Refugees and Police Violence in Calais
An anthropologist reflects on ethical responsibility and everyday violence. Sitting on a bench in a beautiful town-center park in Calais, we speak to a number of Ethiopian refugees…
Tag: Violence
Could Group-Organized Violence Be Rooted in Empathy?
The Samburu people, pastoralists who live in northern Kenya’s semiarid lands, have a rich oral tradition recounting stories of their ancestors. In the late 19th century, one story…
How Culture Allows for War and Peace
Some researchers argue that human warfare develops out of innate tendencies for collective violence and that only culture, or reason, keeps violent and aggressive urges in check. But…
No One Right Way to Peace
When the United Nations drafted The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, it established a vision of peak humanity, articulating what the assembly considered appropriate rules for…
Compassion Sets Humans Apart
When considering the question of whether humans are a naturally aggressive and violent species, it might be good to take a deep breath and have a look at…
How Have Attitudes Toward Extremism Changed Over Time?
Words are more than their dictionary definitions. Amir Ridhwan/Shutterstock This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. The …
When It’s Not Safe to Sleep
Many street dwellers wait to sleep until the sun rises and people bustle through public spaces, providing a level of safety that the homeless cannot find at night.…
A Defense of the Charlottesville Counter-Protesters
Not all forms of violence are created equal. On August 12, violence unfolded at a white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. President Trump’s immediate reaction…
Three Lessons I Learned From Charlottesville
White supremacists surrounded counterprotesters at the University of Virginia campus on August 11. Shay Horse /Associated Press On the evening of August 11, a torch-bearing mob assaulted …
A fear that never ends #fieldnotes
I started my own journey in the Brazilian northeast, on the plane from Rio de Janeiro to Fortaleza, Ceará, with a dream. After wandering around the airport, hot…
Soe Lin Aung: Three theses on the crisis in Rakhine
By now, the main contours of the recent events in Rakhine State, in western Myanmar, are well-known. On August 25, an insurgent group calling itself the Arakan Rohingya…
SHADOW OVER BURMA: THE ROHINGYA CRISIS IN CONTEXT
By Elisa Sandri In late August, alarming reports and harrowing images started to surface from Myanmar. It soon became clear that Rohingya people—a Muslim minority living in a…
Solutionism – The Role of Technology in Solving SocioTechnical Problems
It all began, over a year ago (June 2016), with what author Ethan Zuckerman described as hate-linking. Through this practice, Zuckerman stumbled upon and read an article by…
Bloodshed, Liminality & The Ends Of Egypt’s Revolution
The word “ends” has at least two significant meanings. We can speak of “ends” as goals, aspirations or outcomes. For example, we might ask, “What are the ends…
Is Violence Embedded in Our DNA?
Whether we take the perspective that evolutionary selection made humans prone to violence matters to our sense of ourselves. Are we born to be aggressive or peaceful? David…
Reconsidering How We Honor Those Lost to War
Cities in the southern U.S. are currently under pressure to take down statues of Confederate leaders, whose publicly sanctioned presence is a constant source of injury to many.…
How Our Modern Lifestyles Perpetuate Slavery
An immigrant farmworker listens to activist Ethel Kennedy and a representative from the Florida-based human rights organization Coalition of Immokalee Workers speak as part of the Robert F.…
Ramadan Kareem, my beloved Yemen
Dark clouds over Yemen By Marina de Regt. Last Saturday the holy Muslim month of Ramadan started. Ramadan, a month of fasting and feasting, a month of contemplation,…
Inside Kashmir—A Heroic Fight for Justice
Over the last three decades, India’s occupation of a large portion of Kashmir has brought political strife, widespread oppression, and violence. David Williams/SAPIENS On a hot sunny day…
The Revolutionary Power of Andean Folk Tales
Andean folktales—such as those recounting deals made with merpeople in watery underworlds—are not as innocuous as one might think. James Brunker/Magical Andes Photography In the 1700s, an…
The Anthropoliteia #BlackLivesMatter Syllabus, Week 28: Michelle Stewart, Towards Accomplices not Allies—in the Classroom and the Streets
The editors of Anthropoliteia are happy to continue an ongoing series The Anthropoliteia #BlackLivesMatterSyllabus Project, which will mobilize anthropological work as a pedagogical exercise addressin…
HSR II: Consequences of anti-smuggling and anti-trafficking policies
In the first of two questions of the second roundtable, human smuggling experts share their views on the (un)intended consequences of anti-smuggling and anti-trafficking policies. We assembled a range…
Roundtable II: Responses by Luigi Achilli
What are the unintended consequences of anti-smuggling and anti-trafficking policies? From the perspective of media, border authorities, and public opinion, human smuggling is perceived as an exploita…
Roundtable II: Responses by Alexandra Ricard-Guay
What are the intended/unintended consequences of anti-smuggling and anti-trafficking policies? Alexandra Ricard-Guay is a Research Associate at the European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre…