Teaching about political violence: a primer on representation

Abstract

Geography is not generally viewed as a ‘source’ discipline for political violence studies, but this paper begins with the presumption that geography is well disposed to teach courses on the subject. The key purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that engaging issues of political violence is useful for our pedagogy. In particular, teaching about political violence allows geography to address concerns arising from the ‘crisis of representation’. It does so in two ways. First, it provides another venue for teaching about the ‘the other’ and ‘othered places’ in our curricula. Second, it also allows geography to challenge uncritical tropes about political violence as emerging from some peoples and places and not others. As a case study this paper overviews a course entitled Militia Movements in Comparative Perspective. This course was organized around a theoretical unit and four case study units. The case conflicts were chosen to represent conflicts that crossed ideological (right/left) and geographical (Global North/Global South) divides. The course structure is overviewed and a classroom discussion that highlighted questions about representation is described and analysed. The paper concludes by reviewing current efforts to address violence in the discipline, noting problems with these efforts, and suggesting alternatives to them.

Keywords:

• Political violence
• militias
• representation

Notes

Correspondence address: Carolyn Gallaher, School of International Service, American University, 4400 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington, DC 20016, USA. Email: [email protected]

Broad dichotomies like these may disturb poststructuralist readers. My use of them here is not intended, however, to be essentialist. Indeed, these categories often work within the supposedly unified confines of a conflict's competing sides. Thus, understanding relevant conflicts in these terms enables students to assess how divisions across a conflict's competing sides as well those within each side may influence a conflict and underscores the complexity that any conflict resolution practitioner must confront in the field.

Of the 60 faculty employed by the school, only two are trained in geography at the PhD level. In my capacity as the school's geographer I am charged with representing the discipline in my teaching and research, although I am given wide latitude in how to do so.

Andrew Kirby (1997) makes a similar point in a recent article in Political Geography. He argues that the militias are correct to worry about government violence against its citizenry, noting that the consolidation of the means of violence by domestic agencies in the US, such as the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, the US Border Control and the FBI, is unprecedented in peacetime. He stops short, however, of endorsing the movement's position on guns.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carolyn Gallaher

Correspondence address: Carolyn Gallaher, School of International Service, American University, 4400 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington, DC 20016, USA. Email: [email protected]