Violence – triggers and perspectives
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CORDIScovery podcast- Episode #14 - Violence – triggers and perspectives
This is an AI transcription.
00:00:10:05 - 00:00:16:02
Abigail Acton
This is CORDIScovery
00:00:16:04 - 00:00:37:18
Abigail Acton
Hello and welcome to this episode of CORDIScovery With me, Abigail Acton. Violence reaches into our lives insidiously at a personal level. It can be happening next door in the form of domestic violence further afield as the impact of climate change demands strategic planning, Violence prevents communities from putting into place the means to protect themselves. How does the memory of violence shape our societies?
00:00:37:18 - 00:00:58:20
Abigail Acton
Think of themselves? And how good are we looking at our histories in the eye and rethinking our pasts? The 24th of March is the United Nations International Day for the Right to the Truth concerning gross human rights violations and for the dignity of victims. Our three guests whose projects have been supported by the EU Horizon 2020 program.
00:00:59:01 - 00:01:18:06
Abigail Acton
I here to talk about violence, its triggers and perspectives. A very warm welcome to Catharina Vogt, member of the think tank Respect Research Group at the University of Hamburg. Catharina is interested in the effect of respect in the workplace, and she's been looking into how to enable first responders to better manage domestic abuse cases. Welcome, Catharina.
00:01:18:10 - 00:01:19:08
Catharina Vogt
Hello, everybody.
00:01:19:14 - 00:01:40:15
Abigail Acton
Halvard Buhaug is research professor at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo and professor of political science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He has led research projects on the security dimensions of climate change and geographical aspects of armed conflict. Halvard was the lead author of a chapter for the recently published Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Report.
00:01:40:17 - 00:01:41:19
Abigail Acton
Welcome, Halvard.
00:01:41:21 - 00:01:42:09
Halvard Buhaug
Good morning.
00:01:42:14 - 00:01:55:20
Abigail Acton
Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Edinburgh and the co-director of the Center for Ethics and Critical Thought, Mihaela Mihai’s research focuses on political memory, art and politics, theories of oppression and political emotions. Welcome, Mihaela.
00:01:56:01 - 00:01:57:10
Mihaela Mihai
Thank you for having me.
00:01:57:12 - 00:02:10:22
Abigail Acton
Catharina, let's turn to you. Your project in IMPRODOVA looked at how policies and training shape frontline workers responses to domestic violence. Can you tell us more about the inherent weaknesses in how societies deal with domestic violence?
00:02:10:24 - 00:02:39:19
Catharina Vogt
So when we look at the numbers, for example, from the Fundamental Rights Agency 2014, with 24% of the women who say that they had been shocked, of course, by their current partner. And the majority of this woman, they did not experience this once, but more often. So we have a real problem here. And although this costs a lot of money to societies, we are not aware how large the epidemic is.
00:02:39:21 - 00:03:11:07
Catharina Vogt
So we see a because in many ways, for example, we have a lack of shelter places, we have a lack of perpetrator work. And at the same time, domestic violence is very hard to spot. So it often takes quite a long time and to victims unveil what is happening to them until they understand what's happening to them. And if we do not interrupt domestic violence early enough, this will have so bad effects on the victims on their children.
00:03:11:07 - 00:03:14:14
Catharina Vogt
And we cannot leave this after this right now.
00:03:14:16 - 00:03:22:16
Abigail Acton
No, indeed. And that's what inspired you to to take up the improve a project. So how did your project go about identify, knowing what changes are needed practically?
00:03:22:19 - 00:03:51:02
Catharina Vogt
So we looked at three frontline groups police, medical staff and social workers. And what we see there is, for example, that medical staff, like dentists and ecologists and others, do a very high probability see patients of domestic violence each day. They are not prepared to support domestic violence. They are not trained to be the first ones to break the silence.
00:03:51:02 - 00:04:18:08
Catharina Vogt
But they had the major go to address for victims. At the same time, the police, we find that there are some specialists, but the majority are not trained on death in the on the topic of domestic violence. And that leads to situations that police officers on the beat, if they are not informed enough and trained enough on this topic, they do not meet victim's needs as they could.
