The aim of this section is to return to the study of political violence — a phenomenon intensively debated throughout the twentieth century and gaining renewed practical urgency today, as boiling modernity continues to generate ever new spaces for its (re)thinking. While violence in universum remains one of the most elaborated conceptual categories, it simultaneously proves to be among the most elusive.
Here, political violence is provisionally understood as violence enacted by political authorities or addressed to them, alongside forms of collective and intersubjective coercion that either pursue political aims or give rise to political consequences.
At the same time, it is evident that such a definition cannot claim finality. Mass terror, hate crimes, genocides, state-organized violence, mass atrocities, wars, interventions, guerrilla warfare, revolutions, insurgencies, and civil wars hardly simplify the task of any researcher seeking a final or exhaustive definition.
One of the central objectives of the section is to reflect on how adequate this working definition proves to be in relation to contemporary forms of political violence. A further task is to examine the contested analytical boundaries through which violence itself becomes intelligible.
Corpus vulneratum, invoked in the title of the section, serves as a metaphor for the political body — imagined or real, abstract or institutionally constituted, collective or deeply individual — emerging as a site of interpretation, struggle, contestation, protection, and destruction.
Rather than aspiring to a single, all-encompassing theory of political violence, the section fosters an interdisciplinary polylogue. Participants are invited to collectively explore which forms of violence come to be recognized as political, on what grounds, and with what consequences for existing theoretical frameworks.
The interdisciplinary character of the section is not meant to collapse heterogeneous approaches into one, but rather to identify productive points of encounter where divergent analytical languages open new conceptual possibilities.
To this end, the section mobilizes
three — necessarily provisional —
perspectives:
- A sociological perspective, oriented toward identifying institutional mechanisms, organizational structures, and social conditions through which violence is (re)produced;
- A political-philosophical perspective, focusing on modes of power and mechanisms of exclusion that shape the conditions of possibility for violence;
- An aesthetic perspective, articulated through literature, cinema, audio and visual arts, seeking to move beyond strictly academic language and thereby offering the most expressive accounts of intersubjective registers of violence.
We invite contributions from researchers engaging with diverse manifestations of political violence, from empirical investigations to conceptual inquiries. Interdisciplinary papers that foster multidimensional and unexpected analytical perspectives are especially welcome.