Violent Accounts presents a compelling study of how ordinary people commit extraordinary acts of violence and how perpetrators and victims manage in the aftermath. Grounded in extensive, qualitative analysis of perpetrator testimony, the volume reveals the individual experiences of perpetrators as well as general patterns of influence that lead to collective violence. Drawing on public testimony from the amnesty hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the book interweaves hundreds of hours of testimony from seventy-four violent perpetrators in apartheid South Africa, including twelve major cases that involved direct interactions between victims and perpetrators. The analysis of perpetrator testimony covers all tiers on the hierarchy of organized violence, from executives who translated political doctrine into general strategies, to managers who translated these general strategies into specific plans, to the staff—the foot soldiers—who carried out the destructive plans of these managers. Vivid and accessible, Violent Accounts is a work of innovative scholarship that transcends the particulars of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to reveal broader themes and unexpected insights about perpetrators of collective violence, the confrontations between victims and perpetrators in the aftermath of this violence, the reality of multiple truths, the complexities of reconciliation, and lessons of restorative justice.

Peace, Culture, and Violence examines deeper sources of violence by providing a critical reflection on the forms of violence that permeate everyday life and our inability to recognize these forms of violence. Exploring the elements of culture that legitimize and normalize violence, the essays collected in this volume invite us to recognize and critically approach the violent aspects of reality we live in and encourage us to envision peaceful alternatives. Including chapters written by important scholars in the fields of Peace Studies and Social and Political Philosophy, the volume represents an endeavour to seek peace in a world deeply marred by violence. Topics include: thug culture, language, hegemony, police violence, war on drugs, war, terrorism, gender, anti-Semitism, and other topics. Contributors are: Amin Asfari, Edward Demenchonok, Andrew Fiala, William Gay, Fuat Gursozlu, Joshua M. Hall , Ron Hirschbein, Todd Jones, Sanjay Lal, Alessandro Rovati, Laleye Solomon Akinyemi, David Speetzen, and Lloyd Steffen.

What does it mean to say that a particular war is just or unjust, that terrorism is always wrong, or that torture can sometimes be morally justified? What are the moral bases for the possession or use of nuclear weapons, intervening in other countries’ civil wars, or being a bystander to genocide? Such questions take us to the heart of what is morally right and wrong behaviour in our world. Global Violence: Ethical and Political Issues provides readers with the analytical tools to better understand the suppositions that underlie the debates about such questions, as well as advances its own reasoned and informed ethical analyses of these topics. The book engages different normative approaches from the fields of ethics, political theory, and international relations and uses them to examine a set of case studies on the subjects of inter-state and civil war, nuclear weapons, terrorism, torture and genocide.

The focus of this book is to offer a humane rocesponse to dealing with violence. An interpretive analysis is presented in order to think differently about violence in schools and about how a citizenship education of becoming can deal with the unpredictable consequences of violence in its own potentiality. It seems to the authors that, given the confident onslaught of violence, there is nothing left to do but to offer insight into the nature of violence itself and, by so doing, to search for unexplored ways of humane response and being. The authors are not pretending to hold a magic wand that will sanctify schools into the safe zones that they ought to be and as which they should serve in any society. This would be both presumptuous and misleading. What one is looking and hoping for, however, is a renewed engagement, a slight tilting of the perspective, so that something other than how we have always responded to violence perhaps will emerge. The authors are confident that such a deconstructive approach to violence in schools through the lens of a reconsidered view of citizenship education can assist them and others to wrestle with its potential for destruction that can be changed into options for co-belonging of a non-violent, if not peaceful, kind.

Honour, Violence and Emotions in History is the first book to draw on emerging cross-disciplinary scholarship on the study of emotions to analyse the history of honour and violence across a broad range of cultures and regions. Written by leading cultural and social historians from around the world, the book considers how emotions - particularly shame, anger, disgust, jealousy, despair and fear - have been provoked and expressed through culturally-embedded and historically specific understandings of honour. The collection explores a range of contexts, from 17th-century China to 18th-century South Africa and 20th-century Europe, offering a broad and wide-ranging analysis of the interrelationships between honour, violence and emotions in history. This ground-breaking book will be of interest to all researchers studying the relationship between violence and the emotions.

Based on fieldwork and comparative historical analysis of Rwanda, this book questions the conventional wisdom that education builds peace.

With examples from throughout Europe and the United States, the contributors to this volume explore how gender violence is framed through language and what this means for research and policy. Language shapes responses to abuse and approaches to perpetrators and interfaces with national debates about gender, violence, and social change.

In this book Martyn Smith addresses the issue of God's violence and refuses to shy away from difficult and controversial conclusions. Through his wide-ranging and measured study he reflects upon God and violence in both biblical and theological contexts, assessing the implications of divine violence for understanding and engaging with God's nature and character. Jesus too, through his dramatic actions in the temple, is presented as one capable of exhibiting a surprising degree of violent behavior in the furtherance of God's purposes. Through a reappropriation of the ancient Christus Victor model of atonement, with its dramatic representation of God's war with the Satan, Smith proposes that Christian understanding of both God and salvation has to return to its long-neglected past in order to move forward, both biblically and dynamically, into the future.

The book provides a comprehensive overview of the literature on religion, conflict, and peacebuilding. With a focus on structural and cultural violence, the volume also offers a cutting edge interdisciplinary reframing of the scope of scholarship in the field.