In 1956, a group of Waorani men killed five North American missionaries in Ecuador. The event cemented the Waorani's reputation as ""wild Amazonian Indians"" in the eyes of the outside world. It also added to the myth of the violent Amazon created by colonial writers and still found in academia and the state development agendas across the region.

Victims and Warriors examines contemporary violence in the context of political and economic processes that transcend local events. Casey High explores how popular imagery of Amazonian violence has become part of Waorani social memory in oral histories, folklore performances, and indigenous political activism. As Amazonian forms of social memory merge with constructions of masculinity and other intercultural processes, the Waorani absorb missionaries, oil development, and logging depredations into their legacy of revenge killings and narratives of victimhood. High shows that these memories of past violence form sites of negotiation and cultural innovation, and thus violence comes to constitute a central part of Amazonian sociality, identity, and memory.

In August 1870, during a fair in the isolated French village of Hautefaye, a gruesome murder was committed in broad daylight that aroused the indignation of the entire country. A young nobleman, falsely accused of shouting republican slogans, was savagely tortured for hours by a mob of peasants who later burned him alive. Rumors of cannibalism stirred public fascination, and the details of the case were dramatically recounted in the popular press. While the crime was rife with political significance, the official inquiry focused on its brutality. Justice was swift: the mob’s alleged ringleaders were guillotined at the scene of the crime the following winter.

The Village of Cannibals is a fascinating inquiry by historian Alain Corbin into the social and political ingredients of an alchemy that transformed ordinary people into executioners in nineteenth-century France. Corbin’s chronicle of the killing is significant for the new light it sheds on the final eruption of peasant rage in France to end in murder. No other author has investigated this harrowing event in such depth or brought to its study such a wealth of perspectives.

Corbin explores incidents of public violence during and after the French Revolution and illustrates how earlier episodes in France’s history provide insight into the mob’s methods and choice of victim. He describes in detail the peasants’ perception of the political landscape and the climate of fear that fueled their anxiety and ignited long-smoldering hatreds. Drawing on the minutes of court proceedings, accounts of contemporary journalists, and testimony of eyewitnesses, the author offers a precise chronology of the chain of events that unfolded on the fairground that summer afternoon. His detailed investigation into the murder at Hautefaye reveals the political motivations of the murderers and the gulf between their actions and the sensibilities of the majority of French citizens, who no longer tolerated violence as a viable form of political expression. The book will be welcomed by scholars, students, and general readers for its compelling insights into the nature of collective violence.

A human rights lawyer travels to hot zones around the globe, before and after the September 11 attacks, to document abuses committed by warlords, terrorist groups, and government counterterrorism forces. Whether reporting on al Qaeda safe houses, the mechanics of the Pentagon’s smartest bombs, his interviews with politicians and ordinary civilians, or his own brush with death outside Kabul, John Sifton wants to help us understand violence—what it is, and how we think and speak about it.

For the human rights community, the global war on terror brought unprecedented challenges. Of special concern were the secret detention centers operated by the CIA as it expanded into a paramilitary force, and the harsh treatment of prisoners throughout Iraq and Afghanistan. In drafting legal memoranda that made domestic prosecution for these crimes impossible, Sifton argues, the United States possessed not only the detainees but the law itself. Sifton recounts his efforts to locate secret prisons and reflects on the historical development of sanctioned military or police violence—from hand-to-hand combat to the use of drones—and the likelihood that technology will soon enable completely automated killing.

Sifton is equally concerned to examine what people have meant by nonviolent social change, and he asks whether pure nonviolence is ever possible. To invoke rights is to invoke the force to uphold them, he reminds us. Ultimately, advocates for human rights can only shame the world into better behavior, and their work may involve advocating the very violence they deplore.

'Trolls for Trump', virtual rape, fake news - social media discourse, including forms of virtual and real violence, has become a formidable, yet elusive, political force. What characterizes online vitriol? How do we understand the narratives generated, and also address their real-world - even life-and-death - impact? How can hatred, bullying, and dehumanization on social media platforms be addressed and countered in a post-truth world? This book unpicks discourses, metaphors, media dynamics, and framing on social media, to begin to answer these questions. Written for and by cultural and media studies scholars, journalists, political philosophers, digital communication professionals, activists and advocates, this book makes the connections between theoretical approaches from cultural and media studies and practical challenges and experiences 'from the field', providing insight into a rough media landscape.

