An Education in Violence: Teaching and Learning to Kill in Central TexasHarel Shapira, Department of Sociology, University of Texas at AustinResearch Grant, 2015 This research examined a relatively new and growing population: people who have obtained concealed handgun licenses and carry their guns with them on a regular basis. Drawing on field work at gun schools and in-depth interviews with concealed handgun license holders, the research examined two aspects of gun ownership that have been given insufficient attention in existing scholarship: first, the process by which people are socialized into gun ownership; and second, the embodied, everyday practice of gun ownership. The research showed that becoming a gun owner involves a learning process in which both the mind and body are trained to feel comfortable with, and need, guns. Cognitively, it means developing interpretative frames for thinking about guns, safety, and violence. Specifically, one must learn to think that they need guns, that guns are safe, and that killing another human being can sometimes be a moral action. Gun owners train their bodies to feel comfortable with guns through habit formation, making the experience of holding, shooting, and carrying a gun so normal that the violence contained within the gun is rendered banal. While one must become ideologically comfortable with guns, a person must also learn to be physically comfortable with guns, and ultimately have positive experiences holding, shooting, and carrying guns. Although such embodied experiences are enabled by the above interpretative frames, they are not directly produced by them and require physical training. Gun owners train their bodies to feel comfortable with guns through habit formation, making the experience of holding, shooting, and carrying a gun so normal that the violence contained within the gun is rendered banal. These learned interpretive frames and the embodied pleasures that gun owners experience with guns are co-constitutive, so that the interpretive frames enable and are simultaneously enabled by a set of embodied experiences, and vice-versa. BibliographyShapira, H. and Simon, S.J. (2018) “Learning to Need a Gun.” Qualitative Sociology 41(1): 1-20.
Two Ways Out: Christianity, Security, and Mara SalvatruchaKevin Lewis O'Neill, Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of TorontoResearch Grant, 2010, 2012 This project, based on fieldwork in Guatemala, tracked the growing world of transnational street gangs from the perspective of gang ministry. These criminal organizations originated among Central American immigrants in Los Angeles, California, during the gang wars of the 1980s. Since then, United States deportation policies have transported (and, in turn, expanded) these gangs back to Central America, with one of the strongest networks forming in postwar Guatemala. Tens of thousands of men and women now smuggle drugs, participate in human trafficking, and control prison systems. Religion is a social fact deeply bound to the practice and to the construction of security. While much research focuses on why young men and women join these gangs, this project looked instead at one of the only ways out: Christian conversion. This curious loophole in gang membership raised a guiding research question: How and to what extent does gang ministry exemplify Christianity’s growing entanglement with the geopolitics of Central American security? The answer to this question proved significant, with an array of Christian-inflected research sites contributing to efforts at Central American security. These included prison chaplaincy programs that target active gang members as well as back-to-work programs for ex–gang members. One overall observation proved critical. A range of scholars (in several disciplines) understand religion and security as distinct: religion as a threat to security or religion as a solution to insecurity. Yet, my fieldwork makes it clear that religion, observed here through various manifestations of Christianity, is neither the enemy nor the antidote. Rather, religion is a social fact deeply bound to the practice and to the construction of security, to the very idea of what it means to be secure. Bibliography2015. Secure the Soul: Christian Piety and Gang Prevention in Guatemala. University of California Press.
Armed Politics and the State in Post-Colonial AsiaPaul Staniland, Political Science, University of ChicagoResearch Grant, 2013 & 2014 The political relationships between governments and armed groups differ dramatically. Sometimes they are locked in intense conflict, in other contexts they cut live-and-let-live deals, and in yet others they cooperate closely or even become merged together. My ongoing book project, using fieldwork and archival research funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, seeks to explain how these different armed orders emerge and change. It uses detailed data from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Burma/Myanmar to establish patterns of armed order across space and time within these countries. Research in New Delhi, Kashmir, northern Thailand, Myanmar, and Nagaland is complemented with extensive archival and secondary source research to systematically measure peace deals, ceasefires, combat operations, and informal cooperative. These allow me to identify armed orders of alliance, limited cooperation, and military hostilities, as well as the collapse or incorporation of groups. Tactical calculations and the agency of the armed groups themselves help explain more fine-grained patterns of armed order. I argue theoretically that the threat perceptions of central governments are deeply conditioned by their ideological projects: the definitions and boundaries of the nation and the role of the state within it that key elites seek to construct and defend. Ideas about politics help leaders and their security services decide which armed groups are deeply threatening, which are politically unproblematic, and which are unsavory or tolerable. These political foundations of state and regime form the basis of state strategy, but tactical calculations and the agency of the armed groups themselves help explain more fine-grained patterns of armed order. This argument helps us understand why governments often devote massive repression toward groups that are militarily weak or disorganized, while cooperating with or ignoring much more powerful groups. These complex interactions between states and armed actors create diverse forms of political order in the contemporary world. Bibliography"Politics and Threat Perception: Explaining Pakistani Military Strategy on the North West Frontier." With Asfandyar Mir and Sameer Lalwani. Security Studies (forthcoming). "Armed Politics and the Study of Intrastate Conflict." Journal of Peace Research Vol. 54, No. 4 (July 2017)."Armed Groups and Militarized Elections." International Studies Quarterly Vol. 59, No. 4 (December 2015), pp. 694-705. "Militias, Ideology, and the State." Journal of Conflict Resolution Vol. 59, No. 5 (August 2015), pp. 770-793.
