social security and natural resources in Indonesia and the Netherlands. Publications include Changing Properties of Property, co-edited with Franz von Benda-Beckmann and Melanie Wiber (Berghahn 2006).

Fernanda Pirie is Lecturer in Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford. She has carried out research into conflict and its resolution in both Ladakh and among the nomads of Amdo in eastern Tibet. Her writings focus on order and disorder and the relations between law and religion. She is the author of the forthcoming Peace and conflict in Ladakh: the construction of a fragile web of order (Brill 2006)."

The book deals with the inherent violence of "race relations" in two important countries that remain iconic expressions of white supremacy in the twentieth century. Cultures of Violence does not just reconstruct the era of violence, however. Instead, it convincingly contrasts the "lynch culture" of the South to the "bureaucratic culture of violence" in South Africa. By contrasting mobs of rope-wielding white Southerners to the gun-toting policemen and administrators who formally defended white supremacy in South Africa, Cultures of Violence employs racial killing as an optic for examining the distinctive logic of the racial state in the two contexts. Combining the historian's eye for detail with the sociologist's search for overarching claims, the book explores the systemic connections amongst three substantive areas- agrarian class relations, the rule of law, and the role of Protestant religion-to explain why contrasting traditions of racial violence took such firm root in the American South and South Africa. Thus, departing from accounts that generally underscore the similarities between the two contexts, Cultures of Violence not only makes a convincing case for the differences that distinguished white supremacy but also brings the distinction to bear on the divergent trajectories of "race relations" in the contemporary period. The book shows that a sturdy tradition of explicit state involvement in the management of "race relations" in South Africa was reworked into a remarkably transparent, state-sponsored search for national "truth and reconciliation."

The baby boomer generation grew up in the 1950s when there existed the general belief that the Cold War was the greatest threat to the world order, and a frightening possibility. It was difficult to believe, then, that it could get worse, but the same threat of violence is now a daily occurrence around the globe. People are being shot, slaughtered, maimed, and disappear for a multitude of reasons, none having any connection, most of the time, with the victims. The scale of loss when these tragedies occur is devastating, leaving the public as well as policy makers and legislators scrambling for solutions, clarification, and understanding of how we have become a society where violence is so rampant, so frequent, and so senseless. This book includes contributions by leading experts on violence and its ramifications, who review the devastation, reasons, and consequences of violence which is senseless, cruel, and aims to hurt and destroy anyone in its path. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Journal of Psychology.

" A]n admirable example of how social anthropologists may contribute to understandings of conflicts and armed violence as complex and articulated social processes" . Ethos

The fact is that war comes in many guises and its effects continue to be felt long after peace is proclaimed. This challenges the anthropologists who write of war as participant observers. Participant observation inevitably deals with the here and now, with the highly specific. It is only over the long view that one can begin to see the commonalities that emerge from the different forms of conflict and can begin to generalize. From the Introduction]

More needs to be understood about the ways of war and its effects. What implications does war have for people, their lived-in communities and larger political systems; how do they cope and adjust in war situations and how do they deal with the changed world that they inhabit once peace is declared? Through a series of essays that move from looking at the nature of violence to the peace processes that follow it, this important book provides some answers to these questions. It also analyzes those new dimensions of social interaction, such as the internet, which now provide a bridge between local concerns and global networks and are fundamentally altering the practices of war."

Sex offenders remain the most hated group of offenders, subject to a myriad of regulations and punishments beyond imprisonment, including sex offender registries, chemical and surgical castration, and global positioning electronic monitoring systems. While aspects of their experiences of imprisonment are documented, less is known about how sex offenders experience prison and community corrections spaces - and the implications of their status on their treatment and safety in such environments. Violence, Sex Offenders, and Corrections critically assesses what is meant by the term 'sex offender', and acknowledges that such meanings are socially constructed, situated, and contingent. The book explores the person, crime, penal space, sexual orientation, legislation, and the community experiences of labelled sex offenders as well as the experiences of correctional officers working with said custodial populations. Ricciardelli and Spencer use conceptions of gender and embodiment to analyze how sex offenders are constituted as objects of fear and disgust and as deserving subjects of abjection and violence.

