Epistemic Violence Reconsidered. Spivak Meets Galtung, Bourdieu and B...

The multidisciplinary world of political and social theory provides us with numerous wide concepts of violence that allow for taking into account structural, cultural, discursive, symbolic, epistemic and other dimensions of violence. In the field of international relations, however, analyses and theories of political violence widely ignore these approaches in favour of a narrow, state-centred, direct and physical understanding. They rather conceive of violence as an event, not as a process, as destroying modern political order, and not as its colonial and imperial underside. From this privileged point of view, violence is considered to take place somewhere else, to be perpetrated by someone else, and finally to constitute something else.

It is against this background that I will explore three explicitly wide concepts of violence, which are well known in their respective fields of origin, i.e. peace studies, feminist and postcolonial studies. At the same time, they are hardly discussed in relation to each other, let alone in IR-related fields, which all of them substantially challenge for different reasons. In my paper, I will explore both entanglements and contradictions between them and examine links between political violence, on the one hand, and scholarly knowledge production, on the other.