The Bitter Aloe Project: Building a Prosopographic Understanding of Apartheid-Era Violence Through Advanced Machine LearningStephen Davis, University of KentuckyResearch Grant, 2021–2022 The Bitter Aloe Project uses machine learning models to extract data from large volumes of witness testimony and incident descriptions produced by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Our goal is to open new avenues for research into political violence in South Africa during the apartheid era by bringing new forms of legibility to this massive archive through the extraction of data. This phase of the project is attempting to harness these cultivated datasets to build a prosopography of witnesses that appeared before the commission. Prosopography is a genre of historical writing that consists of collective biographies of entire classes of individuals. The basic analytical assumption of prosopography is that collective biography can reveal more about a given time and place if common interests, outlooks, and motivations can be collated across a specific category of influential individuals. In general, conventional prosopography defines its subjects based on their social status. In its earliest form, prosopography focused on the lives of elites in the ancient world, but the subsequent impact of social history on the field shifted the focus of prosopography to the lives of ordinary people, where sources permitted. The datasets we cultivated from TRC records allow for a new kind of prosopography that focuses on the experiences of victims, their families, or perpetrators. Our intention in writing such a prosopography is to use data to draw connections between individuals who had shared experiences of political violence, but may or may not otherwise fit within the same social category. So, unlike the prosopographies of classical elites, this ongoing work attempts to shed new light on political violence by grouping individuals by experience rather than status. Navigating archives by the meanings contained in a statement preserves the humanistic qualities of testimony that make it such a compelling and useful vessel for documenting human rights abuses. This approach would have been impossible without new developments occurring within the field of natural language processing. In particular, we employed an advanced technique known as document embedding to create a semantic search method that can string together lists of individuals who explained their experience of political violence in similar ways. This approach effectively allows us to read across dozens if not hundreds of testimonies by allowing a machine learning algorithm to identify semantic similarities that can be used to find commonalities that might be invisible to keyword searches, or prohibitively difficult to collate through close reading. One practical example of the application of this method relates to expressions of grief, a common feature of witness testimonies. Witnesses who appeared before the commission often spent a lengthy portion of their time describing the sense of loss they felt after a loved one was severely injured, imprisoned, murdered, or disappeared. This issue of grief is well suited to a prosopography of experience because it links so many individuals across various social categories, but the sheer volume of this material makes parsing it into manageable and meaningful categories difficult without advanced computational methods. With document embedding we began to see the complete contours of a highly detailed typology of grief borne out in the expressions of a wide range of witnesses. This typology is far more reflective of the contents of the entire corpus than would have been possible with exhaustive keyword searches using user-generated lists of synonymous terms, or manual identification of related expressions through close readings of testimony after testimony. Our primary finding is that machine learning methods such as document embedding have the potential to revolutionize the study of truth commission records. All too often, truth commissions produce extraordinarily descriptions and testimonies documenting human rights violations, but do not have the time or resources necessary to make their resultant archive truly accessible. Researchers and ordinary users alike can navigate document embeddings using queries that follow their desired lines of inquiry, rather than engage in the trial and error of guessing which keywords might turn up a useful result. Navigating archives by the meanings contained in a statement preserves the humanistic qualities of testimony that make it such a compelling and useful vessel for documenting human rights abuses. These techniques, for the first time, make such navigation possible.
