Political Violence

« Un monde d’argent. Le difficile financement milanais de la coûteuse paix de Fribourg (1516-1519) », dans Alexandre DAFFLON, Lionel DORTHE et Claire GANTET (dir.) Après Marignan. La paix perpétuelle entre la France et la Suisse. Actes des colloques (Paris, 27 septembre / Fribourg, 30 novembre 2016), Mémoires et Documents publiés par la Société d’Histoire de la Suisse Romande, 4e série, t. XIV,  2018, p. 229-246.

Résumé : Arme décisive de la victoire et du maintien de la paix, l’impôt peut mettre cependant en péril le fragile consensus politique. Un des buts annoncés de la paix de Fribourg était de protéger le duché de Milan redevenu français après Marignan de toute nouvelle descente des carrés suisses. Or, le roi paie la sécurité de ses frontières au prix fort : un million de ducats doublé de 50 000 ducats de pensions annuelles aux cantons et à des particuliers. Mon article tend à montrer comment la sécurisation du duché de Milan par la paix de Fribourg a largement contribué à fragiliser le consensus politique autour de la domination royale en Milanais. Afin de couvrir le coût de la paix, il apparaît légitime au pouvoir royal que les Lombards contribuent à l’effort financier (communes, élites marchandes, feudataires, artisans, peuple manouvrier, paysans, mais excepté le clergé jouissant du privilège d’exemption). Trois traites à chaque premier 1er janvier des années 1517, 1518 et 1519 sont prévues pour honorer l’accord. C’est à chaque fois l’occasion d’étudier de façon précise les tensions qui se firent jour au moment des négociations.

The purpose of this article is to analyse the role played by organized political violence in pre-1914 Europe, with special regard to labour conflicts, through the analysis of the social composition and the practices of four movements which deliberately resorted to armed organisation: the Somatén in Catalonia (Spain), the Jaunes trade union in the French Département du Nord, the Citizen Patrols, and the agrarian squads in the province of Bologna (Italy). Despite their different origins and contexts, these movements pursued similar political strategies based upon the deliberate use of violence and guns, and shared anti-socialist, authoritarian and anti-democratic purposes. The analysis of their practices and political cultures enable us to evaluate the nature of the democratic processes in pre-1914 Europe and also helps to contextualize and understand the political and social violence which came to the fore after the end of the war in 1918.

The first act of Chechen suicide terrorism occurred on June 7, 2000 and was carried out by two young women. This inaugurated the migration of suicide terrorism from other conflict zones, into the Chechen conflict. How suicide terrorism as a tactic made it’s way into Chechnya is the topic of this paper, which provides an analysis of the events concerning the importation of militant ideologies and radical terrorist movements taking place since the Chechen declaration of independence as well as an empirical and theoretical analysis of Chechen suicide terrorism based on psycho-social interviews that were collected in Chechnya over a two-year time period from March 2003 to March 2005. We report data about suicide terrorism and the radicalization process from thirty-two interviews with family members and close associates of thirty-four Chechen suicide terrorists inquiring about the terrorists’ backgrounds, experiences, religious, and psychological reasons leading up to their suicidal acts.

This chapter explores three anthropological dimensions of the denial of crimes committed during the François Duvalier regime in Haiti (1957 and 1971): the manner in which social obligations created by kinship and social bonds induce conformism, self-censorship, and eventually denial; the disassociation from the victim's suffering, a social phenomenon I call pathophobia; and the animistic dimension of denial, which considers that the victim is wrong in their very essence and thus deserving of their fate.