Gender-based violence is a multi-faceted public health problem with numerous consequences for an individual's physical and mental health and wellbeing. This collection develops a comprehensive public health approach for working with gender-based violence, paying specific attention to international budgets, policies and practice and drawing on a wide selection of empirical studies. Divided into two parts, the text looks at how public health budgets and policies can be used to influence a range of risk factors and outcomes, and then outlines a theoretical and conceptual framework. The second section draws on empirical studies to illustrate ways of managing the risks and impacts of, and responses to, the problem. It concludes by summarising those risk factors that can be effectively addressed through appropriately budgeted public health programmes globally. Highlighting ways of bolstering protective and resilience factors and identifying early interventions, it demonstrates the importance of inter-agency interventions through coordinated effort from a wide range of sectors including social services, education, religious organisations, judiciary, police, media and business. This inter-disciplinary volume will interest students and researchers working on gender-based violence, gender budgeting and public health policy from a range of backgrounds, including public health, sociology, social work, public policy, gender studies, development studies and economics.

Approaches to Conflict: Theoretical, Interpersonal, and Discursive Dynamics aims to investigate the role of communication and emotions in conflict contexts. In addition to the fundamental importance of communication in various aspects of conflict, this volume offers a prominent position to the inherent part played by the effects of a wide range of emotions. This multi-disciplinary project draws from communication studies and media, public relations, philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, linguistics, business studies, political science, literature, and cultural studies.

Technological developments move at lightening pace and can bring with them new possibilities for social harm. This book brings together original empirical and theoretical work examining how digital technologies both create and sustain various forms of gendered violence and provide platforms for resistance and criminal justice intervention. This edited collection is organised around two key themes of facilitation and resistance, with an emphasis through the whole collection on the development of a gendered interrogation of contemporary practices of technologically-enabled or enhanced practices of violence. Addressing a broad range of criminological issues such as intimate partner violence, rape and sexual assault, online sexual harassment, gendered political violence, online culture, cyberbullying, and human trafficking, and including a critical examination of the broader issue of feminist 'digilantism' and resistance to online sexual harassment, this book examines the ways in which new and emerging technologies facilitate new platforms for gendered violence as well as offering both formal and informal opportunities to prevent and/or respond to gendered violence.

Violence and community were intimately linked in the ancient world. While various aspects of violence have been long studied on their own (warfare, revolution, murder, theft, piracy), there has been little effort so far to study violence as a unified field and explore its role in community formation. This volume aims to construct such an agenda by exploring the historiography of the study of violence in antiquity, and highlighting a number of important paradoxes of ancient violence. It explores the forceful nexus between wealth, power and the passions by focusing on three major aspects that link violence and community: the attempts of communities to regulate and canalise violence through law, the constitutive role of violence in communal identities, and the ways in which communities dealt with violence in regards to private and public space, landscapes and territories. The contributions to this volume range widely in both time and space: temporally, they cover the full span from the archaic to the Roman imperial period, while spatially they extend from Athens and Sparta through Crete, Arcadia and Macedonia to Egypt and Israel.

Springfield. Columbine. Sandy Hook. Each school shooting in the United States is followed by a series of questions. Why does this happen? Who are the shooters? How can this be prevented? Along with parents, school officials, media outlets, and scholars, popular culture has also attempted to respond to these questions through a variety of fictional portrayals of rampage violence. Rampage Violence Narratives: What Fictional Accounts of Rampage Violence Say about the Future of America's Youth offers a detailed look at the state of youth identity in American cultural representations of youth violence through an extended analysis of over forty primary sources of fictional narratives of urban and suburban/rural school violence. Representations of suburban and rural school shootings that are modeled after real-life events serve to shape popular understandings of the relationship between education and American identity, the liminal space between childhood and adulthood, and the centrality of white heterosexual masculinity to definitions of social and political success in the United States. Through a series of "case studies" that offer in-depth examinations of fictional depictions of school shootings in film and literature, it becomes clear that these stories are representative of a larger social narrative regarding the future of the United States. The continuing struggle to understand youth violence is part of an ongoing conversation about what it means to raise future citizens within a cultural moment that views youth through a lens of anxiety rather than optimism.

