CFP: coercive networks: violence, punishment and the colonial condition
Miss Taylor C Sherman
'COERCIVE NETWORKS': VIOLENCE, PUNISHMENT AND THE
COLONIAL CONDITION
University of Cambridge, UK
Friday, 9 May 2008
This one-day workshop aims to investigate the
relationship between strategies of violence, the law
and governance in the colonial and postcolonial world.
Studies of violence and punishment have become
integral to the understanding of colonial and
postcolonial states. At the same time, the existing
scholarship has become increasingly concentrated upon
single institutions and practises, such as
imprisonment or corporal punishment. Moreover, the
literature is predicated upon the assumption that the
colonial state held a monopoly of the use of force,
when in fact non-state actors were often prominent in
the practises of penal violence which sustained
colonial rule.
This workshop will approach strategies of violence
through wider empirical and theoretical frameworks. It
will integrate studies of individual penal techniques
with less studied practises such as vigilantism,
punitive expeditions and summary justice to analyse
the wider 'coercive networks' through which
governments rule. This workshop aims to move beyond
conceptualisations which regard colonial punishment as
a disciplinary strategy, and are centred around
Foucauldian understandings of discipline. The aim is
to bring out the tensions inherent in practises of
punishment and violence in Latin America, Asia and
Africa.
Economies of violence are constantly created and
maintained, and investigating this process involves
studying the relationship between social structures
and discourses of power, the tensions between law and
social custom, and between the aims and outcomes of
the violence itself. As such, papers are welcomed on
topics including (but not limited to):
• State Violence
• Legal Violence
• Punishment
• Extra-Judicial Violence
• Communal Conflict
• Torture
• Human Rights Violations
• Theoretical and Methodological Approaches
'Coercive Networks' is an interdisciplinary workshop,
with a focus on both theoretical approaches to the
study of violence, and on individual case studies. The
aim of the workshop is to encourage discussion both
between disciplines, and between graduate students and
established researchers.
Enquiries and abstract proposals of 300-500 words
should be submitted to Dr. Taylor C. Sherman
(tc...@cam.ac.uk) or Dr. Stacey Hynd (sh...@cam.ac.uk)
by Tuesday, 15 January 2008.
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