Cataloging Murder: Tracking Violence Against Public Figures in Central AmericaLaura Blume, University of Nevada, RenoResearch Grant, 2021–2022 This award funded the creation and expansion of the Violence Against Public Figures (VAPF) dataset. This dataset tracks incidents of lethal violence in Central America against a broad array of public figures, all of whom are important to the functioning of democratic society. VAPF considers four main categories of public figures: members of the media (e.g., journalists and radio show hosts), politicians, judicial officials (e.g., judges, lawyers, and prosecutors), and activists. We are tracking violence against these four broad categories of public figure over a fifteen-year period (2008 to 2022) in all seven Central American countries: Guatemala, El Salvador, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. While data verification is ongoing, our preliminary findings show that Honduras has the highest level of violence against public figures, followed by Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Panama, with Costa Rica and Belize having the lowest levels of violence against public figures. Violence increased significantly against Honduran public figures following the 2009 coup, and, while still extremely high, it has decreased since peaking in the postcoup period (2010–2013). Nicaragua has experienced increased violence, with over one hundred public figures killed since 2015, corresponding to rising repression and authoritarianism under the Ortega regime. Notably, the violence against public figures increased before the massive prodemocracy protests of 2018 drew international attention to increasing authoritarianism in the country. This dataset tracks incidents of lethal violence in Central America against a broad array of public figures, all of whom are important to the functioning of democratic society. Our data on the circumstances of these public figures’ deaths shows clearly that these are not incidents of people being in the “wrong place at the wrong time,” as most individuals in the VAPF dataset are killed in ways that clearly show they were specifically targeted (e.g., shot over ten times in their home). In terms of who is being targeted, in Nicaragua as well as in the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, we see that activists are the most likely targets of assassinations. The focus of the activists’ work varies, but overall, we see Indigenous, environmental, land rights, LGBTQ, labor and union leaders being the categories of activists most commonly targeted. Our preliminary data also shows that leftists (both activists and politicians) are disproportionately targeted in several countries throughout the region, most notably in the Northern Triangle, as well as to a lesser extent in Panama. Consistent with previous research (Del Bene et al. 2018; Glazebrook and Opoku 2018; Le Billon and Lujala 2020; Lynch et al. 2018), Indigenous activists and social leaders are disproportionately targeted. Judicial officials are targeted slightly more often than activists in Panama and Costa Rica, with several of these incidents allegedly related to organized crime and drug trafficking. More broadly, we hope VAPF draws increased scholarly attention to violence against judicial officials since the targeted killing of judicial officials undermines already weak and overburdened judicial systems and increases the incidence of impunity. The highest rate of targeted killings of judicial figures occurred in Honduras, with 142 judicial assassinations. While our data shows that over 80 percent of public figures who are killed are male, this is in part due to women still being underrepresented in many sectors. For example, a mere 3.2 percent of mayors and 12.7 percent of city council members in Guatemala are women. The assassinations of high-profile women have clear consequences for women in a variety of public/prominent positions and are likely to further hinder women’s efforts to gain equal representation in the region (Blume et al. 2023). References Blume, Laura, Diana Meza, and Piper Heath. 2023. et al., “Honduran Women Leaders in the Crosshairs.” Nacla, January 31. Del Bene, Daniela, Arnim Scheidel, and Leah Temper. 2018. “More Dams, More Violence? A Global Analysis on Resistances and Repression Around Conflictive Dams Through Co-produced Knowledge.” Sustain Sci 13: 617–633. Glazebrook, Trish, and Emmanuela Opoku. 2018. “Defending the Defenders; Environmental Protectors, Climate Change and Human Rights.” Ethics and the Environment 23 (2): 83–109. Le Billon, Phillippe, and Päivi Lujala. 2020, “Environmental and Land Defenders: Global Patterns and Determinants of Repression.” Global Environmental Change 65. Michael J. Lynch, Paul B. Stretesky, and Michael A. Long. 2018. “Green Criminology and Native Peoples: The Treadmill of Production and the Killing of Indigenous Environmental Activists.” Theoretical Criminology 22: 318–341.
