The meanings of violence and resistance: conditions and effects of state violence

Abstract

Violent encounters and state repression, collective memories centered on violent experiences, as well as narratives of violence, injustice and survival are crucial in shaping the conditions of possibility for mobilization processes and political demands. Accounts of mass mobilization under authoritarianism have highlighted the link between repression and oppositional violence. At the same time, violent experiences from physical abuses at the hands of state security forces to the suffering from structural violence and neglect, function as drivers of resistance themselves. Violence and repression thus assume a double role as causes and consequences of contentious dynamics. Equally ambiguous are their socio-political, emotional and cultural impacts. This panel explores this complex nexus of state(hood), violence and resistance. It examines the conditions under which state violence is successful in repressing protest movements and their future potentiality, as well as the cultural and affective traces that such violence imprints on movements and wider society. Furthermore, the panel interrogates the meaning making processes that accompany violent events and materialize in legitimizing narratives, mythologies and martyrs, as well as radical imaginaries that signify violent experiences as motifs of resistance. This panel interrogates these different roles and functions of violence for bottom-up politics. By adopting a fine-grained perspective on violence and repression as multidimensional culturally and emotionally mediated phenomena, it transcends the binary view of violence as either a driver or an outcome and supports an orientation towards the narratives by which actors make sense of violent encounters.

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