All Lecture Notes for Violence and Security: Paradigms and Debates Midterm + Endterm
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Course
Violence and Security: Paradigms and Debates
Institution
Universiteit Van Amsterdam (UvA)
This document includes all of the lecture notes for the course Violence and Security: Paradigms and Debates in the bachelor of Political Science for the 2024 exam. At the end, it also includes tips for the exam and recurring themes mentioned throughout the course.
● Conceptualising Violence
- Johan Galtung provides two definitions of violence
1. Type 1 Direct Violence: Behaviour that is carried out by a clear actor with intent to
cause bodily harm
- E.g people that have been tried in courts
- A clear perpetrator
- The role of intent
- Interstate war, genocide, structural violence
- Political violence can be seen even during times of peace (electoral violence,
vigilantism)
- War: A conflict that results in at least 1000 deaths
2. Type 2 Structural Violence: Violence was present when the bodily and mental state
of humans is below their potential
- Can be about the systematic conditions of human life
- Can be psychological
- He argues that in structural violence there is no intent and does not require a
clear agent
- E.g tuberculosis (before there was a cure people would die but because there
was no cure and that would be direct violence)
- However, once the cure for tuberculosis was found and not administered, that
would be structural violence (even if people are not intending for people to
die, the system is making it such)
- Example of structural violence: road design in America leading to road deaths
(according to lecturer)
● Conceptualising Peace
- Galtung’s two definitions of peace (writing during the Cold War)
1. Negative peace: The absence of direct violence
- In peacebuilding, you start with negative peace but the aim is to establish
positive peace
2. Positive peace: A self sustaining condition that protects human security of a
population
- Both physical and psychological security, a place where humans can thrive
- Positive peace is a tall bar to reach
- A lot of peacebuilding programs use benchmarks for positive peace (education
levels, poverty levels)
● Trend in Violence (Davies, Petterson, Ober)
- Resurgence on scholarship in interstate violence with global shifts in power (rise of
China, Russia and Ukraine war)
, 2
- Interests in ethnic conflict became prominent with Yugoslavia and the Rwandan
genocide
- Difficulty in counting casualties, imperfect method
1. Interstate and intrastate conflict
- Intrastate conflict is the most common form of conflict
- A rise in civil wars post WWII with a spike in the 90s
- Interstate was is comparatively rare
- Internationalised intrastate: when a foreign state will lend support to an
actor in the conflict
- The world is currently in a state of increased conflict
- Geographic distribution of state based conflict in 2022 (at least one party is a
state) is concentrated in parts of Africa, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and
the Middle East
- No region of the world is immune to violence (there are just areas that are
particularly vulnerable)
● What do we Mean by Paradigms?
- Idea of paradigms comes from Thomas Kuhn
- Paradigms are lenses or filters through which we see the world
- Theoretical lenses create assumptions about the most important parts of an empirical
reality
- They assume certain actors are important and assume why actors behave the way they
do
- Paradigms shape what are appropriate topics and methods to study political behaviour
- Empirical study of political study straddles international relations and comparative
politics
● Realism
- Comes out of the two world wars and the Cold War (rooted in historical moments)
- Characterised by a few assumptions
- They think that the state is the principal actor of international politics
- State is a unitary and rational actor
- National security trumps all
- For realists it doesn’t matter what is going on within a country, the state will still act
in its defence
- These assumptions matter because it products the type of behaviour states will engage
with
- Realists argue that states are in an environment of anarchy, no world government, risk
of war is always there
- Kenneth Waltz regarded as the founder of realism
- E.g conflict over the South China Sea
- Zero sum game (winner and a loser in each situation)
● Liberalism
, 3
- Liberals also see state actors as important
- Liberals see non state actors as also important
- Government of countries shape how politics is done but NGOs and organisations such
as the UN are also important
- Looking at relationships between state and non state actors
- Liberals don't see the state as a unitary actors, it is a composition of different actors
(different component parts have their own objectives and will shape politics)
- The decision to go to war does not have to be rational (suboptimal decisions tend to
be common)
- Believe in cooperation and shared preferences
- Liberals understand order and peace through
1. Economic interdependence and the free trade
- Trade is the most important mechanism for bringing peace and security
(going back to Adam Smith and the invisible hand)
- War disrupts economic relations and the cost of war would be too high
2. International institutions
- International institutions as a policy instrument for maintaining peace
and bringing in order (they decrease transaction costs)
- Implied sanctions if you don't hold up your commitment
3. Democratic institutions
- Goes back to Kant
● Constructivism
- Entities that make up politics are socially constructed
- If states themselves are socially constructed, the interests of states are also socially
constructed and can change
- Identity as an important part of constructivism (how an actor sees themselves will
determine their goals)
- State behaviour also shaped by norms
● Instrumentalism
- Elite interests and behaviour as a focal point
- If elites believe they will gain something from violence, they will organise the masses
into violence
- If they believe they will gain from maintaining peace, they will keep it
- E.g politicians using violence to help them gain more votes
- Violence can be useful when a country is ethnically divided (might make you more
likely to vote for a party that defends your ethnic group)
● Institutionalism
- Institutionalism is the perspective that institutions matter
- Has some overlap with liberalism (international conflict being resolved with
institutions, national or international)
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