Rebel Tactics, Local Public Support, and the Upcoming Phase of Peace Talks in Southern ThailandMargherita Belgioioso, University of KentResearch Grant, 2021 Understanding the local legitimacy of rebel groups in contested areas can be challenging because it is generally not directly observable. The existing literature assumed that rebel legitimacy depended on the use of violent or nonviolent tactics. However, there had been limited empirical work directly testing this idea. This research project aimed to fill the gap by examining how public support varied based on the tactics employed by rebels. This knowledge could be instrumental in shaping stable peace talks and negotiations, as rebels with broader support tend to have more stable peace agreements. The project had two primary objectives: (1) to provide negotiators with systematic evidence for evaluating the legitimacy levels of various rebel groups involved in a civil war, and (2) to advance the growing experimental knowledge regarding the impact of rebel tactical choices on public opinions. The research involved conducting two survey experiments in conflict-affected provinces of Thailand in collaboration with a local survey provider, Deep South Watch. These experiments aimed to map local public opinion response to specific rebel tactics by presenting survey respondents with randomized information about these tactics and then measuring the extent of support they expressed for the rebels and their leaders. This research addressed a global issue by examining how local support for rebel groups in civil wars varies based on the rebels’ behavior, specifically their tactical choices. The study then tested the hypothesis that nonviolent tactics enhanced the local legitimacy of rebel groups by examining four specific nonviolent tactics. It also assessed whether the use of violent tactics against soft targets reduced local public support, as suggested by several rationalist studies. Additionally, it explored the effect of internal “democratic” processes, arguing that rebels’ use of elections to designate leaders increased the local legitimacy of their group. This research addressed a global issue by examining how local support for rebel groups in civil wars varies based on the rebels’ behavior, specifically their tactical choices. The project hypothesized that only tactics that demonstrated the rebels’ ability to impose sufficient costs on the opponent to induce a change in behavior would influence local attitudes toward rebel groups, making them more prominent actors in the conflict. The direction of this change in attitudes depended on the audience’s perception of the morality of each tactic. Nonviolent actions were universally seen as moral, as they signalled respect for human life and offered the potential for peaceful conflict resolution. The study rigorously tested these expectations through analysis of the data obtained from the two survey experiments conducted in conflict-affected areas of southern Thailand. The findings suggested that large-scale nonviolent protests led to a more favorable overall public opinion of rebel groups. However, self-immolations and terrorism against civilians generated both more favorable and more unfavorable opinions, highlighting their polarizing effect. Finally, the study indicated that terrorist attacks on infrastructure had made local public opinion of dissidents less unfavorable but had not made it more favorable.
Valuable Resources: Women, Conflict, and Modern Mining in RwandaLaine Munir, African Leadership University/ University of Rwanda's Center of Excellence in BiodiversityResearch Grant, 2020 Rich in minerals like tin, tantalum, and tungsten (3T), Rwanda has been closing informal artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) operations in favor of larger, corporate mining enterprises over the last decade. The government and companies argue that this increase in legal regulation improves outcomes through enhanced protection against gender-based violence (GBV) and discriminatory employment for the estimated fifty thousand women living near mining sites. This exploratory research project, “Women, Conflict, and Modern Mining in Rwanda” (WCMM), inquires whether increased legalization of 3T mining operations could somehow alter physical, structural, or environmental violence against women during this formalization process. Based on qualitative content analysis in NVivo, the findings drew directly from sixty semistructured interviews, eighteen focus group discussions, and twelve participant observations, and indirectly from twelve mapmaking workshops with women who are full-time employees, seasonal miners, and farmers near six extraction sites. The goal was to understand better how rural women fare during Rwanda’s state formalization of the extraction process and to use participatory action research (PAR) to give voices to their experiences with economic, physical, and environmental violence. Three salient findings emerged. The goal was to understand better how rural women fare during Rwanda's state formalization of the extraction process and to use participatory action research (PAR) to give voices to their experiences with economic, physical, and environmental violence. First, state formalization of 3T mineral extraction, moving from ASM to legalized and more extensive operations, changes the justice pathways for women seeking remedies for mining-related grievances. It alters the postcolonial landscape of legal pluralism in extractive communities. On the one hand, legal mining instills codified rules to keep women physically safe, to implement gender quotas, and to close the gender wage gap. Legal employment also positions women to report crimes without fear of being investigated for informal labor practices. Yet the avenues for remedying a wrong are more nebulous for those working in official operations. Women miners often do not know the private security actors nor understand the internal structures for elevating a complaint at an office. Meanwhile, women reported feeling comfortable taking some violations to their customary local leaders, who they know personally and who are imbued with traditional norms about GBV. Thus, the formalization of mining has not given women formalized access to justice for mining-related conflicts. Instead, it changes their challenges from localized stigma and traditional norms with local leaders to distancing and unclear pathways vis-à-vis company management. This project’s second line of inquiry examined how cooperative business models, rather than direct company employment, might mitigate economic and physical violence against women in extractive industries. Through feminist political ecology’s intersectionality framework, the study asked how cooperatives might improve women’s outcomes: financial gains, gender violence reduction, and legal awareness and empowerment. This study finds that the selected mining cooperative, a case study, does not improve women’s financial outcomes or lower violence rates more than private companies in Rwanda. However, cooperative work may expand women’s rights conceptions and legal consciousness. Cooperative members demonstrated a greater understanding of supply chains, government functions, and conflict resolution pathways. Together, these outcomes indicate that Rwanda’s formalization of 3T extraction could be a promising avenue for reducing GBV in mining communities, but that such legal reforms must be clearly translated into awareness, behavior modification, and enforcement at the company and local levels.