In this article, I describe some of my research on caring, helping, active bystandership, and the origins of genocide and collective violence, as a background to interventions in real-world settings aimed to create positive change. They include working with teachers to create classrooms that promote caring and helping; training police to prevent or stop unnecessary harmful actions by fellow officers, and similarly students in schools to prevent harmful actions; promoting reconciliation, using trainings and workshops, and educational radio programs in Rwanda, Burundi, and the Congo; working to improve Dutch-Muslim relations in Amsterdam after violence; and a number of other projects. In these projects, information and participants' experiences combined to create "experiential understanding." Evaluation studies showed positive effects. These projects and their evaluation show that research-and theory-based interventions can be effective. An initial motivation for this work was my early childhood experience during the Holocaust in Hungary and receiving help from bystanders. Public Significance Statement This review of research, interventions, and applications in real-world settings shows that research on helping behavior and on the origins of great violence by groups can be applied to prevent violence, for example, by police or by students who would bully, and to help groups reconcile after great violence, for example, the genocide in Rwanda. It shows that knowledge gained in research can be used to make a difference in the world. Keywords: evolution of violence and of helping, passive and active bystanders, the roots of genocide, promoting reconciliation in Rwanda, preventing police violence and bullying by students I spent almost all of my professional life, starting in the mid-1960s, studying the roots of goodness (helping, caring about other people's welfare, moral courage, and active bystandership) and the roots of evil (the influences leading to genocide and mass killing, and, to a lesser extent, violent conflict and terrorism). I also engaged in activities both to increase caring, helping, and active bystandership, and to prevent harm and violence and promote reconciliation after great violence. This article is primarily about the applications of research and theory, mainly my own but also others', to real-world settings. It originates from a talk I gave at the National Summit on Violence in November 2016 at the American Psychological Association offices in Washington, D.C. The editor of this journal was present and invited me to write an article describing the "interventions" my associates and I have conducted in varied settings, my experiences along the way, and the lessons I learned, in the hope that it would help others doing similar work. He suggested that I could do this in an autobiographical manner. I begin by considering the roots in my early experience of my lifelong commitment to such work. Next, I briefly describe some of my research and theory, which guided the applications. The applications range from working with teachers to create class-Editor's Note. Continue the conversation by submitting your comments and questions about this article/book review to PeacePsychology.org/ peaceconflict. (The Editor of PeacePsychology.org reserves the right to exclude material that fails to contribute to constructive discussion.) ERVIN STAUB holds a PhD from Stanford, taught and Harvard and is Professor Emeritus and Founding Director of the PhD program in the Psychology of Peace and Violence, Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is former President of the International Society for Political Psychology and of the Peace Psychology Division of APA. He has studied the origins of and ways to increase caring, helping, moral courage, active bystandership and altruism born of suffering, and the roots of, or societal, cultural and psychological influences leading to genocide, mass killing and intractable violent conflict and ways to prevent these. In addition to studying these he worked in many real world settings, for example to promote reconciliation after a genocide in Rwanda, improve Dutch Muslim relations in the Netherlands after violence there, training police in active bystandership to prevent fellow officers from doing unnecessary harm, and creating classrooms that promote caring. CORRESPONDENCE CONCERNING THIS ARTICLE should be addressed to Ervin Staub,

There are more types of borders today than ever before in history. Borders of all kinds define every aspect of social life in the twenty-first century. From the biometric data that divides the smallest aspects of our bodies to the aerial drones that patrol the immense expanse of our domestic and international airspace, we are defined by borders. They can no longer simply be understood as the geographical divisions between nation-states. Today, their form and function has become too complex, too hybrid. What we need now is a theory of the border that can make sense of this hybridity across multiple domains of social life.

Rather than viewing borders as the result or outcome of pre-established social entities like states, Thomas Nail reinterprets social history from the perspective of the continual and constitutive movement of the borders that organize and divide society in the first place. Societies and states are the products of bordering, Nail argues, not the other way around. Applying his original movement-oriented theoretical framework "kinopolitics" to several major historical border regimes (fences, walls, cells, and checkpoints), Theory of the Border pioneers a new methodology of "critical limology," that provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary border politics.

