This summary contains notes from all the lectures the University of Amsterdam gave for its Violence & security. Paradigms and debates
course. Description given by the University: This course provides a framework for understanding and analyzing conflict and security at both the international level...
● Johan Galtung (1969) provides a compelling way to think about violence and peace
○ 2 types of violence
■ Direct violence: Behaviours carried out by a clearly identifiable agent
with the intent to inflict bodily harm
■ Structural violence: violence as present when humans systematically
cannot fulfil their physical and mental potential. Violence does not
require intent and does not require a clear agent.
Conceptualising peace
● Johan Galtung’s typology of peace (1969)
○ Two types of peace
■ Negative peace: The absence of direct violence
● Written during the Cold War
■ Positive peace: A self-sustaining condition that protects the human
security of a population
What do we mean by paradigms?
● The idea of paradigms comes from Thomas Kuhn (1962)
● Paradigms or theoretical frameworks are lenses through which we see the world
● They contain assumptions about:
○ The most important actors, as well as their behaviours and motivations
○ What leads to war and violence
○ What allows for peace and security
Paradigms and approaches to violence and security
● International relations
● Comparative politics
Realism
● Actors: the state is the principal actor in international politics
● Nature of the state
○ The state is a unitary and rational actor seeking to maximise its own interests
○ National security is a first-order preference (i.e. it trumps all)
● Understanding of conflict/order
○ THe international system is characterised by anarchy, which means that
security is not guaranteed
○ Power (generally defined as material capabilities is a central concern to
realism, because it is key to security
, ○ The likelihood of war is shaped by the distribution of power in the international
system
Liberalism
● Actors: State and non-state actors are important
○ E.g. Transnational advocacy networks (Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink
1998)
● Nature of the state: State preferences are an aggregate of preferences of a wide
range of state and societal actors
○ Preferences not necessarily opposing
○ National security is not always the most important consideration
● Understanding of conflict/order
○ Conflict is not inevitable; cooperation and mutual gains are possible
○ Order is possible though
■ Economic interdependence and free trade
■ International institutions
■ Democratic institutions
Constructivism
● Actors: Actors and the interests that drive them are socially constructed
● Assumptions about agent behaviour:
○ Political action is shaped by identities and interests
○ Who the actor is shaped what they view as appropriate action
○ Conflict and peace are therefore shaped by the content of identities and
interests, which is why norms are so important to social constructivism
● Groups are socially constructed and groups are not unitary actors
● Violence as a means of delineating and asserting group boundaries
Instrumentalism
● Elites as the primary explanatory variable for the presence/absence of conflict
● Assumptions of instrumentalism
○ Elites seek to maximise political power and other material gains and will
foment violence to meet their interests
Institutionalism
● Institutionalism is an approach seeks to understand how political struggles are
mediated by the institutional setting in which they take place
Course focus:
● Focus on direct violence in this course, focusing on forms of political violence
● Political violence occurs in wartime (conflict where there as >1000 battle-related
deaths in a given year) and in times of ‘peace’ (e.g. electoral violence, ethnic riots)
, Lecture 2:
What is the relation between violence and state formation?
Does war make strong states?
Key concepts:
● State: The organisation that has a monopoly over the legitimate use of physical force
within a given territory in the enforcement of its order (Weber)
● State formation: The long-term processes leading to the centralization of political
power within a sovereign territory
● State capacity: The ability of states to accomplish their goals
○ Often measured by a state’s military power and its bureaucratic/administrative
capacity
The Bellicist approach to state formation
● War made the state, and the state made war - Tilly
● War making requires extraction which in turn requires state building and protection, of
which state building also requires protection
● War leads to a strong state
The Cold War and state making in East Asia
● Stubbs 1999
○ The Cold War context helped several Asian states build their military and
bureaucratic capacity
○ But, US aid was key
The Cold War and state making in Latin America
● Centeno 2002
○ War in Latin America did not lead to state-building
○ No incentive for governments to extract from the population
■ Other revenue sources
■ The scale of war was not total
○ The Spanish colonial state meant that the bureaucratic apparatus was very
weak
Alternative Explanations for State Formation
● Trade makes the state
● The modern state originates in ideological change
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