The Nazi Concentration CampsNikolaus Wachsmann, Birbeck College, University of LondonResearch Grant, 2011 The goal of this project was to write the history of the prewar Nazi concentration camps, from their uncertain beginnings in 1933 to their coordination under the SS and expansion in the final years before the outbreak of the Second World War. The study draws on a wide range of published material, survivor testimonies, and original documents, such as circulars, local orders, statistics, and prisoner files. It will be published in spring 2015 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux as part of a general history of the SS concentration camps. My research charts the origins of the Nazi camp system, exploring the influence of disciplinary traditions in the German army and penal system, as well as the far-right paramilitary culture that emerged during the Weimar Republic. It also highlights the multiple functions of the growing prewar SS sites, which operated at various times as boot camps, reformatories, prisons, forced labor reservoirs, and torture chambers. The basic outline of the SS camps had been drawn before the war and the camps proved extremely adaptable to new and more extreme demands of violence. Much of my work focuses on daily practices of violence. I have examined the transition from the improvised abuse in the early camps to the structured violence of later years, charting the process by which SS terror became routine. I also explore the effects of violence on the victims and their responses. Crucially, the prewar experience left an important legacy for the wartime period, when the camps descended into mass death and genocide. The basic outline of the SS camps had been drawn before the war and the camps proved extremely adaptable to new and more extreme demands of violence. I found that the prewar Nazi concentration camps did not hurtle straight towards the abyss, towards ever greater violence and death; rather, periods of rising terror alternated with periods of comparative moderation. The largest group of victims of the concentration camps in the final years before the outbreak of World War II were probably not political prisoners or Jews but social outsiders pursued as “criminals” and “asocials.”
Exploring Violent Careers over the Life Course: A Study of Urban African American Males and FemalesElaine Eggleston Doherty, Health, Behavior and Society, Johns Hopkins School of Public HealthResearch Grant, 2012, 2014 The primary purpose of this two-year project was to examine the criminal career dimensions and patterns of violence among a cohort of urban African American males and females into mid-adulthood because most of what we know about patterns of violence within the same individuals over the life course is from White males or from samples that have included African American males and females but only through early adulthood (i.e., twenties and thirties). Data come from a prospective developmental study of a community cohort of African American first graders from the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago (N=1,242) who were initially studied in 1966 (at age six) and then assessed at three additional waves (ages sixteen, thirty-two, and forty-two). For this project, in collaboration with the Illinois Criminal Justice Authority (ILCJA), we collected and coded criminal history information for the cohort from ages seventeen to fifty-two. The extension of criminal history data into the fifties for the Woodlawn cohort provides a unique opportunity to examine the patterns of violence among a sample that represents an understudied population. Overall, we found both similarities and differences between the criminal career patterns of existing published studies and the Woodlawn cohort. For instance, we found rates of participation similar to those for African Americans from national probability sample estimates. By age fifty-two, 65.2% of the 589 males (n=384) and over one-quarter of the 628 females (28.8%, n=181) had been arrested at least once. Moreover, 45.8% of the male cohort (70.3% of the male offenders) and 12.1% of the female cohort (42.0% of the female offenders) had at least one violent arrest. However, the violence trends over time are in contrast to the typical age-crime curve identified among Whites. Among the Woodlawn men there is a steady to increasing pattern throughout the twenties and thirties with close to 20% of the male cohort still being arrested for violence in their mid-thirties. In fact, the prevalence rates of property and violence are similar throughout the twenties and thirties for the Woodlawn men. Violence among the females also shows a steady rate even farther into adulthood (throughout the forties), but at lower rates, with approximately 3% of the cohort arrested for violence between ages seventeen and forty-two before falling to below 1% by age fifty-two. This finding is in contrast to the current contention based on largely White samples that high rates of violence are limited to a small cohort or to young adulthood. In sum, the extension of criminal history data into the fifties for the Woodlawn cohort provides a unique opportunity to examine the patterns of violence among a sample that represents an understudied population. Thus, these descriptive analyses contribute to the larger body of knowledge regarding the relationship between age and crime and the unfolding of the criminal career for African American males and females. BibliographyDoherty, Elaine Eggleston and Margaret E. Ensminger (2014). "Do the Adult Criminal Careers of African Americans Fit the "Facts"?" Journal of Criminal Justice 42: 517-526.