Fighting and Bargaining Across Two Centuries of International ConflictEric Min, University of California, Los Angeles Research Grant, 2020 How do the outcomes of fighting on the battlefield impact states’ willingness to engage in diplomacy and seek peace? Over the last two hundred years, two-thirds of wars between countries have ended through a negotiated settlement that stops conflict short of complete military victory or defeat. Nonetheless, scholarship has failed to adequately address when, why, and how belligerents choose to engage in diplomacy during war, much less the question of what factors account for the outcomes of these negotiations. One of the major obstacles to such research is the lack of systematic data on the battlefield activity that undoubtedly shapes actors’ decisions to continue or stop fighting. This project addresses this shortcoming by creating a dataset of over two thousand individual battles that took place in all interstate wars between 1816 and 2003. For each battle, the dataset contains information on start and end dates, outcomes, participants, casualties, and location. The data endeavor involved a dozen research assistants poring over several hundred distinct encyclopedias, books, and other historical sources. To date, the result represents the most comprehensive and thoroughly researched quantitative effort to track the ebbs and flows of violence during interstate wars. These data permit an analysis of the shifting fortunes of fighting both within and across almost a hundred wars. The battle data help challenge assumptions held by many scholars and practitioners that it “cannot hurt” for third-party actors and institutions to promote diplomacy during war, and that negotiations are most likely to produce peace when belligerents find themselves in a costly stalemate. Pairing this battle data with a recently published dataset on wartime negotiations paints a complex picture of how diplomacy is used in conflict. In particular, I am able to identify a set of conditions under which belligerents are likely to negotiate sincerely (in good faith, with intentions of finding peace) and a set under which they are likely to negotiate insincerely (in bad faith, with intentions of using diplomacy to promote the war effort by creating propaganda and stalling for time). I demonstrate that an international environment that applies high pressure to belligerents to negotiate will permit parties to talk regardless of their sincere or insincere intentions. Meanwhile, battlefield activities that strongly favor one side will increase the chance that negotiations that do take place are sincere. Therefore, the combination of strong external diplomatic pressures and indeterminate battlefield activity enables insincere negotiations that may fuel war rather than end it. The idea—and empirical evidence—of insincere negotiations makes two significant contributions. In the scholarly realm, this result contradicts a long-standing belief in the field of international relations that wartime diplomacy is a mechanical process that has no strategic value beyond ending wars. On the policymaking front, the battle data help challenge assumptions held by many scholars and practitioners that it “cannot hurt” for third-party actors and institutions to promote diplomacy during war, and that negotiations are most likely to produce peace when belligerents find themselves in a costly stalemate.
