Institutional ViolenceDeane W. Curtin, Robert Litke 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
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 |
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Common terms and phrases
accept actions African Americans agriculture alternative androgyny Arendt argues argument attitudes authority autonomy become behavior believe Buddhism challenge Churchill claim collective violence commitment context covert crime critical culture death penalty dehumanization democracy democratic discourse domination Ecofeminism epistemic epistemology ethics evil example family dynamics Feminism Feminist forms of violence fundamental Garver genocide Hannah Arendt harm human Ibid ideal ideological intolerance incarcerated individual institutional violence intervention Jean Bethke Elshtain jobs system justice justified language legitimate liberal linguistic violence lives means military Miller modern moral mothers nation nature Nigeria nonviolent norms one's Paulo Freire person perspective Philosophers for Peace Plato political position poverty practice principles prison problem professional punishment question racism reason responsibility Sara Ruddick sense sexism sexual harassment society structure suggests systemic oppression Tailhook tolerance totalitarian trans understanding University Press values victims vigorous force women York
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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...