Drug Violence, Fear of Crime, and the Transformation of Everyday Life in the Mexican MetropolisAna Villarreal, Sociology, University of California-BerkeleyDissertation Fellowship, 2014 My dissertation, “Drug Violence, Fear of Crime and the Transformation of Everyday Life in the Mexican Metropolis,” is an ethnography of how and why increased criminal violence and fear have prompted a new form of urban seclusion and governance in contemporary Latin America. Most of the research we have on violence and urban inequality focuses on the living conditions of the urban poor in favelas, barrios marginados, and the inner-city. In stark contrast, this book examines the impact of a tidal wave of gruesome violence on one of Latin America’s wealthiest cities: San Pedro in Monterrey, Mexico. As a San Pedro native, I had unique access to observe the responses of the wealthy to horrific criminal turf wars over cocaine and human trafficking routes in recent years. In brief, the upper class leveraged private and state resources to make of San Pedro a city-within-a-city. The upper class is not only relying on private security, but on the public security apparatus to create an "armored city" in detriment of the rest of the metropolis. A similar phenomenon took place in Caracas in the aftermath of the violent riots of the Caracazo in 1989 when the upper class created the municipality of Chacao. Although researchers have shown that the upper class is more and more likely to enclose living, leisure and work spaces in Latin America and beyond, these cases are different. Here, the upper class is not only relying on private security, but on the public security apparatus to create an “armored city” in detriment of the rest of the metropolis. This book will make a unique contribution to the fields of urban and political sociology by revealing this new pattern of exacerbated urban inequality raising new challenges for urban inclusion and democracy in Latin America. BibliographyVillarreal, Ana. 2015. "Fear and the Spectacular Drug Violence in Monterrey" in Violence at the Urban Margins, edited by Javier Auyero, Phillipe Bourgois, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes. Oxford University Press.
The Neural Circuitry of Aggression, Sex and Sexual AggressionDavid J. Anderson, Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience, California Institute of TechnologyResearch Grant, 2014 Mating and aggression are innate (or instinctive) behaviors that are performed without training. Interestingly, among animals, these two seemingly different behaviors appear to be inextricably intertwined: aggressive encounters are often associated with mating, when males exhibit their dominance for sexual opportunities. However, male-female interactions are primarily sexual (mating) and male-male interactions tend to be aggressive, while aggression toward females is more often the exception than the norm. What brain mechanisms are responsible for separating sexual behavior toward females, and violent aggression toward males, under normal conditions? To investigate the brain mechanisms, we used a technique called microendoscopy that allowed us to image deep-brain (hypothalamic) neuronal activity in male mice engaged in social behaviors. We recorded over two hundred neurons on average in each mouse (total 25 mice), and the mice had no trouble fighting or mating because of the microendoscope neural implant. In sexually and socially experienced adult male mice, neurons were strongly active during interactions with conspecifics, but not with a toy. It was immediately clear that characteristic, yet separate, ensembles of neurons were active during interactions with male or female conspecifics. But surprisingly, in inexperienced adult males, common populations of neurons were activated by both male and female conspecifics. The sex-specific ensembles gradually emerged as the mice acquired social and sexual experience. These observations indicated that interactions with males and females was required for the distinct representations of males and females in the adult mouse brain. These observations reveal an unexpected requirement of experience for behaviors that were traditionally viewed as "hard-wired" or innate. We performed another set of experiments where adult male mice were permitted to investigate (touch, smell, etc.) but not mount or attack other female or male mice. In this case, we did not observe female- or male-specific ensembles or divergent representations in the brain, suggesting that sensory exposure itself was insufficient. However, providing male mice with brief sexual experience was sufficient to generate neuronal ensembles that were specific to males and females, divergent neural representations of conspecific sex and aggression towards males. This experiment demonstrated that social interactions are necessary for the formation of male and female specific neuronal ensembles. These observations reveal an unexpected requirement of experience for behaviors that were traditionally viewed as “hard-wired” or innate. Social experience was required for the formation of neuronal ensembles that themselves control social behavior. Bibliography Remedios R, Kennedy A, Zelikowsky M, Grewe BF, Schnitzer MJ, Anderson DJ. (2017) Social Behaviour Shapes Hypothalamic Neural Ensemble Representations Of Conspecific Sex. Nature. In Press. Kennedy A, Asahina K, Hoopfer E, Inagaki H, Jung Y, Lee H, Remedios R, Anderson DJ. (2015) Internal States and Behavioral Decision-Making: Toward an Integration of Emotion and Cognition. Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Biol. 79:199-210.
