Institutional Violence

Front Cover
Deane W. Curtin, Robert Litke
Rodopi, 1999 - Philosophy - 413 pages
Violence can be physical and psychological. It can characterize personal actions, forms of group activity, and abiding social and political policy. This book includes all of these aspects within its focus on institutional forms of violence. Institution is also a broad category, ranging from formal arrangements such as the military, the criminal code, the death penalty and prison system, to more amorphous but systemic situations indicated by parenting, poverty, sexism, work, and racism. Violence is as complex as the human beings who resort to it; its institutional forms pervade our relational lives. We are all participants in it as victims and perpetrators. The chapters in this book were written in the hope that violence can be explicated, even if not fully understood, and that such clarification can help us in devising less violent forms of living, even if it does not lead to its total abolition. The studies bring new aspects of violence to light and offer a number of suggestions for its remedy.
 

Contents

ONE Is Poverty Violence?
5
THREE Compromised Childhoods
35
FOUR The Death Penalty as a Peace Issue
53
TWELVE
71
SIX Work and Peacemaking
87
Introduction
103
NINE Genocide and Moral Philosophy
129
Shell in Nigeria
149
SIXTEEN
215
SEVENTEEN
225
EIGHTEEN
233
Introduction
251
Introduction
281
TWENTYFOUR Power Public Authority and Nonviolence
331
TWENTYSIX Epistemological Violence
353
Reference Bibliography
381

Introduction
195
FIFTEEN
205
About the Authors
401
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 25 - Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machinegunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber...
Page 25 - In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but...