Super Cops, Extrajudicial Killings, and Popular Imaginaries of Policing in Facebook Groups in NairobiPamela Chepngetich Mainye, Columbia UniversityResearch Grant, 2020 The overall goal of my research was to probe the continued public consent to extrajudicial killings by police through the lens of popular cultural forms in various Facebook groups in Nairobi. For several years, especially the period between 2015 and 2019, Facebook groups became important new spaces for mobilizing Eastlands Nairobi residents in “digital” community policing platforms, spaces which convened police, members of the public, and gangsters. In many ways, these Facebook groups provided insights into the complexity of policing “ungoverned” spaces, as well as into the construction and mobilization of opinion around extrajudicial killings of suspects. Central to the popularity of Facebook as a space to mobilize consent for extrajudicial killings is the phenomenon of “super cops.” “Super cops” describe an unorthodox yet deeply embedded form of urban policing in Kenya where specific police officers (mostly male), through a complex mix of public consent and state sanction, use extrajudicial killings to “manage” violent crime. This study proposed a methodology of digital ethnographic work, surveys and textual analysis, and moving beyond a human rights discourse, to identify and explain the (public) discourses, popular arts, and imaginaries that provided scaffolding and legitimacy for police extrajudicial killings in Kenya. Findings from the Facebook group discourse indicated that Facebook was primarily used in Eastlands (specifically in the Community Policing Groups run by police) to mobilize opinion around extrajudicial killings. Using metaphors, sloganeering, and specific appeals such as videos drawn from CCTV footage, the police were able to make a case for and give rationality to extrajudicial killings, despite scattered opposition to it as a “crude” policing method. Additionally, the online groups not only mainstreamed a specific security discourse whereby populist methods of dealing with violent crime are adopted but also legitimized it by giving it a sheen of public consent. This study proposed a methodology of digital ethnographic work, surveys and textual analysis, and moving beyond a human rights discourse, to identify and explain the (public) discourses, popular arts, and imaginaries that provided scaffolding and legitimacy for police extrajudicial killings in Kenya. Furthermore, Facebook discourse revealed the use of local metaphors that drew from the street lingua franca of sheng that excused, naturalized, and used flippancy to downplay extrajudicial killings of suspected gangsters. Accompanying the metaphors and stock phrases equating crime with disease and vermin is an abiding heroization and veneration of “super cops” through illustrations that take the format of Marvel superhero comics. These illustrations mask the illegality and sheer viciousness of the methods they endorse—and the reality that real people and real lives are at stake. Archival work that featured leading dailies in Kenya from the 1960s to the 2000s showed laudatory journalistic coverage of police-gangster encounters, where specific police (men) were celebrated for their ruthlessness. The modus operandi across these stories was similar, with a lone cop acting outside the boundaries of law, dispensing on-the-spot justice to suspected violent criminals. Journalists framed super cops as necessary evils, and as mysterious, and in many ways, altruistic figures. In summary, what appeared online in Facebook groups as crime discourse reflected public perceptions of crime, as well as circumstances that residents of Eastlands have adopted as their everyday lived reality across time. Additionally, while super cops were feared, venerated, and portrayed as mysterious in both online and print coverage, their continued existence is considered a necessary compromise that emerges from a broken judicial system, an urban space replete with crime and small arms, and a populace that desires to live with guarantees of security in an urban space where the reach of the state is weak.
In the Name of Christ: Religious Violence and Its Legitimacy in Mexico (1920–2020)Gema Kloppe-Santamaría, Loyola University of ChicagoResearch Grant, 2020 My research project examines why and under what historical conditions religion contributes to, legitimates, or deters the use of violence across different periods of time in Mexico. In order to answer this question, I analyze the complex and contentious relationship between religion and violence during the foundational decades between 1920 and 1960, a period that witnessed the Cristero War (1926–1929), the Second Cristero War (1935–1938), and the launch and intensification of a nation-wide anti-Protestant campaign (1945–1960). Based on the extensive review of primary documents from official and ecclesiastical sources, historical newspapers, religious publications, and secondary literature on religious violence in Latin America and beyond, my research explores the theological, political, and cultural drivers that contributed to Catholics’ understanding of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of violence. I analyze the complex and contentious relationship between religion and violence during the foundational decades between 1920 and 1960. My