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

This study analyzes controversies and public attitudes concerning the Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)
and Stepan Bandera in Ukraine. The research question is: Which factors affect attitudes toward the OUN-B, the UPA and Bandera in contemporary Ukraine? This article employs comparative and regression analyses of surveys commissioned by the author and conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) in 2009 and 2013 to determine the effects of regional and other factors on attitudes toward these organizations and the OUN-B leader. The study shows that regional factors and perceptions of these organizations' involvement in mass murder were the strongest predictors of the views concerning the OUN-B, the UPA and Bandera. Their public support is strongest in Galicia and weakest in the East and the South, in particular, in Donbas and Crimea, two major conflict areas since the “Euromaidan.”

This study examines the role of political factors in attitudes toward World War II in contemporary Ukraine. The question under examination is which factors determine public views of the principal warring sides and their leaders in Ukraine. This paper uses a representative national survey specifically designed for this research project and conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in 2012. It analyzes the roles of regionalism, political party preferences, ethnicity, language, age, and sex in attitudes toward the Red Army, Soviet partisans, the German Army (Wehrmacht), and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) during the war, as well as toward the wartime leaders of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the UPA. The analysis of the survey data shows that regional values, political party preferences, ethnicity, language, and age have significant effects on views of the Soviet Army and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army during the war and attitudes toward the wartime activities of Joseph Stalin and Roman Shukhevych. Public perceptions of the German Army and Adolf Hitler in Ukraine do not vary much across regions, political parties, and ethnic, language, age, and sex groups.

The massacre of almost 50 Maidan protesters on February 20, 2014 was a turning point in Ukrainian politics and a tipping point in the conflict between the West and Russia over Ukraine. This mass killing of the protesters and the mass shooting of the police that preceded it led to the overthrow of the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych and gave a start to a civil war in Donbas in Eastern Ukraine, Russian military intervention in Crimea and Donbas, and an international conflict between the West and Russia over Ukraine. A conclusion promoted by the post-Yanukovych governments and the media in Ukraine that the massacre was perpetrated by government snipers and special police units on a Yanukovych order has been nearly universally accepted by the Western governments, the media, and many scholars. The Ukrainian government investigation identified members of the special company of Berkut as responsible for killings of the absolute majority of the protesters, but did not release any evidence in support, with the exception of videos of the massacre.
              The question is which side organized the “snipers’ massacre.” This paper is the first academic study of this crucial case of the mass killing. It uses a theory of rational choice and a Weberian theory of instrumental rationality to examine actions of major actors both from the Yanukovych government, specifically various police and security forces, and the Maidan opposition, specifically its far right and oligarchic elements, during the massacre.
          The paper analyzes a large amount of evidence from different publicly available sources concerning this massacre and killings of specifics protesters. Qualitative content analysis includes the following data: about 1,500 videos and recordings of live internet and TV broadcasts from mass media and social media in different countries(some 150 gigabytes), news reports and social media posts by more than 100 journalists covering the massacre from Kyiv, some 5,000 photos, and nearly 30 gigabytes of publicly available radio intercepts of snipers and commanders from the special Alfa unit of the Security Service of Ukraine and Internal Troops, and Maidan massacre trial recordings. This study also employs field research on site of the massacre, eyewitness reports by both Maidan protesters and government special units commanders, statements by both former and current government officials, estimates of approximate ballistic trajectories, bullets and weapons used, and types of wounds among both protesters and the police. This study establishes a precise timeline for various events of the massacre, the locations of both the shooters and the government snipers, and the specific timeline and locations of nearly 50 protesters’ deaths. It also briefly analyzes other major cases of violence during and after the “Euromaidan.” This study includes two video appendixes.
            This academic investigation concludes that the massacre was a false flag operation, which was rationally planned and carried out with a goal of the overthrow of the government and seizure of power. It found various evidence of the involvement of an alliance of the far right organizations, specifically the Right Sector and Svoboda, and oligarchic parties, such as Fatherland. Concealed shooters and spotters were located in at least 20 Maidan-controlled buildings or areas. The various evidence that the protesters were killed from these locations include some 70 testimonies, primarily by Maidan protesters, several videos of “snipers” targeting protesters from these buildings, comparisons of positions of the specific protesters at the time of their killing and their entry wounds, and bullet impact signs. The study uncovered various videos and photos of armed Maidan “snipers” and spotters in many of these buildings. The paper presents implications of these findings for understanding the nature of the change of the government in Ukraine, the civil war in Donbas, Russian military intervention in Crimea and Donbas, and an international conflict between the West and Russia over Ukraine.

