This book offers novel insights about the ability of a democracy to accommodate violence. In El Salvador, the end of war has brought about a violent peace, one in which various forms of violence have become incorporated into Salvadorans’ imaginaries and enactments of democracy. Based on ethnographic research, The Violence of Democracy argues that war legacies and the country’s neoliberalization have enabled an intricate entanglement of violence and political life in postwar El Salvador. This volume explores various manifestations of this entanglement: the clandestine connections between violent entrepreneurs and political actors; the blurring of the licit and illicit through the consolidation of economies of violence; and the reenactment of latent wartime conflicts and political cleavages during postwar electoral seasons. The author also discusses the potential for grassroots memory work and a political party shift to foster hopeful visions of the future and, ultimately, to transform the country’s violent democracy.

In Violence of Democracy Ruchi Chaturvedi tracks the rise of India’s divisive politics through close examination of decades-long confrontations in Kerala between members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and supporters of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival research, Chaturvedi investigates the unique character of the conflict between the party left and the Hindu right. This conflict, she shows, defies explanations centering religious, caste, or ideological differences. It offers instead new ways of understanding how quotidian political competition can produce antagonistic majoritarian communities. Rival political parties mobilize practices of disbursing care and aggressive masculinity in their struggle for electoral and popular power, a process intensified by a criminal justice system that reproduces rather than mitigating violence. Chaturvedi traces these dynamics from the late colonial period to the early 2000s, illuminating the broader relationships between democratic life, divisiveness, and majoritarianism.

An account of the origins of violence, its consequences, its uses, and the relationship between violence and democracy.

Illustrated most dramatically by the events of 9/11 and the subsequent ‘war on terror’, violence represents a challenge to democratic politics and to the establishment of liberal-democratic regimes. Liberal-democracies have themselves not hesitated to use violence and restrict civil liberties as a response to such challenges. These issues are at the centre of global politics and figure prominently in political debates today concerning multiculturalism, political exclusion and the politics of gender. This book takes up these topics with reference to a wide range of case-studies, covering Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Europe. It provides a theoretical framework clarifying the relationship between democracy and violence and presents original research surveying current hot-spots of violent conflict and the ways in which violence affects the prospects for democratic politics and for gender equality. Based on field-work carried out by specialists in the areas covered, this volume will be of high interest to students of democratic politics and to all those concerned with ways in which the recourse to violence could be reduced in a global context. This book has significant implications for policy-makers involved in attempts to develop safer and more peaceful ways of handling political and social conflict. This book was published as a special issue of Democratizations.

In this book David Mansley argues that the frequency with which violence intrudes on to the streets is related to both how society is governed and how it is policed. With the help of an innovative methodology, he quantifies and tests three variables – collective violence, democracy and protest policing – using protests in Great Britain in 1999–2011, for his sampling frame. The result is the design of new tools of measurement and a harvest of new data, including previously unpublished details of banning orders and riot damages, that enable us to reflect, with the benefit of broad sociological perspective, on the causes of contemporary violent events. Mansley’s explanation of the trends he identifies draws from the work of the best thinkers on violence – especially Charles Tilly, Thomas Hobbes and Norbert Elias. He shows how the style of protest policing and the depth of democracy, both of which function under the direction of the political economy, are crucial to the state’s credentials as the monopoly supplier of legitimate violence. His discussion touches on such current topics as the institution of police commissioners, the privatisation of policing duties, and the decline in homicide. This cultured study, which includes an engaging review of the existing scholarship on violence, is essential material for undergraduate and postgraduate students reading criminology, sociology or political theory.

An analysis of the phenomenon of political violence and its implications for democratic politics

Presidentialism, Violence, and the Prospect of Democracy tackles the perennial debate about whether presidentialism is associated with democratic breakdown. Yao-Yuan Yeh and Charles K. S. Wu integrate both institutional and behavioral arguments to discuss how institutional rigidity in changing executive power would stimulate citizens to adopt relatively violent means to address their grievances, leading to democratic crises. This book finds presidential democracies are more likely to encounter crises than either parliamentary or semi-presidential systems. However, once a crisis occurs, presidentialism does not trigger a higher likelihood of a breakdown. The conventional wisdom is thus only half correct.

This book explores what is at stake methodologically for researchers seeking to expand opportunities for people to become visible upon the public stages of debate, decision making and action, making audible their experiences of wrongs and injustices.

Critiquing the valorization of democracy as a means of containing violence and stabilizing political contestation, this book draws links between the democratization process and sexual/gendered violence observed against women during electioneering periods in Kenya. The book shows the contradictory relationship between democracy and gendered violence as being largely influenced in the first instance by the capitalist interests vested in the colonial state and its imperative to exploit laboring women; secondly, in the nature of the postcolonial state and politics largely captured by ethnic, bourgeois class interests; and third, influenced by neoliberal political ideology that has remained largely disarticulated from women's structural positions in Kenyan society. It argues that colonial capitalist interests established certain patterns of gender exploitation that extended into the postcolonial period such that the indigenous bourgeoisie took the form of an ethnicized elite. Ethnicity shaped politics and neoliberal political ideology further blocked women’s integration into politics in substantive ways. It concludes that it is not so much the norms and values of liberal democracy that assist in understanding women’s exclusion, but rather the structural dynamics that have shaped women’s experiences of democratic politics. In this way, gender violence in the context of democratization and electoral violence with its gendered manifestation can be fully understood as deeply embedded in the history of the structural dynamics of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchalism in Kenya.

This book presents the concept of ‘unstaging’ war as a strategic response to the failure of the discourse and institutions of peace. This failure is explained by exploring the changing character of conflict in current and emergent global circumstances, such as asymmetrical conflicts, insurgencies, and terrorism. Fry argues that this pluralisation of war has broken the binary relation between war and peace: conflict is no longer self-evident, and consequentially the changes in the conditions, nature, systems, philosophies and technologies of war must be addressed. Through a deep understanding of contemporary war, Fry explains why peace fails as both idea and process, before presenting ‘Unstaging War’ as a concept and nascent practice that acknowledges conflict as structurally present, and so is not able to be dealt with by attempts to create peace. Against a backdrop of increasingly tense relations between global power blocs, the beginnings of a new nuclear arms race, and the ever-increasing human and environmental impacts of climate change, a more viable alternative to war is urgently needed. Unstaging War is not claimed as a solution, but rather as an exploration of critical problems and an opening into the means of engaging with them.