Religion, Violence and Cities

In exploring the connections between religion, violence and cities, the book probes the extent to which religion moderates or exacerbates violence in an increasingly urbanised world. Originating in a five year research project , Conflict in Cities and the Contested State, concerned with Belfast, Jerusalem and other ethno-nationally divided cities, this volume widens the geographical focus to include diverse cities from the Balkans, the Middle East, Nigeria and Japan. In addressing the understudied triangular relationships between religion, violence and cities, contributors stress the multiple forms taken by religion and violence while challenging the compartmentalisation of two highly topical debates – links between religion and violence on the one hand, and the proliferation of violent urban conflicts on the other hand. Their research demonstrates why cities have become so important in conflicts driven by state-building, fundamentalism, religious nationalism, and ethno-religious division and illuminates the conditions under which urban environments can fuel violent conflicts while simultaneously providing opportunities for managing or transforming them.

Religion, Violence and Cities: An Introduction

The catalyst for this special issue was a symposium entitled Religion, Violence and Cities, held under the auspices of a five year inter-disciplinary research project on ethno-nationally divided cities.

While this project expressly addressed cities divided by ethno-national conflict, it was clear from the beginning that there was an important religious dimension to such conflicts in most, if not all, the cities being studied.2 The rationale of the Special Issue is to examine how this religious dimension exacerbates (or moderates) urban violence within a broad comparative context. Although three of the following articles are informed by Project research, we draw the net wider to encompass a broader geographical spread from the Balkans, the Middle East, Nigeria and Japan.

Dup discourses on violence and their impact on the northern ireland peace process

This paper analyses the Democratic Unionist Party's (DUP) discourses about paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland. Drawing on narrative analysis of DUP discourses reported in Northern Ireland's largest unionist newspaper, the News Letter (1998-2006), it explores the relationship between the party's identity, its discourses about republican and loyalist paramilitaries, and the impact of these words on the DUP's electoral success and on the peace process. The paper argues that these discourses may haunt the progress of peace-building, not least because the DUP will find it hard to disentangle itself from a history of scepticism and nay-saying even as it takes a leading role in a devolved Executive designed by an Agreement it longscorned.

“How Can a Woman Who Has Been Raped Be Believed?”: Andrea Dworkin, Sexual Violence and the Ethics of Belief

In June 2000, Andrea Dworkin, an American feminist activist and author, published an account of being raped in a Paris hotel room a year earlier. The story was met with widespread disbelief, including from feminist readers. This article explores the reasons for this disbelief, asking how and why narratives of rape are granted – or denied – truth status by their readers. The article argues for understanding the conferral of belief as a narrative transaction involving the actions of both narrator and reader. It posits that Dworkin was widely seen as an unreliable narrator but argues that for ideologically charged narratives such as rape narratives judgements of reliability and belief inevitably draw upon the normative standpoint of the reader. I suggest that there are opposing criteria for establishing the truth of rape narratives; a ‘factual’ or legal model, which sees rape narratives as requiring scrutiny, and an ‘experiential’ model, located within certain strands of feminist politics, which emphasises the ethical importance of believing women’s narratives. The article finishes with a consideration of the place of belief within an ethics of reading and reception of rape narratives.

Gendered Violence and International Human Rights: Thinking Non-Discrimination Beyond the Sex Binary

The concept of non-discrimination has been central in the feminist challenge to gendered violence within international human rights law. This article critically explores non-discrimination and the challenge it seeks to pose to gendered violence through the work of Judith Butler. Drawing upon Butler’s critique of heteronormative sex/gender, the article utilises an understanding of gendered violence as effected by the restrictive scripts of sex/gender within heteronormativity to illustrate how the development of non-discrimination within international human rights law renders it ineffective to challenge gendered violence due to its own commitments to binarised and asymmetrical sex/gender. However, the article also seeks to encourage a reworking of non-discrimination beyond the heteronormative sex binary through employing Butler’s concept of cultural translation. Analysis via the lens of cultural translation reveals the fluidity of non-discrimination as a universal concept and offers new possibilities for feminist engagement with universal human rights.