This article questions whether there exists a 'revisionist' current that not only to undermine the 'consensus' on the Second Republic, but also to demonstrate the latter's 'illegitimacy'. Such is the position of a small group of historians who, having proclaimed themselves as the guardians of orthodoxy on the period, do not hesitate to stigmatize in ideological terms all those that diverge from their standpoint. This article maintains that the approach of these historians is more political than academic and that is the result of a retrospective reading of the Republic's first six years via the prism of the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship. Their interpretation is also the product of an obsessive desire not to give any credit to the dictatorship's profoundly negative account of the Republic. In so doing, these historians often distort the facts and ignore the sources and data that, in their judgement, might present "a tremendously negative vision" or "catastrophic" one of the Republic and its "defects".

In the broadest view, Isis seems the product of a catastrophic war – the Anglo-American assault on Iraq. There is no doubt that the ground for it was prepared by this systematic devastation – the murder and displacement of millions, which came after more than a decade of brutalisation by sanctions and embargoes. The dismantling of the Iraqi army, de-Ba’athification and the Anglo-American imprimatur to Shia supremacism provoked the formation in Mesopotamia of al-Qaida, Isis’s precursor. Many local factors converged to make Isis’s emergence possible last year: vengeful Sunnis; reorganised Ba’athists in Iraq; the co-dependence of the west on despotic allies (al-Sisi, al-Maliki) and incoherence over Syria; the cynical manoeuvres of Assad; Turkey’s hubristic neo-Ottomanism, which seems exceeded in its recklessness only by the actions of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.

El artículo pretende ser una breve y didáctica reflexión sobre uno de los movimientos sociales más importantes de Latinoamérica, en general, y sin duda alguna el más importante de Brasil. Se trata de un análisis sobre la violencia estructural en un país polarizado, con una dicotomía económica que hace estragos y la respuesta desde el Movimiento de los Trabajadores Sin Tierra (MST) y la ocupación de tierras, rompiendo las normas establecidas. De esta forma, el trabajo se adentra, por un lado, en los postulados teóricos del movimiento social de los trabajadores que defiende la reforma agraria y, por ende, los derechos humanos frente al derecho positivo, y, por otro, en las estrategias del poder y el uso de la violencia, legitimada por el Estado frente a las ocupaciones de tierra. En suma, nos enfrentamos al célebre planteamiento de Max Weber sobre el monopolio de la violencia, aplica-do a las acciones a favor de una reforma agraria y un reparto de tierras más equitativo. En cuanto a su interés, es evidente por su eco social y las actuales movilizaciones en Brasil vinculadas al juicio político de Dilma Rousseff. This paper is intended to be a brief and didactic reflection on some of the most important Social Movements in Latin America in general, and undoubtedly the most important in Brazil. This is an analysis of structural violence in a polarized country, with an economic dichotomy that rages, the response from the MST and the occupation of land, breaking the established norms. Thus, the work delves into the theoretical postulates of workers social movement that defends the Agrarian Reform and, therefore, human rights versus the positive law. On the other hand, it looks into the strategies of the power and the use of violence, legitimized by the State against land occupations. In sum, we are confronted with Max Weber's famous approach to the monopoly of violence, applied to actions in favour of an Agrarian Reform and a more equitable land distribution. It is of particular and obvious interest for its social echo and the current mobilizations in Brazil linked to the political judgment of Dilma Rousseff.

