This work explores the links between political, economic and social violence and illustrates how local community organizations run and managed by women play a key role throughout conflict situations, not only for meeting basic needs, but also as advocates, fostering trust and collaboration.

Increasing levels of global conflict and political violence provide a critical challenge for development theorists and practitioners. Many countries have endured decades of armed conflict, and others live under the permanent menace of political violence. Throughout, the gendered impacts of armed conflict and political violence are key issues. The gendered causes, costs, and consequences of violent conflicts have been underrepresented, and often misrepresented. This book gives a broader understanding of the complex, changing relations between women and men in societies facing violence and conflict.

This volume examines how both victims and perpetrators of terrorism are relevant to our understanding of political violence. While the perpetrators of political violence have been the subject of significant academic research, victims of terrorism and political violence have rarely featured in this landscape. In an effort to capture the vast complexity of terrorism, and to widen the scope of the agenda that informs terrorism research, this book presents a series of analyses that examines the role of the perpetrators, the experience of the victims, the public and media perceptions of both, and given the inherent intricacy of the phenomenon, how we might think about engaging with perpetrators in an effort to prevent further violence. By considering the role of the many actors who are central to our understanding and framing of terrorism and political violence, this book highlights the need to focus on how the interactivity of individuals and contexts have implications for the emergence, maintenance and termination of campaigns of political violence. The volume aims to understand not only how former perpetrators and victims can work in preventing violence in a number of contexts but, more broadly, the narratives that support and oppose violence, the construction of victimisation, the politicisation of victimhood, the justifications for violence and the potential for preventing and encouraging desistance from violence. This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism and political violence, victimology, criminology, security studies and IR in general.

Blame Society. Blame a bad upbringing. Blame the circumstances. Blame the victim - she may even blame herself. But what about the perpetrator? When the blame is all assigned, will anyone be left to take responsibility? This powerful book takes up the disturbing topic of victimization and blame as a pathology of our time and its consequences for personal responsibility. By probing the psychological dynamics of victims and perpetrators of rape, sexual abuse, and domestic violence, Sharon Lamb seeks to answer some crucial questions: How do victims become victims and sometimes perpetrators? How can we break the psychological pattern of perpetrators blaming others and victims blaming themselves? How do victims and perpetrators view their actions and reactions? And how does our social response to them facilitate patterns of excuse? With clarity and compassion, Lamb examines the theories, excuses, and psychotherapies that strip victims of their power and perpetrators of their agency - and thus deprive them of the means to human dignity, healing, and reparation. She shows how the current practice of painting victims as pure innocents may actually help perpetrators of abuse shirk responsibility for their actions; they too can claim to be victims in their own right, passive and will-less in their wrongdoing.

This book examines the representation of women in relation to violence in Chinese crime films made on the mainland, and in Hong Kong and Taiwan. It introduces a new trajectory in the investigation of the cinematic representation of female figures in relation to gender issues by interweaving Western feminist and postfeminist critiques with traditional Chinese sociocultural discourse. An in-depth narrative identifies three major representations of women: the female victim, the female perpetrator of violence, and the female professional. Salience to contemporary society shows up in many ways, passive and active, all of which reinforce a sense of male dominance and patriarchal power. Analysis bridges the gap in the field of female representation in Chinese culture/Chinese film studies by systematically examining Chinese crime films as a genre in its own right. The depiction of female victimisation at the hands of men in the selected crime films consolidates the notion of women's vulnerability and inferiority as perceived in Chinese gender discourse. On the other hand, the representation of active female perpetrators of violence, and as professional working women, presents what may be seen as a postfeminist masquerade a cultural strategy that shows an ostensible impression of female empowerment albeit that it reinforces traditional gender hierarchies in the Chinese gender context. While graphic female victimisation is commonly presented, female perpetrators of violence and females in professional roles in crime films are shown to remain under the control of male authority, leading to the conclusion that Chinese crime films are produced in a context of heavy patriarchal power and misogyny.

Why would anyone commit a mass atrocity such as genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, or terrorism? This question is at the core of the multi- and interdisciplinary field of perpetrator studies, a developing field which this book assesses in its full breadth for the first time. Perpetrators of International Crimes analyses the most prominent theories, methods, and evidence to determine what we know, what we think we know, as well as the ethical implications of gathering this knowledge. It traces the development of perpetrator studies whilst pushing the boundaries of this emerging field. The book includes contributions from experts from a wide array of disciplines, including criminology, history, law, sociology, psychology, political science, religious studies, and anthropology. They cover numerous case studies, including prominent ones such as Nazi Germany, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia, but also those that are relatively under researched and more recent, such as Sri Lanka and the Islamic State. These have been investigated through various research methods, including but not limited to, trial observations and interviews.

