The plasma of violence: Towards a preventive medicine for political evil
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The plasma of violence : Towards a preventive medicine for political evil. / Austin, Jonathan Luke.
In: Review of International Studies, 2022, p. 105–124.Research output: Contribution to journal › Journal article › Research › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - The plasma of violence
T2 - Towards a preventive medicine for political evil
AU - Austin, Jonathan Luke
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - How do people know how – very practically speaking – to be violent? This article explores that question through a Science and Technology Studies perspective. It does so in order to go beyond the usual location of global political violence at a structural level that attributes its emergence principally to hierarchicalorders, formal training, or deep cultural, political, or ideological factors. The alternative explanation offered here draws on Bruno Latour’s concept of ‘plasma’ to sketch a theory of how practices of violence are embedded at a distributed ontological level through the historical accumulation of (popular) cultural,textual, technological, and other epistemic objects. In making that claim, I seek to stress how violent knowledge circulates outside the formal domains associated with it (the military, police) and is instead preconsciously accessible to each and every person. To support this argument, the article draws on empirical examples of the use of torture, including interviews conducted with Syrian perpetrators of torture, as well as by tracing the paradoxical entanglements between scientific practice and the practice of torture. Iconclude by engaging the field of preventive medicine to speculate on the need to develop modes of violence prevention that appreciate political violence as a population-level sociopolitical problem.
AB - How do people know how – very practically speaking – to be violent? This article explores that question through a Science and Technology Studies perspective. It does so in order to go beyond the usual location of global political violence at a structural level that attributes its emergence principally to hierarchicalorders, formal training, or deep cultural, political, or ideological factors. The alternative explanation offered here draws on Bruno Latour’s concept of ‘plasma’ to sketch a theory of how practices of violence are embedded at a distributed ontological level through the historical accumulation of (popular) cultural,textual, technological, and other epistemic objects. In making that claim, I seek to stress how violent knowledge circulates outside the formal domains associated with it (the military, police) and is instead preconsciously accessible to each and every person. To support this argument, the article draws on empirical examples of the use of torture, including interviews conducted with Syrian perpetrators of torture, as well as by tracing the paradoxical entanglements between scientific practice and the practice of torture. Iconclude by engaging the field of preventive medicine to speculate on the need to develop modes of violence prevention that appreciate political violence as a population-level sociopolitical problem.
KW - Faculty of Social Sciences
KW - Political violence
KW - Violence prevention
KW - Science and technology studies
KW - Torture
KW - Popular culture
KW - Ethnography
KW - Political Violence
KW - Violence Prevention
KW - Science and Technology Studies
KW - Torture
KW - Popular Culture
KW - Ethnography
U2 - 10.1017/S0260210522000316
DO - 10.1017/S0260210522000316
M3 - Journal article
SP - 105
EP - 124
JO - Review of International Studies
JF - Review of International Studies
SN - 0260-2105
ER -
ID: 312282549