This paper seeks to examine the relation between democracy and violence. It will first offer an historical overview of the emergence of democracy in relation to three major political events: the English civil war from 1640-1660; the American war of independence and the drafting of the Bill of Rights; and the French Revolution. It will propose that, apart from the fact that each of these struggles was marked by large-scale and protracted violence, they also shared a common discourse – the discourse of rights, understood proprietorially. The paper will argue that the emergence of democracy as articulated through this discourse of proprietorial rights was, in turn, closely related to the emergence of the contemporary form of the nation-state, and that, consequently, it is founded on a paradox: the discourse of the nation (or nationalism) has been historically an exclusivist one, while the discourse of democracy seeks, by definition, to be inclusive. It will argue that the colonial moment served on the one hand, to disseminate the discourses of nationalism and democracy; while on the other, it complicated the paradoxical relation between them further, when the discourse of rights (integral to both) often emphasized community rights over individual rights, at least in colonial South Asia. The contours of community, then and since, have been overwhelmingly determined by the personal law system and the communal patriarchates. Given that, this paper will argue that the tensions between the exclusivism of such communalisms and the inclusivism of the democratic discourse leads inevitably to the production of cultures of violence. It will conclude by questioning the sustainability of a rights-based understanding of democracy.

Politically motivated religious radical groups, resorting to violence or willing to do so, are seriously challenging the current social order and security in Western societies, and even world peace and human rights. The most recent and dramatic example is the appeal the so-called Islamic State has on such groups. To counter these developments, social science should not omit to make its own contribution: analyzing the factors and processes which motivate individuals to join these groups and continue to participate in them. This paper offers a psychological analysis of some of these factors and takes as its starting point a similarity between radical groups and sects. This gives rise to the following view:
Like sects, radical groups especially attract normal adolescents and young adults with severe identity issues (this is even more prevalent in second and third generation immigrants). The radical views within such a group seem to provide an answer to pressing existential questions such as: who am I, what do I live for, and what can I signify in the world? A charismatic leader could strengthen and exploit this. The relatively small and well-defined nature of such groups provide a certain security, solidarity, community, and often a sense of superiority as well, all of which could further strengthen the person's identity.
Once such a person has joined a radical group, then processes of isolation, indoctrination and manipulation are put in motion, purposely arranged by the leader(s). These intensify the member's ties with the group and its ideology more and more, and increasingly reduce his receptiveness for correcting influences from outside. If, at last, the member progresses to violence, then this in turn, will activate internal and external negative spiral processes, which will increasingly block the way back to functioning normally in society.
Examples of internal negative spirals are: ways to appease one's conscience, hardening, addiction to the power inherent in violence. Examples of external negative spirals are: self-aggravating vicious circles of revenge and counter-revenge, as well as war stress and survival drive.
Our conclusion is that an analysis in terms of sects could yield fruitful insights.

“Total War Behind the Frontlines? An Inquiry into the Violence on the Republican Side in the Spanish Civil War”, in Martin Baumeister, Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (eds.), “If You Tolerate This...” The Spanish Civil War in the Age of Total Wars, Campus, Frankfurt-New York, 2008, pp. 154-168.

"A los 80 años del comienzo de la Guerra Civil española: víctimas, victimarios y lógicas de la violencia", pp. 324-339, en VIÑAS, Ángel y BLANCO, Juan Andrés (Dirs.): La Guerra Civil española, una visión bibliográfica, Madrid, Marcial Pons Digital, 2017.

The message of peace and nonviolence was believed in the early church until the claim of Constantine's vision was endorsed by Eusebius and Lactantius. Scriptures and quotes from early church writers are reviewed, and thought questions challenge the reader.

Loadenthal, Michael. “Cells, Communiqués and Monikers: The Insurrectionary Networks of Anti-State Attack.” In Routledge Handbook of Radical Politics, edited by Uri Gordon and Ruth Kinna, 326–40. New York, NY: Routledge, 2019.