historical and sociological exploration of religious violence in Mexico recognizes the conflicts and divisions that existed between the clergy and lay groups and organizations, as well as within the clergy, regarding the legitimacy of violence. It highlights the intersections between spiritual, political, and economic interests in the organization and legitimation of belligerent forms of religious activism. My research builds on the works of scholars such as Scott Appleby, Atalia Omer, and William Cavanaugh, who have called into question essentialist and transhistorical interpretations of religion and of religious individuals as inherently prone to violent and irrational conduct. It also builds upon a rich historiography on religious conflict in Mexico, which, particularly in reference to the Cristero War, has taken the impact of religion on Catholics’ forms of activism seriously. As discussed by Matthew Butler and most recently Robert Weis and Robert Curley, Catholic militants were driven by political interests and economic grievances, but also by a genuine interest in defending their faith. By going beyond the Cristero Wars and a focus on the history of the state-Church conflict in Mexico, my project arrived at four main findings that can be summarized as follows: Catholics’ recourse to violence in twentieth-century Mexico did not follow the mandates or the official position of the Catholic Church. Instead, Catholic militants and organizations liberally reinterpreted the meanings of martyrdom, just war, and tyrannicide in order to justify or make sense of their use of violence against so-called infidels. Church-state relationships did not determine patterns of religious violence in Mexico. This becomes evident in the fact that religious violence occurred both during periods characterized by explosive and confrontational interactions between state and ecclesiastical authorities, as well as during times when this relationship was for the most part peaceful and even collaborative. Religious violence has historically intersected with economic and political interests in Mexico, including Catholics’ overall rejection of the state’s land reform, their hostile reaction towards individuals and ideologies considered external or foreign, local electoral politics, and conflicts over access to resources. This does not deny the importance of religion, but rather illustrates the ways in which religious beliefs have historically been embodied, practiced, and reimagined by religious militants in their everyday lives.4. The timing and geographical distribution of religious violence has followed from national and transnational factors that bolstered local dynamics of conflict. Although higher ecclesiastical authorities had an important impact in shaping Catholic militants’ ideologies, in practice, parish priests had a greater and more direct role in either instigating or de-escalating violent forms of religious activism. References Kloppe-Santamaría, Gema. “Martyrs, Fanatics, and Pious Militants: Religious Violence and the Secular State in 1930s Mexico.” The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History 79, no. 2 (2022): 197–227. https://doi.org/10.1017/tam.2021.149.
“Twas Always Known as the Bloody Frontier”: Rumors, Memories, and Bosnian Identity in the Migrant CrisisDorian Juric, University of OttawaResearch Grant, 2020 This project uses detailed interviews, ethnographic data, participant observation, archival materials, and various antagonistic examples of folklore (songs, jokes, rumors, conspiracy theories, and more) to better understand nativist responses to an overwhelming influx of migrants in the northwestern Krajina region of Bosnia and Herzegovina. There was a large inpouring of Middle Eastern, African, Asian, and other migrants between 2018 and 2021 that overwhelmed the region’s resources and prompted a range of responses from the local population. I sought to understand the crisis from the resident perspective; to contextualize the historical, cultural, and social valences that were used to justify antagonistic actions taken against the migrants; and to couch that understanding in local frames of identity. From November 2021 to March 2022, I conducted extensive background research into the crisis, followed antimigrant groups on social media and conducted virtual interviews with some active members of those groups. Between April and November of 2022, I conducted ethnographic research, participant observation, and in-person interviews in the Bosnian city of Bihać and the wider Krajina region, as well as archival research in two folklore and ethnology archives, one in Bihać and one in Zagreb, Croatia. The research produced seventy-eight informative interviews and a range of other data regarding the crisis timeline and how locals responded to and understood the event. Early waves of migrants were readily tolerated and accepted, but once the numbers increased exponentially and perpetrators of crimes appeared among the migrants’ ranks, Bosnians turned antagonistic. Sluggish and inadequate responses from the central government exacerbated the issue and a large contingent of Bihać began to protest the impromptu migrant camp that had been established in the city center, demanding that the migrants be moved beyond city limits. Money from the European Union was finally used to answer these demands. Antagonistic