Who participates in
(political) violence?
CDSN4002 POLITICAL VIOLENCE
MIRIAM MATEJOVA, PHD
MARCH 11, 2024
Agenda
 Who participates in political
violence?
 Why do ordinary people
partake in direct and
structural violence?
Ordinary people and direct violence
 Two forms of politically-authorized slaughter:
 1) the large-scale slaughter of service-personnel (i.e.,
soldiers killing soldiers)
 2) the slaughter of civilians
Ordinary people and direct violence
 Most perpetrators deny feeling responsible or guilty even in
cases of atrocity and genocide – why is that?
 History textbooks (e.g., Japan after WWII – ‘aggression in
North China’ vs. ‘advance into North China’)
 Complicity: the role of “allies”
 Highlighting the aggression of enemies (“they killed us”)
Retribution: “no prisoners”
 Lack of willingness to take prisoners
during war
 Experience, risk
Obedience: “only obeying orders”
 ‘obeying orders’ as a way of minimizing emotional conflict
 generates the ‘appropriate’ response in combatants (i.e., murderous aggression)
 recognized by military instructors who insist on instantaneous obedience to orders
 officers experience more ‘collective guilt’ about the war than privates
 killing could be re-conceptualized as something other than murder
Parallel response:
“either him or me”
 War is about ‘kill or be killed’
 Reinforced through a certain
representation of war in
combat art and literature,
battle films, war games,
propaganda
Eagerness to kill
 Survival depended on the ability of combatants to forge some degree of
pleasure from the world around them.
 “the thrill of killing” – e.g., airforce personnel, drones
Language
 With mass killing, language becomes divorced from experience
 Dehumanization through language (a substitute language to speak about
death)
 Technological language, euphemisms, racist language
 Killing re-conceptualized as ‘action’, ‘severe measures’, or ‘giving special treatment’
 In Japan during WWII, Anglo-Americans described as demons (oni), devils (kichiku), and
monsters (kaibutsu).
 In Rwanda, Tutsis described as ‘cockroaches’, with the Hutus simply engaged in ‘bushclearing’.
Hutus were ordered to ‘remove tall weeds’ (adults) as well as the ‘shoots’
(children).
Collective memory
 Collective memory as a social representation of the past
 Not history – collective memory simplifies events, may reduce them to myths
 Links collectively shared past emotion to present events
Ordinary
people and
structural
violence
 How and why do ordinary
people participate in structural
violence?