A significant addition to the Colombian political landscape over the past ten years is the participation of victims in the debate over the country's model of transitional justice. This stands in stark contrast with previous periods in Colombian history, when victims -- despite their already growing numbers -- were largely invisible both in the more than twenty successful and unsuccessful peace negotiations that have taken place in the country as well as in the overall political debate. This paper seeks to explain this shift in public attention to the plight of millions of Colombians. It also asks how the average Colombian population evaluates and in what way these opinions reflect tensions between the overall goal of repairing victims and other goals of the Colombian peace-building and development agenda. In brief, the paper argues that international and domestic factors combined to make visible the plight and number of victims in the country and to develop a vast and ambitious transitional justice institutional framework, which will set the tone of transformations for years to come. Like other policies, this has not occurred in a political vacuum: Victims as well as other actors concerned with the shape and scope of transitional justice in Colombia have become mobilized in the pursuit of their interests, endowed with political preferences and a more or less effective repertoire of political strategies. As a result, the discussion about the role of victims and the state and society's responses to their needs is likely to become a central issue of public debate in the near future. However, the debate has occurred predominantly among a small group of experts, ignoring or underestimating some of the prevailing opinions and attitudes about transitional justice held by the general Colombian population. This may prove problematic as several features of the trade-offs and bargains involved in transitional justice mechanisms will impact large parts of the population via elections, taxes, and processes of community integration of victims and perpetrators, all of which are challenges to the ultimate viability and success of transitional justice mechanisms. For these reasons, this chapter argues that it is important to complement the normative statements of policymakers, activists and organizations with data on the overall victims' population and on the opinions and attitudes of the average Colombian. In order to so, it resorts to data from the Registro Único de Víctimas (RUV) -- the first attempt to unify information on all types of victimization in the country conducted by the Colombian state -- and from a 2012 survey conducted by a consortium of public and private entities. The RUV data serve to underscore the extent of the suffering. The survey results illustrate some of the structural impediments faced by Colombian victims (such as poverty and little education). In addition, the survey shows that almost a decade of transitional justice pedagogy has paid off in the country: In general, the Colombian population is more aware and understands the magnitude of people impacted by the armed conflict as well as the plight of victims. As a result, a majority of Colombians endorse the wrongfulness of the victims' experience and the need for reparations. At the same time, the long duration and the complex nature of the Colombian armed conflict -- especially the simultaneous presence of multiple illegal armed actors who have fought over territories over many years, and the similar socio-economic and often geographic origin of victims and combatants (referred to here as social proximity) -- have had an impact on people's opinions and attitudes. Important fractions of the Colombian population, including victims, are fearful of opportunism in accessing state-provided privileges associated with the status of victims and are reticent to accept privileges for victimized populations to the detriment of larger development goals benefiting all Colombians, illustrating the classic peace-building versus development dilemma that has historically haunted the peace-building community. The chapter also explores the organizational dimension of the victims' population: According to available data, 7 percent of the more than six million victims are organized in more than 3,000 organizations. This level of dispersion is a result both of heterogeneous experiences of victimization and, so far, of a severe incapability of producing collective action. The small percentage of organized victims raises questions about representation in the political debate. The findings presented here aim to contribute to the developing academic and empirical literature on transitional justice which is still incipient in Colombia, and provide elements for testing some of the prevailing opinions and attitudes about victims in Colombia. It also aims to provide useful insights for practitioners in the global field of transitional justice as many of the findings about the Colombian case are relevant to other transitional contexts around the world.

Exercising Human Rights investigates why human rights are not universally empowering and why this damages people attempting to exercise rights. It takes a new approach in looking at humans as the subject of human rights rather than the object and exposes the gendered and ethnocentric aspects of violence and human subjectivity in the context of human rights. Using an innovative visual methodology, Redhead shines a new critical light on human rights campaigns in practice. She examines two cases in-depth. First, she shows how Amnesty International depicts women negatively in their 2004 ‘Stop Violence against Women Campaign’, revealing the political implications of how images deny women their agency because violence is gendered. She also analyses the Oka conflict between indigenous people and the Canadian state. She explains how the Canadian state defined the Mohawk people in such a way as to deny their human subjectivity. By looking at how the Mohawk used visual media to communicate their plight beyond state boundaries, she delves into the disjuncture between state sovereignty and human rights. This book is useful for anyone with an interest in human rights campaigns and in the study of political images.

The explosive economic development in China over the last three decades has created social challenges unprecedented in the country's history. In response, China has overhauled its existing tort laws and even created new tort laws. By exploring its principles, theories and history, this book provides international readers a fresh outlook on China's tort law system. Granted that some concepts or theories in China's modern tort laws were "borrowed" from the west, the principles behind them can nevertheless often find their roots in ancient Chinese philosophies, concepts or even laws. This book also uses real cases to explain the courts' application of China's tort laws and the meaning of the corresponding statutes.