This keynote session, hosted by RC02 on the last day of the World Congress in Melbourne, featured new work by Sylvia Walby, past RC02 President, and Co-President of the Thematic Group Violence & Society. The session was organized by Heidi Gottfried, also past RC02 President, with comments by William Carroll, past RC02 President and Margaret Abraham, past ISA President. Before a full room of participants, Walby argued for a macro-sociological theory of violence integrated into a theory of society. While violence as an institution was present in classical sociological theories of society, for example in Durkheim, and later Du Bois, it has been largely marginal in contemporary sociological theory, relegated to specialized areas of analysis. Behind the relative neglect of violence in contemporary theories of society lurks a difference in approaches. On the one side is a securitization approach, from Hobbs to Weber, which views the mobilization of violence as the best means for ending violence. This places the focus on states and coercive powers, and criminalization as the best way to address interpersonal violence. In most such analyses, violence, often understood as inter-state violence, is decreasing. Feminist critiques however, working from an intersectional analysis, question the empirical evidence on another level of analysis, where criminalization as a carceral state response to violence results in punishing disadvantaged groups rather than addressing the systemic origins of violence. Violence, as feminist theory has shown, is central to systems of gender inequalities, while feminist movements demonstrate that the counter-hegemonic movements for more equality are rooted in improved democratic participation rather than securitization.
A second approach, largely ignored, could frame these political movements. In this approach, violence as an answer to violence perpetuates rather than ends violence. The alternative posed is peace by peaceful means. In this line of work, reaching back to Kant the claim is that interdependencies prevent war, and full and democratic political participation deters nations from sending their citizens into violent conflict. In the work of Galtung, social structures generate violence. The only plausible answer is peace by peaceful means. This analysis views violence as caused by the whole of society, and thus, ending violence depends on the mobilization of all-societal forces to end inequalities and guarantee democratic participation. Feminist critiques of criminalization importantly focus on inter-personal violence. Walby’s theory aims to embed these critiques into a broader macro-societal analysis of the origins of violence, and the counter-hegemonic movements that can end violence. Drawing on her past work on globalization and social inequalities, Walby argued for giving violence an equal ontological status to political economic and civil societal theorizations of hegemony and counter-hegemonic social change.
The two discussants, Bill Carroll and Margaret Abraham both emphasized the importance of violence as the practice of forms of domination and underlined the importance of Walby’s theorization of violence in class and feminist analyses. Both however, resisted the theoretical challenges posed by Walby, launching a vibrant debate about whether violence has equal ontological status with economy, polity, and civil society in critical analyses of the global political economy. For Abraham, violence as an institutional domain is not independent from the political, economic, or civil society, but a cross-cutting set of relations embedded in other forms of domination. More important for Abraham is understanding how violence, especially gender-based violence, cuts across cultures, boundaries, time, economic and political systems, “in and across contexts”. She called for multiple theories of violence rather than one theory to broaden the frame of analysis to critical race theory, post-colonial studies, as well as to contextualized analysis of movements to end violence. Carroll echoed Abraham’s view of violence as a cross-cutting practice, but framed by, rather than on an equal plane with critical political-economic analysis. Here the call was not for multiple theorizations, but for foregrounding political economy, and relegating violence to a practice of domination, as exemplified by Marx and Gramsci. Posed alongside each other, the comments underlined divides in critical political economic and critical feminist work on violence, which Walby is attempting to bridge exactly by elevating the ontological status of violence in social theory and engaging in a macro-social analysis of complex systems of inequalities.