00:04:18:10 - 00:04:42:13
Catharina Vogt
So, for example, they do not follow what the victims to a support services. And we have the social workers who are working as victim support. They are very well trained, but they cannot do the job alone. For example, their voices are not heard in front of the court. We also have a lack of cooperation between these frontline responder groups and especially this cooperation.
00:04:42:15 - 00:04:48:23
Catharina Vogt
Victims needs best so and comprehensively. And that is where our research started.
00:04:49:00 - 00:04:56:07
Abigail Acton
So what did you actually do in your research? You established these weak points in these areas that needed improving. And then what did your project actually do?
00:04:56:09 - 00:05:11:11
Catharina Vogt
We looked at the data statistics. We looked at policies. We looked at risk assessment. We looked at case documentations and we looked at training and all these sectors. And we did this in eight European countries.
00:05:11:13 - 00:05:15:18
Abigail Acton
When you brought it all together, what did you find was necessary?
00:05:15:20 - 00:05:51:04
Catharina Vogt
So we found that the most necessary thing was training. And so we established a training website. You can find it for free access under training.improdova.eu where we have specifically training material design for police, medical profession and social sector. And then we have also a tool on domestic violence risk assessment where you can learn about your ability, factors, risk assessment, process and so on.
00:05:51:06 - 00:06:05:08
Catharina Vogt
We also have a policy maturity checklist for persons when to set up a local domestic violence policy and want to check that checklist aside. So because we also found that there is a lack of policies.
00:06:05:10 - 00:06:23:20
Abigail Acton
Yeah, right. Could you give me an example of where you found that there was something that wasn't working very well on the ground and you worked with a maybe a first responder and maybe the police or something? Could you give me an example of where you managed to perhaps suggest a change in their approach? So what are they doing differently after your project?
00:06:23:22 - 00:07:00:22
Catharina Vogt
So, for example, in France, a lot of energy on collaborating with the French ministries and as a result, they learned from the project and from the management techniques of domestic violence in the other countries that they really needed a risk assessment tool on the ground. And so in 2020, they made a change in their law and to to our contribution that they now at every domestic violence encounter, the police, together with the domestic violence victim, is doing the risk assessment.
00:07:00:24 - 00:07:11:17
Catharina Vogt
And as we said, we now see that in France there's a significant increase of persons who want to press charges against the perpetrators in the domestic violence hit.
00:07:11:22 - 00:07:26:19
Abigail Acton
Excellence as a direct consequence of your work. Yes, that must be very fulfilling. Excellent. And the professionals that you you interviewed and worked with and so on with a welcoming of your advice and your suggestions, did you meet with resistance or were they keen, in fact, to improve their services?
00:07:26:21 - 00:07:54:20
Catharina Vogt
I mean, usually they were very keen to to have this improved. Of course, we have some partners where our partner countries where there was a huge lack of knowledge and who benefited a lot. And we had other countries who were very elaborate and rather gave us the input, but who also saw by our research that they had some kind of validation of what they were actually already doing.
00:07:54:22 - 00:08:03:03
Abigail Acton
Right. That's excellent. Thank you very much, Catherine. Does anyone have any questions for Catherine or any comments at all that they would like to to say or make? Yeah.
00:08:03:24 - 00:08:22:20
Mihaela Mihai
thank you so much for sharing your very exciting findings. I mean, I'm a social scientist, so perhaps my question is a bit unfair, but I was wondering whether there was room in your project to consider what could be done earlier, not at the point where the violence has already happened and the prosecution and you are enabling prosecutions. Is there space for thinking temporarily a little bit earlier, preventively, as opposed to punitively?
00:08:22:22 - 00:08:51:08
Catharina Vogt
So I think a point where we have to be at a very early stage. When you are at the at the medical profession where people come to you with psychosomatic problems and we see and in some countries or often rather in some organizations where it is obligatory to ask how is this going at home?