Violence and Commemoration in the New Northern Ireland: Space, Memory and Management

On June 27th 2012, the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland and former IRA commander, Martin McGuinness shook hands with Queen Elizabeth II for the first time at an event in Belfast. For many the gesture symbolised the consolidation of Northern Ireland's transition to peace, the meeting of cultures and traditions, and hope for the future. Only a few weeks later however violence spilled onto the streets of north and west Belfast following a series of commemorative parades, marking a summer of hostilities. Those hostilities spread into a winter of protest, riot and discontent around flags and emblems and a year of tensions and commemorative-related violence marked again by a summer of rioting and protest in 2013. Outwardly these examples present two very different pictures of the 'new' Northern Ireland; the former of a society moving forward and putting the past behind it and the latter apparently divided over and wedded to different constructions of the past. Furthermore they revealed two very different 'places', the public handshake in the arena of public space; the rioting and fighting occurring in spaces distanced from the public sphere. This paper has also illustrated the difficulties around the ‘public management’ of conflict and transition as many within public agencies struggle with duties to uphold good relations and promote good governance within an environment of political strife, hostility and continuing violence.

This paper presents the key findings and implications of an exploratory project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, explored the phenomenon of commemorative-related violence in Northern Ireland. We focus on 1) why the performance or celebration of the past can sometimes lead to violence in specific places; 2) map and analyse the levels of commemorative related violence in the past 15 years and 3) look at the public management implications of both conflict and transition at a strategic level within the public sector.

Review of Mark F. Chingono. The State, Violence and Development. The Political Economy of War in Mozambique, 1975–1992.

Book review of: Mark F. Chingono. The State, Violence and Development. The Political Economy of War in Mozambique, 1975–1992. Avebury (Aldershot, Brookfield USA, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney), 1996. 291 pp. Foreword by Keith Hart. Tables. Appendix. Selected Bibliography. Index. £42.00. $71.95. Cloth.

Validation of night blindness reports among children and women in a vitamin A deficient population in rural Tanzania.

OBJECTIVE: This study validates different definitions of reported night blindness (XN) in a vitamin A deficient African population with no local term for XN. DESIGN: Case-control study with follow-up after treatment. SETTING: Eight primary schools and health centres in rural Tanzania. SUBJECTS: A total of 1214 participants were screened for reported XN and other eye signs of xerophthalmia: 461 children aged 24-71 months, 562 primary school-age children and 191 pregnant or breast-feeding women. All 152 cases of reported XN were selected for the validation study and group matched with 321 controls who did not complain of XN. XN reports were validated against serum retinol concentrations and pupillary dark adaptation measurements in cases and controls. INTERVENTION: All children and women who reported XN or had other signs of active xerophthalmia were treated with vitamin A and followed up 3-4 weeks later. Half of the untreated control group who had their serum retinol examined in the baseline examination were also followed up. RESULTS: The overall prevalence of reported XN was 12.5%. At baseline, mean pupillary threshold (-1.52 vs -1.55 log cd/m(2), P=0.501) and median serum retinol concentrations (0.95 vs 0.93 micromol/l, P=0.734) were not significantly different in cases and controls either overall or in each population group. More restricted case definitions reduced the prevalence of reported XN to 5.5% (P<0.001), but there was still no significant difference between cases and controls although the results were in the expected direction. After treatment, the median serum retinol concentration improved significantly only in the most deficient group, the young children. Dark adaptation improved in all the subgroups but the difference was only significant for young children and primary school-age children when the restricted case definitions were used. CONCLUSIONS: XN reports are a poor indicator of vitamin A deficiency in this population. SPONSORSHIP: Task Force Sight and Life, Basel, Switzerland.

Victims, Violence and Voice: Transitional Justice, Oral History and Dealing with the Past

Transitional justice is concerned with the legal and social processes established to deal with the legacy of violence in post-conflict and post-authoritarian contexts. These processes are essentially “creatures of law” – they are established by statute, their work is molded and shaped by lawyers, and their outcomes are benchmarked against what is or is not acceptable in domestic and international law. Concerns have mounted in recent years about the dominance of legalism within the field and the instrumentalization of those most directly affected by past violence. A commonly prescribed – but as yet largely empirically untested – corrective is that transitional justice theory and practice must become more open to interdisciplinary insights and perspectives. The interview – in different guises, contexts and settings – is at the heart of most transitional justice processes. As a historian now working in a School of Law I reflect in this article on the theoretical and practical intersections between law, history, and the interview. Drawing on more than 200 interviews concerning the Northern Ireland conflict and six other international case studies I concentrate in particular on interview-based initiatives that purport to be “victim-centered”. Having identified three interrelated risks - the manipulation of victim voice by vested interests, the affording of authority to particular voices, and the reification or “freezing” of identity - and having related these to the constraints of legal mechanisms and a wider failure to manage victims’ expectations, I argue that a greater familiarity with oral history theory and praxis can usefully illuminate the tensions between legal and historical approaches to engaging voice, and ultimately offer guidance to the shared challenge of victim-centered transitional justice.