The study of violence has tended to focus on the political and economic condition under which it is generated, the suffering of victims and the psychology of its interpersonal dynamics. Such work has vastly improved our conceptualizations of violence but ignores the role of perpetrators, their motivations and the social conditions under which they are able to operate. In the context of post-colonial state-building , and more latterly collapse and implosion, community violence, state repression and the phenomena of judicial inquires and panels of reconciliation in the aftermath of civil conflict, foreground the need to better comprehend the role of those who actually do the work of violence - torturers, assassins and terrorists - as much as those who suffer its consequences.

The Legacies of Violence Research Circle would bring together researchers in a variety of disciplines who work on such perpetrators of violence. Many of these researchers grew out of the Legacies of Authoritarianism Research Circle, but some are new. We envisage this potentially vast field of enquiry being organized around five interlocking themes that would be the subject of serial workshops over the coming semesters. Such workshops would also feature a keynote speaker to set the tone and raise some of the issues for subsequent discussion.

1) Perpetrators and the Heroism of Violence
This workshop would bring together different disciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches to the study of perpetrators. We envision this as a prelude to developing a reader on perpetrators, that would have two parts. Part I would include summary readings on the evolution of different disciplinary approaches to perpetrators: psychological, anthropological, and sociological. Part II would include recent approaches to perpetrators, that build on and break out of those traditional disciplinary constraints and boundaries, incorporating media and performance studies, literary and cultural studies.

2) Collaboration and the Culture of Violence
There is a notable absence of any scholarly work on collaborators, although Goldhagen’s recent work on Nazi Germany has made the notion of culture a key concept to invoke in this context. Perpetrators do not operate in a vacuum despite the secrecy and cover-up which often surrounds the work of torturers and death-squads. The paradox here being that this must also be an open secret if the instrumental effects of exemplary violence, as in death squad killings or the routinization of atrocity and torture, are to be achieved. For these reason it is not just the individual psychology and motivations of the perpetrator but the wider context in which they feel themselves justified or even heroic in their actions that needs to be connected with the notion of collaboration. This workshop will address not only the academy’s silence on the subject of collaborators and collaboration, but also silences within particular national communities on collaboration. This workshop would also constitute a reader on collaboration that would begin with a discussion of the existing literature (e.g., Goldhagen, Scarry, Sartre) and invite scholars from a range of disciplines (history, anthropology, political science, literature, visual culture and media studies) to present new work on individual and collective collaboration in violence.

3) The Media of Conflict and the Cultural Imaginary
Linking to the above theme it would be necessary to also consider how specifically the media plays into the cultural production of violence, as notably was the case in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. The Research Circle will work with the UW-News Media Center, specifically to build on our existing collection of television programs about truth commissions and trials around the world. (We hope to add to the collection of 87 videotapes of the South African Truth and Reconciliation series that we purchased from the South African Broadcasting Corporation.) Violent acts may embody complex aspects of symbolism that relate to both order and disorder in a given social context, and it is these symbolic aspects that give violence its many potential meanings. This is a particularly important point when we consider the violent acts taken by peoples around the world in the name of a particular religion or in a belief that these acts conform to a set of “moral” or “patriotic” teachings directly linked to specific ideologies. When atrocity or murder take place they feed into the world of the iconic imagination. Imagination transcends reality and its rational articulation; but in doing so it can bring further violent realities into being. In addition to sponsoring new scholarship by acquiring videotapes of media representations of political violence, we also hope to sponsor a workshop where scholars working on media and the representation of violence would present their work.

4) Memorializing the Authoritarian Past
Much of the literature on memorials focuses on those used to condemn the authoritarian past. But we often hear about efforts to remember the "heroic past" on the part of the old authoritarian order and its supporters. These come in the form of days of commemoration, monuments or other public events. The idea behind this workshop would be to systematically examine this kind of memorializing. We have identified scholars in a variety of countries who have begun this work. Our plan is to bring together these scholars, translate their work into English, and work together to develop an innovative study of the politics behind “counter-memorializing,” the residual political spaces that try to remember the authoritarian past, not to condemn it and call for “nunca mas” (never again), but to glorify it.

