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The plasma of violence: Towards a preventive medicine for political evil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2022

Jonathan Luke Austin Open the ORCID record for Jonathan Luke Austin [Opens in a new window]
Jonathan Luke Austin*
Affiliation:
The University of Copenhagen, Denmark
*
*Corresponding author. Email: jla@ifs.ku.dk
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Abstract

How do people know how – very practically speaking – to be violent? This article explores that question through a Science and Technology Studies perspective. It does so in order to go beyond the usual location of global political violence at a structural level that attributes its emergence principally to hierarchical orders, formal training, or deep cultural, political, or ideological factors. The alternative explanation offered here draws on Bruno Latour's concept of ‘plasma’ to sketch a theory of how practices of violence are embedded at a distributed ontological level through the historical accumulation of (popular) cultural, textual, technological, and other epistemic objects. In making that claim, I seek to stress how violent knowledge circulates outside the formal domains associated with it (the military, police) and is instead preconsciously accessible to each and every person. To support this argument, the article draws on empirical examples of the use of torture, including interviews conducted with Syrian perpetrators of torture, as well as by tracing the paradoxical entanglements between scientific practice and the practice of torture. I conclude by engaging the field of preventive medicine to speculate on the need to develop modes of violence prevention that appreciate political violence as a population-level sociopolitical problem.

Keywords

Political ViolenceViolence PreventionScience and Technology StudiesTorturePopular CultureEthnography
Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 1 , January 2023 , pp. 105 - 124
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British International Studies Association

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68 All quotes and notes below are taken from fieldwork conducted between 2014–18 in Beirut, Lebanon. All names have been changed. For discussions of the methodology, see Austin, ‘A parasitic critique for International Relations’; Austin, Jonathan Luke, ‘Accessing lifeworlds: Getting people to say the unsayable’, in Secrecy and Methodology in Critical Security Research (London, UK: Routledge, 2019)Google Scholar.

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