actors used this success as a platform to try to pivot into political positions, though they were largely unsuccessful. I sought to understand the crisis from the resident perspective; to contextualize the historical, cultural, and social valences that were used to justify antagonistic actions taken against the migrants; and to couch that understanding in local frames of identity. I was able to interview a wide range of locals, including many who were instrumental in organizing the protests. Some of the interesting and startling findings of the research included the extent of the local and national networks that antimigrant organizers created. These included unofficial task forces organized to investigate migrant behavior, track their movements, and to share information from within aid organizations. Another notable aspect was the micro-economies that immediately arose when the migrants arrived. Locals rented rooms to wealthier migrants, took payment for accepting wire transfers for them, bought excess humanitarian goods from them, smuggled them across the European border, and more. These entanglements made for constant surprises in resident/migrant relations. Vehement xenophobes and racists often proved to be deeply socially entangled with migrants with whom they frequently bonded on a personal level. Conversely, many ostensible supporters working in migrant camps and with aid groups often proved to be highly critical of migrants and used their positions to inform nativist organizers. There were prominent “moral entrepreneurs” who tried to solidify their positions through social and other virtual media, by fostering moral panic and shaming locals into taking antagonistic positions. Their claims were backed by conspiracy theories about migrant “sleeper cells” used by Serbian and Croatian politicians to destabilize the Muslim regions of Bosnia. These theories tapped into widespread fears among the Muslim population who still carry the trauma of the wars in the 1990s and the genocide enacted upon their conationals. The fact that the rhetoric mirrored some of the “dog whistle” language that is notable among similar Western ideologues is informative. So too is the use of various social tactics by many locals to deflect and deflate the xenophobia of their peers and humanize the migrants.
Understanding Violence and Incarceration in Africa: Evidence from British Colonies and Postcolonial StatesKatherine Bruce-Lockhart, University of WaterlooDavid M. Anderson, University of WarwickResearch Grant, 2020 This project provided the first systematic comparative study of incarceration in former British African colonies. Our aims were to assess and analyze the factors determining the level and nature of violence in colonial prisons, to examine and explain the similarities and differences between the penal systems of British African colonies, and to trace the long-term legacies of these violent systems in postcolonial states. Despite extensive scholarly work on the history of the prison in Africa, empirical evidence on incarceration has been largely ignored, with scholarship instead relying on Eurocentric theories. This lack of engagement with empirical data has made it difficult for scholars in African Studies to situate their work in broader continental contexts and has also created barriers to engagement with research on Africa for scholars working in other regions. Our team, which included current and former master’s and doctoral students at the University of Waterloo, investigated the use of incarceration as a tool of colonial governance, the use of violent punishment within prisons, and the continuities of these practices in postcolonial states. We conducted archival research in the United Kingdom, Canada, and through online databases, as well as drawing on materials that we had previously collected through research in African and European archives. Ultimately, the colonial legacies of authoritarianism, impunity, and violent punishment continue to have significant effects on penal systems in postcolonial African states. There are two key findings from our research. The first is that violence was afoundational and fundamental aspect of colonial African penal systems. While many scholars have made this argument, our work drew on quantitative data to substantiate this point. For example, we traced the high rate of punishments within prisons (including corporal punishments), which regularly exceeded 50 percent (meaning that there were more than fifty punishments per one hundred prisoners). Since these rates only reflect what authorities officially reported, the frequency of punishments would have been even higher. Second, our work demonstrates the significant continuities between colonial and postcolonial penal systems. Colonial officials relied heavily on incarceration, detention without trial, executions, deportations, military punishments, and other modes of violent punishment, and postcolonial leaders have drawn extensively on colonial penal legislation and punitive practices. Ultimately, the colonial legacies of authoritarianism, impunity, and violent punishment continue to have significant effects on penal systems in postcolonial African states. Addressing such legacies requires robust systemic changes, including moving away from colonial carceral systems and turning to restorative and transformative justice frameworks.