5) Vigilantism and Popular Justice Seekers
Scholarly and political interest in the rising rates of crime in countries emerging from authoritarian rule has produced a veritable growth industry for police and military reformers, studies on the link between neo-liberalism and poverty and crime, new militarization, and corruption. Our approach is to root this current crime wave throughout the world to violent pasts. It would examine the legacy of violence in terms of the supply and trade of weapons used in wars and repression, the persistence of a “psychology of war” that survives into peacetime, the enduring glamour of soldier/warrior imagery (particularly among young people), and the echo of past violence through reenactments of past forms of violence and uses of symbols of an earlier period of conflict.

Program of Events and Participants

The Research Circle would include several sets of activities. A steering committee comprised of Jo Ellen Fair (Journalism), Leigh Payne (Political Science), and Neil Whitehead (Anthropology), will contact faculty and graduate students on campus working on these themes to establish a cross-disciplinary circle with representation in various countries around the world. To formally constitute this group, we would like to have the research circle participants present their work at a workshop on campus. In addition to presentations of research, we will hold a planning committee where we tap our campus experts to identify scholars and practitioners around the globe who work on these themes, as well as possible funding sources. We may bring in some outside speakers, using UW Area Studies funds, Anonymous funds, and University Lecture Series funds.

The second part of the project is to seek extra-mural funding for the workshops. We plan to submit a proposal for one of the workshops to the Rockefeller Foundation to hold a small meeting at its Bellagio conference site. We will select the workshop theme based on our initial conversation with UW scholars, particularly which theme we feel we can develop well based on the country and disciplinary expertise in that area. We have identified several other granting agencies that might find one, or more, of the workshops worthy of funding: The H. F. Guggenheim Foundation; NEH - Humanities Focus grants; the MacArthur Foundation; Ford Foundation; Carnegie Foundation; Hewlett Foundation, and other programs at the Rockefeller Foundation.

The third aspect of the project is fund-raising to build the UW News-Media Center’s collection of television footage of transitional justice arrangements around the world. In addition to the granting agencies listed above, we also plan to approach the Pew Charitable Trust and the Annenberg Foundation. Part of this project would also involve support for the workshop on the media.

Fourth, we hope to find support for a graduate student project assistant at the 50% level. This student would carry out much of the communication work for the research circle, build a bibliography of sources and a list of experts for the different workshops, investigate and follow-up on funding sources, and co-edit one or more of the published volumes.

Fifth, we have a new book series with Duke University Press entitled The Cultures and Practices of Violence. The series editors are Neil L. Whitehead, Jo Ellen Fair, and Leigh Payne.

Sixth, we plan to develop at least one cross-disciplinary seminar on the legacies of violence. This may build on the short term research seminar abroad idea within the International Institute and the Study Abroad program or take advantage of on-campus support for teaching across disciplines.

Seventh, we are helping resurrect the international practitioner sabbatical program and a scholars-in-residence program. We are particularly interested in bringing to our campus practitioners and scholars working on issues of violence abroad. We would provide these scholars and practitioners with office space and a computer, internet and library access, an engaged community, and the opportunity to write about, and publicly, present their work. Aloys Habimana, director of Rwanda's leading human rights organization, LIPRODHOR,was our first visiting practitioner at the University of Wisconsin-Madison during 2004-2005. His visit was supported by the Open Society Institute, Human Rights Watch Merck grant, Waterfall Family Charitable Trust, the Division of International Studies,the International Institute, Global Studies, International Humanitarianism project, Brittingham Foundation, and the African Studies Program at UW-Madison.

This research circle builds on the success of the Legacies of Authoritarianism Research Circle, and in some sense may be viewed as its institutional off-spring. Many of the participants, both on- and off-campus also participated in the earlier LOA events. The thinking behind this project at least in part evolved out of the LOA research circle. This Legacies of Violence circle, also draws on the successful strategies developed by LOA: international partnerships and workshops, interdisciplinary and cross-regional dialogues, connection between scholars and practitioners, development of research material holdings, innovative uses of technology, development of innovative pedagogies, graduate student training, and publishing goals.

As the potential of various kinds of funding develops this would also be an opportunity to involve a network of overseas colleagues through web-based participation in live conferencing and discussion. We also plan to build a video library, transferring PAL and NTSC tapes into DVD format that can be indexed and subsequently accessed electronically through our UW News Media lab.