On Violence: Troubling our Assumptions and Expanding our Theoretical Vistas
The last 100 years bear the ignominious distinction of being the most violent in recorded history, through acts of terror, organised extermination and war, continuously enabled by the prevailing political and social systems, as well as new technologies. How do we understand this seemingly pivotal aspect of the human condition that remains one of the most intractable features of our time? In this address, I examine some of the key contemporary limitations associated with viewing violence purely through the dominant lenses of either being a psychosocial/health antecedent, or outcome, within psychology. The paper selectively highlights several important considerations: (1) a critique of the ontological assumptions embedded within hegemonic approaches to understanding violence at present; (2) advocating against ‘interventionism’ as an epistemological framing that may foreclose our theorizing of violence; (3) and a proposition to reconsider how violence is frequently deployed as a strategic social resource, in three contemporary examples – human migration, community violence, and war. In each instance, I suggest that violence is made possible because of varying economies of morality that are in circulation around and within enactments of violence, that either legitimise or delegitimise violence. In addition, I argue that violence is a situationally contingent set of negotiations, performances, embodied enactments and affects that draw on subjectivities such as class, race, gender, nationality, religion, history, citizenship, etc. I conclude by suggesting that an inter-disciplinary approach is most suited to understand what the necessary pre-requisites for violence are, as well as how violence offers us an analytic window into the social world through the kinds of ‘work’ that it accomplishes.
Prof. Garth Stevens
Garth Stevens is a Professor and Clinical Psychologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. He is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf), previously served as the Dean in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand, is Past-President of the Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA), and is currently the Deputy Vice-Chancellor: People Development and Culture.