The United Nations has called violence against women "the most pervasive, yet least recognized human rights abuse in the world" and there is a long-established history of the systematic victimization of women by the state during times of peace and conflict. This book contributes to the established literature on women, gender and crime and the growing research on state crime, and extends the discussion of violence against women to include the role and extent of crime and violence perpetrated by the state. State Crime, Women and Gender examines state-perpetrated violence against women in all its various forms. Drawing on case studies from around the world, patterns of state-perpetrated violence are examined as it relates to women's victimization, their role as perpetrators, resistors of state violence, as well as their engagement as professionals in the international criminal justice system. From the direct involvement of Condoleezza Rice in the United States-led war on terror, to the women of Egypt's Arab Spring Uprising, to Afghani poetry as a means to resist state-sanctioned patriarchal control, case examples are used to highlight the pervasive and enduring problem of state-perpetrated violence against women. The exploration of topics that have not previously been addressed in the criminological literature, such as women as perpetrators of state violence and their role as willing consumers who reinforce and replicate the existing state-sanctioned patriarchal status quo, makes State Crime, Women and Gender a must-read for students and scholars engaged in the study of state crime, victimology and feminist criminology.

Applying Anthropology to Gender-Based Violence: Global Responses, Local Practices addresses the gaps in theory, methods, and practices that are currently used to engage the problem of gender-based violence. This book complements the work carried out in the legal, social work, and medical fields by demonstrating how a focus on local issues and local responses can better inform a collaborative global response to the problem of gender-based violence. With chapters covering Africa, Asia, Latin and North America, and Oceania, it provides ample evidence that richly textured and qualitatively informed research can illuminate work that is more quantitative in scope. The volume illustrates the various ways scholars, practitioners, frontline workers, and policy makers can work together to end forms of violence in their local communities. The chapters in this volume demonstrate that the ways top-down responses to violence have been inadequate, and that solutions are available when the local historical, political, and social context is taken into consideration. Applying Anthropology to Gender-Based Violence contains useful insights that, when combined with the efforts of other disciplines, offer solutions to the problem of gender-based violence.

In this urgently needed book, Marc Crepon addresses the nature of hatred and its manifestations in international and domestic terrorism, racism, war and other forms of violence. Looking at the evidence of violence motivated by hatred, including US racial segregation, South African apartheid and the terrorist attacks in New York City in 2001 and in Paris in 2015, Crepon makes a compelling case for why hatred is the burden of our times.With inspiration from the non-violence resistance movements of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr., Crepon reveals how philosophy and literature, using courage and a new language, can overcome the many forms of hatred and violence present in our lives today.

This book examines violence. It looks at the nature and types of violence, the causes of violence, and the emotional wake left by violent episodes. In the twentieth century, the world experienced two world wars and countless other wars. Many millions died violent deaths from murder, death squads, purges, riots, revolutions, ethnic cleansing, rape, robbery, domestic violence, suicide, gang violence, terrorist acts, genocide, and in many other ways. As we entered the twenty-first century, we experienced 9/11, the Red Lake School deaths, suicide bombers, and more mass death brought about by the actions of governments, revolutionaries, terrorists, and still more wars. The need to better understand violence, both lethal and non-lethal, to become aware of the many forms of violence, and to learn how to survive in the aftermath of violent death are the focus of "Perspectives on Violence and Violent Death."

This work seeks to address two closely related questions, what is the process by which the relatively short and violent genocides of the twentieth century and beyond have occurred and why have these instances of mass violence been genocidal and not some other form of state violence, repression, or conflict? Hiebert seeks to answer these questions by exploring the structures and processes that underpin the decision by political elites to commit genocide, focusing on a sustained comparison of two cases, the Nazi ' Final Solution' and the Cambodian genocide. The work seeks to clearly differentiate the structures and processes, contained within a larger overall process, that leads to genocidal violence. Hiebert uncovers the mechanisms by which societies, at least in the contemporary era, come to experience genocide as a distinct form of destruction and not some other form of mass or political violence, allowing the author to seek to highlight a set of key process that leads to specifically genocidal violence.Providing an insightful contribution to the burgeoning literature in the area, this work will be of interest to students and scholars of genocide, international relations and political violence.