Abstract:
Spanning over a century, the insurrectionary spirit of anarchism has been on the forefront
of direct, unmediated attacks on the state and capital. Insurrectionary praxis is based on an ethic of informality, clandestinity and temporality, and as a result, its cells exist in secret only as long as deemed necessary for a particular action. Unlike social movement organisations and above-ground campaigns, the cells that populate the insurrectionary milieu are not something to ‘belong to’ but something to ‘act through’; a momentary assemblage of likeminded individuals united for a particular attack by voluntary association and through shared affinity.

While the modern cell networks gained visibly in Europe around the millennium,
their rapid replication has led to similarly styled formations in dozens of countries from the Americas to Asia. This franchised replication is aided by the use of adoptable monikers – static labels used to associate an attack with others, and to ideologically tag them as insurrectionary. Oftentimes, these are acronyms whose names communicate the politics of the attackers, such as the Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI), Conspiracy of Cells of Fire (CCF), International Revolutionary Front (IRF) as well as older, not explicitly insurrectionary monikers such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and Earth Liberation Front (ELF). The use of moniker-linked attacks, which form into a campaign of sorts, is a distinctive feature of the insurrectionary cells. For example, in June 2013, a Greek of the FAI cell bombed a vehicle belonging to a prison director overseeing the incarceration of comrades. This attack marked ‘act one’ of the Phoenix Project, and would be followed by thirteen additional attacks, spanning eight countries out over a twelve-month period. The Phoenix Project highlights the strength of the adoptable moniker, as through its usage, an arson targeting an Indonesian hotel and the sabotage of Italian fuel pumps can be united into a shared, global effort, and not understood as disparate acts of lone wolves. This chapter will explore how the insurrectionary anarchist networks utilise the cell model, the communiqué and the adoptable moniker to allow for the creation of a globally dispersed, decentralised, open involvement movement united in its rejection of capitalism, the state and those who would seek to control it.

Attention to extreme forms of political violence in the social sciences has been episodic, and studies of different forms of political violence have followed different approaches, with “breakdown” theories mostly used for the analysis of right-wing radicalism, social movement theories sometimes adapted to research on left-wing radical groups, and area study specialists focusing on ethnic and religious forms. Some of the studies on extreme forms of political violence that have emerged within the social movement tradition have nevertheless been able to trace processes of conflict escalation through the detailed examination of historical cases. This article assesses some of the knowledge acquired in previous research approaching issues of political violence from the social movement perspective, as well as the challenges coming from new waves of debate on terrorist and counterterrorist action and discourses. In doing this, the article reviews contributions coming from research looking a...

Electoral disputes accompanied by violent outbreaks have become an emerging problem in societies under transformation, in authoritarian regimes, as well as in young democracies. The truth is that many politicians elected to office, their supporters, and political activists have altered their perceptions of electoral competition in a form of zero-sum logic with direct consequences for their opponents. After the fall of Communism in the beginning of the 1990s, Central and Eastern Europe stood at a crossroads. This period of imbalance and uncertainty affected the violent interaction in newly reformed electoral arenas with serious consequences for legitimizing democratic change. Despite the well-documented tension that existed in the region, the importance of violence in the electoral arena is rather neglected. The article approaches this gap as the first attempt to map electoral violence in a new typological environment where the process of transformation has affected political pluralism and the patterns of political contest. It argues that electoral violence is not a rare phenomenon in the region of post-Communist Europe and the dynamic varies on a great scale. Moreover, the article presents a picture of electoral violence occurring in different settings with potentially different contextual preconditions that need to be studied separately.

This article is the Arabic translation (with minor modifications approved by the author) of an English original ("The KRG's Relationship with the Yazidi Minority and the Future of the Yazidis in Shingal") that was published by NRT, a Kurdish media outlet in Iraqi Kurdistan, on January 31, 2017. This Arabic translation was published by NRT on March 19, 2017. Both versions are available on Academia.edu and also appear on the NRT website.

