1. Defining violence and coercion
2. Patterns of violence
3. Audiences

difficult and contested, but for our purposes:

violence: action in which perpetrator regards inficting pain, suffering, fear, distress, injury, maiming, disfigurement, death as intrinsic, necessary or desirable means to the intended ends.

Exclusions:

• actions where harm is undesirable but unavoidable (e.g. medical procedures)
• actions that are "accidental" (assuming a reasonable standard of whether the harm was foreseeable) (does this foreclose kinds of structural violence?)

coercion: using violence or the threat of it to induce people to act or behave other than they would.

• Connection to "off-the-path behavior"
• Could overlap in some cases with violence, or not (e.g. taxation is coercive but might not be violence as such)

off-the-path behavior: when the behavior we observe is systematically influenced by potential, but untaken and thus unobserved actions

e.g.: coercion involves off-the-path behavior because we may not see violence since its threat ensures that people (nearly) always comply.

repertoire:

forms of violence in which an organization/individual regularly engages

Examples:

killing, torture, displacement, rape, robbery, kidnapping/imprisonment, etc.

targeting:

which people or social groups are made the targets of specific repertoires of violence

Examples:

ethnic groups, genders, political groups, combatants, etc.

selective violence:

violence against an individual because of specific allegations about their behavior or actions

Examples:

assassinations, disappearance of political activists, etc.

collective or identity-based violence

violence against individuals based on their membership in a social group.

This kind of violence is connected to social boundaries: violence happens along the boundary because it targets people based on the categories they are labelled with

Examples

ethnic cleansing; supporters of a political party; shelling cities with ethnic majorities

indiscriminate violence

violence against individuals without regard to individual behavior or membership in social categories

technique

how a repertoire of violence is performed

Examples

killing by firing squad, massacre using knives, bombing, torture to death

frequency

the count or rate of victimization among specific groups in the population

Examples

fraction of police shooting victims that are African American

Three related things (these may overlap)

1. Strategic goals

   • Seizing territory, enforcing political agenda

2. Symbolic goals

   • Performing for an audience

3. Organizational structure/needs

   • How are perpetrators organized?
   • Who has capacity for violence?

Selective violence is often used to produce prevent cooperation with an enemy or to induce cooperation with the perpetrator.

But there is no guarantee this message is correctly delivered

What would you do in terms of targeting, repertoire, and technique to make violence "selective"?

Chicago Police and Torture

No an exhaustive list:

• victims

• potential victims

• other people/groups who commit violence (peers/rivals)

• co-perpetrators/self

• constituency/community