Police Special Operations and Armed Criminal Groups in Rio de JaneiroDaniel Veloso Hirata, Fluminense Federal University, BrazilCarolina Christoph Grillo, Fluminense Federal University, BrazilResearch Grant, 2020 The territorial control exerted by drug-trafficking “factions” and racketeering groups called “milícias” over poor neighborhoods has been a crucial public problem in the Metropolitan Region of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. For more than three decades, police special operations forces in poor neighborhoods (mostly favelas) have been the main instrument of public action aimed at deterring violent crimes. Financial, technological, and human resources of the government of the state of Rio de Janeiro are used to carry out armed incursions into favelas, based on the presumption that this is an effective and unavoidable means of law enforcement. Police raids in favelas are known to be the cause of thousands of civilian casualties, the disruption of the routine of favela residents, and the interruption of public services that operate in these territories. However, it is taken as self-evident that police operations reduce crime rates and that, therefore, restrictions on carrying out these operations would prevent the police from fighting crime. Such assumptions are not based on evidence, because local state authorities don’t maintain a record of police raids. Our research shows that, besides the inefficiency of police raids in lowering crime rates, the lack of democratic controls over police use of lethal force contributes to corruption and violence. Moved by the perspective of data activism and aimed at filling this gap of information, since 2018, our research team, the Group of Studies of New Illegalisms from the Fluminense Federal University (GENI/UFF), has engaged in producing a database on police special operations. The research project, supported by The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, aimed to conduct a scientific investigation into the impact of police special operations on crime rates and disputes among criminal armed groups of drug traffickers and racketeers in Rio de Janeiro. Our objective was to produce evidence-based knowledge to support the public debate about the use of lethal force during police special operations, in support of initiatives aimed at promoting democracy, human rights, and peace. Two fundamental sets of research questions guided the research project. First, to assess if there is a statistical correlation between police special operations and the incidence of criminal offenses. Second, to describe how police raids are distributed in Rio de Janeiro and verify if the police equally target all territories controlled by different armed criminal groups. We analyzed data drawn from the following three sources: (1) official data on occurrence of crimes against life and crimes against property in the interval between 2007 and 2019, produced by the Instituto de Segurança Pública (ISP-RJ); 2) data on police special operations from 2007 to 2019 in favelas of the Metropolitan Region of Rio de Janeiro (MRRJ) from the GENI/UFF database, which gathers information from press sources; 3) the Map of Armed Groups in Rio de Janeiro, jointly elaborated by GENI/UFF, the Fogo Cruzado-RJ, Disque-Denúncia, NEV/USP, and Pista News from complaints about criminal activity registered at the Disque-Denúncia database for the year 2019. Our research results indicated that increases in police operations are not accompanied by decreases in criminal occurrences, but rather the opposite: a greater number of police operations seems to be associated with an increase in crimes against life and does not impact the reduction of property crimes. Our findings also showed that the frequency of police raids is higher in territories controlled by drug factions, particularly Comando Vermelho, and lower in territories controlled by milícias, suggesting that police favor milícias over drug factions. Our hypothesis for interpreting these results is that police incursions in conflagrated territories intensify conflicts between armed groups that dispute these territories, as state action weakens some groups and favors the expansion of others. This problem seems to be compounded by the discretion granted to police teams to conduct special operations without legal authorization, allowing police raids to become a means for imposing the payment of bribes and for facilitating invasions from rival armed groups. Our research shows that, besides the inefficiency of police raids in lowering crime rates, the lack of democratic controls over police use of lethal force contributes to corruption and violence. By allowing police to conduct raids outside of any regulation, the Rio de Janeiro state authorities facilitate the use of the state apparatus for obtaining private gains at the cost of thousands of lives. Bibliography Hirata et al. Operaciones Policiales en Rio de Janeiro (2006-2020) De la brecha estadística al activismo de datos. http://revistascientificas.filo.uba.ar/index.php/runa/article/view/8396 HIRATA et al. Operações policiais no Rio de Janeiro: ativismo de dados e detectabilidade da violência de estado. https://www.unifesp.br/reitoria/caaf/images/CAAF/livro/TELES-CALAZANS_GestaoMortes-Mortos_CAAF2021.pdf Hirata et al. “The Expansion of Milícias in Rio de Janeiro: Political and economic advantages.” Journal of Illicit Economies and Development, 4(3), p.257–271. https://jied.lse.ac.uk/articles/10.31389/jied.140
