Editing Violence (section)

=== Geographical context ===
{{Essay-like|date=December 2023|section}}
Violence, as defined in the [[dictionary of human geography]], "appears whenever power is in jeopardy" and "in and of itself stands emptied of strength and purpose: it is part of a larger matrix of socio-political power struggles".<ref name="Hyndman, J. 2009">Hyndman, J. (2009) Violence in Gregory, D., Johnston, R., Pratt, G., Watts, M. and Whatmore, S. eds. ''Dictionary of Human Geography'', Wiley-Blackwell, NJ: 798–99.</ref> Violence can be broadly divided into three broad categories—[[direct violence]], [[structural violence]] and [[cultural violence]].<ref name="Hyndman, J. 2009" /> Thus defined and delineated, it is of note, as Hyndman says, that "[[Human geography|geography]] came late to theorizing violence"<ref name="Hyndman, J. 2009" /> in comparison to other social sciences. Social and human geography, rooted in the [[Humanism|humanist]], [[Marxist]], and [[Feminist theory|feminist]] subfields that emerged following the early positivist approaches and subsequent behavioral turn, have long been concerned with social and [[spatial justice]].<ref>Bowlby, S. (2001) "Social Geography", in Smelser, N. and Baltes, P. eds. ''International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences'', Oxford, Elsevier, 14293–99.</ref> Along with critical geographers and political geographers, it is these groupings of geographers that most often interact with violence. Keeping this idea of social/spatial justice via geography in mind, it is worthwhile to look at geographical approaches to violence in the context of politics.

Derek Gregory and Alan Pred assembled the influential edited collection ''Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence'', which demonstrates how place, space, and landscape are foremost factors in the real and imagined practices of organized violence both historically and in the present.<ref>Gregory, Derek and Pred, Alan'', 2006 Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence''. London: Routledge.</ref> Evidently, political violence often gives a part for the state to play. When "modern states not only claim a monopoly of the legitimate means of violence; they also routinely use the threat of violence to enforce the rule of law",<ref name="Hyndman, J. 2009" /> the law not only becomes a form of violence but is violence.<ref name="Hyndman, J. 2009" /> Philosopher [[Giorgio Agamben]]'s concepts of [[state of exception]] and ''[[homo sacer]]'' are useful to consider within a geography of violence. The state, in the grip of a perceived, potential crisis (whether legitimate or not) takes preventative legal measures, such as a suspension of rights (it is in this climate, as Agamben demonstrates, that the formation of the Social Democratic and Nazi government's lager or concentration camp can occur). However, when this "in limbo" reality is designed to be in place "until further notice…the state of exception thus ceases to be referred to as an external and provisional state of factual danger and comes to be confused with juridical rule itself".<ref name="Agamben, G. 1998">Agamben, G. (1998) ''Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life'', Stanford University Press, Stanford.</ref> For Agamben, the physical space of the camp "is a piece of land placed outside the normal juridical order, but it is nevertheless not simply an external space".<ref name="Agamben, G. 1998" /> At the scale of the body, in the state of exception, a person is so removed from their rights by "juridical procedures and deployments of power"<ref name="Agamben, G. 1998" /> that "no act committed against them could appear any longer as a crime";<ref name="Agamben, G. 1998" /> in other words, people become only ''homo sacer''. [[Guantanamo Bay detention camp|Guantanamo Bay]] could also be said to represent the physicality of the state of exception in space, and can just as easily draw man as homo sacer.

In the 1970s, genocides in Cambodia under the [[Khmer Rouge]] and [[Pol Pot]] resulted in the deaths of over two million Cambodians (which was 25% of the Cambodian population), forming one of the many contemporary examples of state-sponsored violence.<ref name="Ringer, G. 2002">Ringer, G. (2002) "Killing Fields", in Christensen, K. and Levinson, D. eds. ''Encyclopedia of Modern Asia'', Charles Scribner's Sons, New York: 368–70.</ref> About fourteen thousand of these murders occurred at [[Choeung Ek]], which is the best-known of the extermination camps referred to as the [[Killing Fields]].<ref name="Ringer, G. 2002" /> The killings were arbitrary; for example, a person could be killed for wearing glasses, since that was seen as associating them with intellectuals and therefore as making them part of the enemy. People were murdered with impunity because it was no crime; Cambodians were made ''homo sacer'' in a condition of bare life. The Killing Fields—manifestations of Agamben's concept of camps beyond the normal rule of law—featured the state of exception. As part of Pol Pot's "ideological intent…to create a purely agrarian society or cooperative",<ref name="Ringer, G. 2002" /> he "dismantled the country's existing economic infrastructure and depopulated every urban area".<ref name="Ringer, G. 2002" /> Forced movement, such as this forced movement applied by Pol Pot, is a clear display of structural violence. When "symbols of Cambodian society were equally disrupted, social institutions of every kind…were purged or torn down",<ref name="Ringer, G. 2002" /> cultural violence (defined as when "any aspect of culture such as language, religion, ideology, art, or cosmology is used to legitimize direct or structural violence"<ref name="Hyndman, J. 2009" />) is added to the structural violence of forced movement and to the direct violence, such as murder, at the Killing Fields. Vietnam eventually intervened and the genocide officially ended. However, ten million landmines left by opposing guerillas in the 1970s<ref name="Ringer, G. 2002" /> continue to create a violent landscape in Cambodia.

Human geography, though coming late to the theorizing table, has tackled violence through many lenses, including anarchist geography, feminist geography, Marxist geography, political geography, and critical geography. However, [[Adriana Cavarero]] notes that, "as violence spreads and assumes unheard-of forms, it becomes difficult to name in contemporary language".<ref name="Cavarero, A. 2009">Cavarero, A. (2009) ''Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence'', Columbia University Press, New York.</ref> Cavarero proposes that, in facing such a truth, it is prudent to reconsider violence as "horrorism"; that is, "as though ideally all the…victims, instead of their killers, ought to determine the name".<ref name="Cavarero, A. 2009" /> With geography often adding the forgotten spatial aspect to theories of social science, rather than creating them solely within the discipline, it seems that the self-reflexive contemporary geography of today may have an extremely important place in this current (re)imaging of violence, exemplified by Cavarero.{{clarify|date=November 2014}}