Competitive Intervention and its Consequences for Civil WarsNoel Anderson, Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyDissertation Fellowship, 2015 This project explores two interrelated puzzles about external intervention and internal war. The first asks why rebels, governments, and third-party interveners often continue to invest in costly and protracted conflicts rather than sue for peace and a negotiated settlement. The second considers the consequences of these behaviors for temporal variation in the average duration and global prevalence of civil wars. A central finding that emerges concerns the critical role of competitive intervention—two-sided, simultaneous military assistance from different third party states to both government and rebel combatants—in the dynamics and intractability of civil wars across time and around the globe. Developing a generalizable theory of competitive intervention, the project explains the distortionary effects this form of external meddling has on domestic bargaining processes, describes the unique strategic dilemmas it entails for third-party interveners, and links its varying prevalence to international systemic change. It uncovers a feature of this form of intervention—namely, that “not losing” is often more important than “winning.” In doing so, it moves beyond popular anecdotes about “proxy wars” by deriving theoretically grounded propositions about the strategic logics motivating competitive intervention in civil wars. It also uncovers a heretofore overlooked feature of this form of intervention—namely, that “not losing” is often more important than “winning” from the perspective of third-party interveners under the shadow of inadvertent escalation. The theory is tested with a mixed-method design that combines statistical analyses of all civil wars fought between 1975 and 2009 with detailed case studies of competitive intervention in Angola (1975–1991) and Afghanistan (1979–1992). The project’s theoretical and empirical results shed new light on the international dimensions of civil war, address ongoing debates concerning the utility of intervention as a conflict management tool, and inform policy prescriptions aimed at resolving some of today’s most violent internal conflicts.
In Harm’s Way: Violence at the Urban Margins in Contemporary ArgentinaJavier Auyero, Sociology Department, University of Texas, AustinResearch Grant, 2013 In Argentina, and elsewhere in Latin America, members of the middle and upper-middle classes tend to be the main spokespeople in public debates around the issue of citizens’public safety (seguridad). Public discourse about urban violence tends to be dominated by those occupying privileged positions in the social structure. They talk most about the issue because, presumably, they are the ones most affected by it. And yet, any cursory count of the victims of urban violence in the subregion tells us that those who are suffering the most from it live (and die) at the bottom of the socio-symbolic order. As a result, the experience of interpersonal violence among the urban poor becomes something unspeakable, and the everyday fear and trauma lived in relegated territories is constantly muted and denied. The urban violence among those who suffer from it the most is absent from public debate. In Harm’s Way is about the collective trauma created by the constant and implacable interpersonal violence in a marginalized neighborhood in the outskirts of the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina. We subject the experience of violence to social scientific analysis to render it visible and make it a subject of debate. The book makes four interrelated arguments: First, much of the violence we place under the ethnographic microscope resembles that which has been dissected by students of street violence in the United States, i.e., it is the product of interpersonal retaliation and remains encapsulated in dyadic exchanges. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. The violence at the urban margins of Buenos Aires resembles that pervading daily life in the most dangerous U.S. ghettos, Brazilian favelas, Colombian comunas, and other relegated zones throughout the Americas. However, including other forms of physical aggression (sexual, domestic, and intimate) that take place inside and outside the home and shape the course of residents’ daily lives, we begin to see that violence serves more than just retaliatory purposes and that its several forms are often linked beyond dyadic relationships. While sociological and journalistic accounts of life in dangerous communities point to some of the more spectacular ways in which people respond to danger, we still know little about the less public practices that residents under siege devise to prevent violence and protect their loved ones. Violence does not always remain confined to reciprocal exchange. It sometimes spreads throughout the social fabric of the community, resembling a chain that connects different types of physical harm. Part of our task was to reconstruct this concatenation of events and show that what looks like an isolated incident is, in fact, part of a larger interactional sequence. Thus, we talk about concatenated violences—in plural. Second, we argue that violence in these communities is a routine way of dealing with everyday life issues inside and outside the home. Physical aggression is part of a local repertoire of action,a habitual way of acting on individual and collective