The present paper will investigate pardon letters or “lettres de rémission” granted to soldiers by the Valois dukes of Burgundy from 1386 to 1482. During this period, the chancery records contain 885 remission letters by which the prince granted his pardon to individuals who committed a crime and petitioned for mercy. This large amount of documents includes more than 15 percent of pardons granted to petitioners who served or had served the dukes in their armies. In the narrative parts of their letters, these soldiers insisted on their military pasts as a good reason to be pardoned. The purpose of this paper is to study the contents of these military pardons to underline how they contributed to shape a collective military identity in the Burgundian State. Following the works of Christopher Allmand, according to whom fifteenth-century leaders undertook to transform their soldiers into professional State agents, I will argue that military pardons were used by the dukes of Burgundy as a tool of social disciplining. Because they granted a large amount of pardons to their soldiers who affirmed their military identity in their petitions, the dukes promoted the military service as a motive to be forgiven. And because they only forgave simple homicides and refused to pardon typical war crimes such as pillage, rape, or even desertion, they indicated which kind of behaviour was worthy for the good Burgundian soldier, and which one was not.

Die Grenzlanduniversität Kiel gilt als nationalsozialistische Musterhochschule, an der der Parteiwille regierte und die Professoren und Studierenden dem NS-Regime zuarbeiteten. Doch ausgerechnet zu den studentischen Funktionären des Studentenbundes existiert bislang keine eigenständige Untersuchung. Erstmalig wird daher das jungakademische »Führerkorps am Beispiel der Kieler Universität vor dem Hintergrund einer Politkarriere« betrachtet.

Die Studie widmet sich auf breiter Quellen- und Literaturbasis den spannungsreichen, von Kooperation wie Konfrontation geprägten Beziehungen zwischen dem studentischen Funktionärskorps, den Hochschulbehörden und den nationalsozialistischen Staats- und Parteistellen im Zeitraum von 1927 bis 1945 – einer Zeit gesellschaftlicher Umbrüche und zahlreicher politischer Konflikte.

On 18 April 2019, by-stander Lyra McKee was killed while a group of teenagers and young men rioted against the PSNI in the Northern Irish city of Derry. During these riots, two masked gunmen of the “New IRA” fired up to ten shots at three PSNI Land Rovers. The recruitment of teenagers into the ranks of dissident Irish republicans has raised concern that a new generation of young adults born after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement is prepared to continue acts of political violence in Ireland. This article will examine the motivations and ideology of teenagers and young adults in dissident Irish republican organisations. It is based on a series of in-depth interviews with members of the dissident republican youth organisation Na Fianna Éireann in the Dublin region. The interview data show four broad motivational factors for teenagers and young adults to join the republican youth organisation, Na Fianna Éireann, in the Republic of Ireland. These four are: First, working-class background, with its related deprivation and social problems (such as criminality and drug addiction); second, the importance of family links and social networks; third, social media as an introduction to republicanism; and, fourth, fascination with Irish history.

During the past decades, the assassination attempt has been treated from different disciplines. Nevertheless, the mediatization of the assassination attempt or its treatment in images and audiovisual media has been widely neglected. Starting from a triptych applicable to 19th century tyrannicides and articulated by the assassination performance, the perpetrator’s arrest and, finally, his punishment, we aim at verifying to what extent this model fits into 20th-century assassination attempts. For this reason, three key assassinations will be considered. First, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, perpetrated by Serbian nationalists, and which would lead to WWI. Second, the failed attempt on 20 July 1944 against Adolf Hitler in the Wolfsschanze; a plot in which many high rank officers of the Wehrmacht were involved. As third example, we will focus on John F. Kennedy’s assassination in
Dallas, on 22 November 1963, reputed to Lee H. Oswald.