Violence was endemic to rural South African society from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. But acts of violence were not inherent in African culture; rather, violence resulted from the ways in which Africans navigated the hazardous social and political landscape imposed by white rule. Focusing on the Eastern Cape province, Sean Redding investigates the rise of large-scale lethal fights among men, increasingly coercive abduction marriages, violent acts resulting from domestic troubles and witchcraft accusations within families and communities, and political violence against state policies and officials. 

Many violent acts attempted to reestablish and reinforce a moral, social, and political order among Africans. However, what constituted a moral order changed as white governance became more intrusive, land became scarcer, and people reconstructed their notions of “traditional” culture. State policies became obstacles around which Africans had to navigate by invoking the idea of tradition, using the state’s court system, alleging the use of witchcraft, or engaging in violent threats and acts. Redding’s use of multiple court cases and documents to discuss several types of violence provides a richer context for the scholarly conversation about the legitimation of violence in traditions, family life, and political protest.

Focusing on overt and covert violence and bringing attention to the many ways violence inflects and infects the teaching, administration, and scholarship of composition, Violence in the Work of Composition examines both forms of violence and the reciprocal relationships uniting them across the discipline. Addressing a range of spaces, the collection features chapters on classroom practices, writing centers, and writing program administration, examining the complicated ways writing instruction is interwoven with violence, as well as the equally complicated ways writing teachers may recognize and resist the presence and influence of violence in their work.
 
This book provides a focused, nuanced, and systematic discussion of violence and its presence and influence across pedagogical and administrative sites. Violence in the Work of Composition offers a close look at the nature of violence as it emerges in the work of composition; provides strategies for identifying violence, especially covert violence, addressing its impact and preventing its eruption across many sites; and invites readers to reflect on both the presence of violence and the hope for its cessation. Contributors consider, first, how compositionists can recognize the ways their work inadvertently enacts and/or perpetuates violence and, second, how they can intervene and mitigate that violence.
 
Rich with the voices of myriad stakeholders, Violence in the Work of Composition initiates an essential conversation about violence and literacy education at a time when violence in its many forms continues to shape our culture, communities, and educational systems.
 
Contributors: Kerry Banazek, Katherine Bridgman, Eric Camarillo, Elizabeth Chilbert Powers, Joshua Daniel, Lisa Dooley, Allison Hargreaves, Jamila Kareem, Lynn C. Lewis, Trevor Meyer, Cathryn Molloy, Kellie Sharp-Hoskins, Ellen Skirvin, Krista Speicher Sarraf, Thomas Sura, James Zimmerman
 

Violent acts over the past fifteen years have profoundly altered civil rituals, cultural identity, and the meaning of place in Tel Aviv. Three events in particular have shed light on the global rule of urban space in the struggle for territory, resources, and power: the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin in 1995 in the city council square; the suicidal bombing at the Dolphinarium Discothèque along the shoreline in 2001; and bombings in the Neve Shaanan neighborhood in 2003.

Tali Hatuka uses an interdisciplinary framework of urban theory and sociopolitical theory to shed light on the discourse regarding violent events to include an analysis of the physical space where these events take place. She exposes the complex relationships among local groups, the state, and the city, challenging the national discourse by offering a fresh interpretation of contesting forces and their effect on the urban environment.

Perhaps the most valuable contribution of this book is its critical assessment of the current Israeli reality, which is affected by violent events that continually alter the everyday life of its citizens. Although these events have been widely publicized by the media, there is scant literature focusing on their impact on the urban spaces where people live and meet. In addition, Hatuka shows how sociopolitical events become crucial defining moments in contemporary lived experience, allowing us to examine universal questions about the way democracy, ideology, and memory are manifested in the city.

Roger Lane uses the statistics on violent death in Philadelphia from 1839 to 1901 to study the behavior of the living. His extensive research into murder, suicide, and accident rates in Philadelphia provides an excellent factual foundation for his theories. A computerized study of every homicide indictment during the sixty-two years covered is the source of the most detailed information. Analysis of suicide and accident statistics reveals differences in behavior patterns between the sexes, the races, young and old, professional and laborer, native and immigrant, and how these patterns changed overtime.

Using both these group differences and the changing overall incidence of the three forms of death, Lane synthesizes a comprehensive theory of the influences of industrial urbanization on social behavior. He believes that the demands of the rising industrial system, as transmitted through factory, school, and bureaucracy, combined to socialize city dwellers in new ways, to raise the rate of suicide, and to lower rates of simple accident and murder. Finally, Lane suggests a relation between these developments and the violent disorder in the postindustrial city, which has lost the older mechanisms of socialization without finding any effective new ones. Original and probing, Lane's combination of statistics and theory makes this a significant new work in social, urban, and medical history.