interests. Residents rely on violence to address individual and collective problems (from disciplining a misbehaving child to establishing authority in the neighborhood or at home). Violence is a repertoire, an established know-how, a familiar practice useful in dealing with the difficulties daily life presents to residents of poor city neighborhoods—a rape threat, a robbery, an out-of-control child, etc. Third, contrary to descriptions of destitute urban areas in the Americas as either governance voids deserted by the state or militarized spaces firmly controlled by the state’s iron fist, we argue that law enforcement at the urban margins is intermittent, selective, and contradictory. This fractured presence of the state perpetuates the violence it is presumed to prevent. Fourth, residents of dangerous communities are acutely aware of the hazards that chronic exposure to violence poses, expressing a deep desire to protect their loved ones from harm and making active efforts to do so, despite the many constraints they face. However, while sociological and journalistic accounts of life in dangerous communities point to some of the more spectacular ways in which people respond to danger, such as direct retaliation, collective organizing, and lynching and/or vigilantism, we still know little about the less-public practices and routines that residents under siege devise to prevent violence and protect their loved ones. The book examines the ways—some mundane and some not, some of which involve the perpetration of physical damage, others of which do not—that residents of the urban periphery cope with the constant but unpredictable danger.
Troubled Peace: Explaining Political Violence in Post-Conflict SettingsFrancesca Grandi, Political Science, Yale UniversityDissertation Fellowship, 2013 My research is about violence after war. Contrary to received wisdom, violent societies are not a natural outcome of war. Violence is not ubiquitous in post-war countries. It does not emerge everywhere all the time; its distribution varies significantly across time and space. Explaining where violence occurs allows us to understand why it does–which is the objective of my dissertation, a history-grounded investigation in the nature and impact of post-conflict violence and the dynamics of its variation. My project explains why the winners of a war kill their former enemies after the hostilities have officially ended. They do so to convert their military advantage into political dominance. The winners cleanse the territories under their control as a way to consolidate their military victory and sanction their political power. Post-conflict targeted assassinations are therefore a strategy to establish political hegemony and, as such, they occur in the areas where the winners’ influence concentrates. In other words, my explanation centers on the forward-looking, strategic dimension of postwar violence, which most existing accounts overlook by privileging past dynamics, i.e., revenge, justice demands, or the conflict’s “root-causes.” The end of a war, no matter how decisive its military settlement, does not automatically lead to a definitive political solution. Most often, a transitional period begins, during which the question of who governs and how to distribute power ought to be solved. In other words, the winners have to transform their military advantage into a political victory. This process happens during the time lag between the official end of the hostilities and the return of “normal” politics. It is during this time that the foundations of a new political system are laid and so are the bases for durable peace or renewed conflict. Violence plays a crucial role in this transition from civil war to peaceful democratic politics. It intertwines with the emerging electoral competition. It becomes an integral part of the political contestation process and a strategy to influence the post-war allocation of power. The fast-changing political system at war’s end creates a sense of urgency, which is the underlying condition for targeted extra-judicial assassinations of former enemies. But violence emerges only under specific conditions. The war experience and its military resolution forge the winning actors’ preferences, particularly in regards to how political power should be distributed and attained. The wartime legacies combine with forward-looking expectations to create a series of mismatches, which give the winners incentives to kill, and organization, which gives them the capacity to do so. The mismatches create a more complicated net of incentives than the dichotomies of winner-loser or military vs. political actors would predict. Instead, the causes of post-war targeted killings during transitions rest in the relative strength of the parties within the winning coalition and the relative position of party affiliates within these parties. My empirical strategy focuses on a structured, sub-national comparison of post-WWII Italy. I generalize these findings to contemporary settings, by developing a topology of post-conflict violence, by mapping cases of post-conflict violence across the world since 1945, and by testing my theoretical findings in a contemporary case study–post-Qadhafi Libya. My research bridges academia and practice by providing a basis for more suited data collecting strategies and more tailored intervention policies in post-conflict settings, with the ultimate goal of increasing international peacebuilding and conflict prevention capacity.