00:08:51:10 - 00:09:29:16
Catharina Vogt
For example, midwives at some places. And this is a very critical point because the tensions often do not arise out of taboo, but it's building up and building up and to start as early as you can with the detection and then also with the prevention, and that is very important. So there is also a lot of numbers, for example, pregnant women where due to the pregnancy, the violence that's not stopped, but or we just we do not only speak of violence, but also of abuse or the other psychological forms of violence.
00:09:29:18 - 00:10:01:05
Catharina Vogt
And in pregnancy, this is a very critical point that violence can increase, very dangerous for mama and baby. But we also see it we know it from the from research that the point of splitting up the relationship is very critical. And so especially towards this high impact domestic violence, so homicides and very strong violence so that we know this before, I think your point is very, very good.
00:10:01:09 - 00:10:06:24
Abigail Acton
To be able to anticipate a little bit when we might get dangerous. A It sorry, you had a question as well. Would you like to pose it?
00:10:07:02 - 00:10:39:02
Halvard Buhaug
Yeah, I mean, I really found this a very hands on project, extremely fascinating. I just wanted to ask you briefly about something that you touched upon a little bit, and that is, did you experience any kind of friction or some kind of disagreements in your understanding of what is the major problem here and what could be possible solutions between partner practitioner communities, perhaps especially practitioner communities that are not necessarily partners in this project?
00:10:39:08 - 00:10:43:06
Halvard Buhaug
On the one hand, and then academic research on the other.
00:10:43:08 - 00:11:07:24
Catharina Vogt
A main point of friction is already the the understanding of what the main cause of domestic violence is. So we have these two big fields of family violence and others who say it's the gender inequality. So these these two fields and of course, we also had a lot of discussion within our project on these topics within the field.
00:11:08:01 - 00:11:31:05
Catharina Vogt
We tried to foster interagency cooperation and we need respect and meeting each other on a high level and to say, okay, I have my definition, you have your definition, but I do not have to change my way of thinking, but I need to learn how you the other one thing so that we can interact good and in the end for the benefit and the satisfaction of the victim.
00:11:31:05 - 00:11:39:12
Catharina Vogt
And that must be the if this is the priority that we benefit victims, then we can learn to step back from our different views.
00:11:39:16 - 00:11:56:19
Abigail Acton
Yes, it motivates people to work together more smoothly because they see that the end goal is so important. Yeah, absolutely. No, I mean, it must be difficult bringing together so many different organizations and cultures maybe or approaches that perhaps are different. It's an interesting question, but I was wondering about the friction thing as well. Thank you very much, Catherine.
00:11:56:19 - 00:12:13:14
Abigail Acton
I'm going to turn to Halvard now and talk about his project, The CLIMSEC project took a look at the security implications of climate change, which were at the time the project kicked off, still a little obscure Halvard that climate change must have a destabilizing impact on societies. What were the gaps in our knowledge, the CLIMSEC wanted to fill?
00:12:13:15 - 00:12:19:15
Abigail Acton
And did those gaps lead to mistaken assumptions before about how climate shapes the risk of conflict?
00:12:19:17 - 00:12:51:05
Halvard Buhaug
Yeah. So when the CLIMSEC project started back in 2015, we still knew very little actually, about how climatic changes could affect conflict risk. And so, for example, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC had published its fifth assessment report only months before, and that report concluded that research on climate and conflict was too patchy and with too many diverging findings to support a conclusion about a general relationship between climate and conflict.
00:12:51:07 - 00:13:25:09
Halvard Buhaug
In some contrast, policy debates on climate and security at the time often were founded on strong assumptions about how climate climatic changes directly threaten peace and security. So both the official justification for the Nobel Peace Prize Award to the IPCC and Al Gore in 2007 and also subsequent years of debates in the UN Security Council on Climate Security, often make explicit connections between climate and violent conflict, but without rigorous scientific evidence.
00:13:25:09 - 00:13:32:18
Halvard Buhaug
To back up these claims. And so when this project started, there was a clear need for more systematic research on this issue.
00:13:32:20 - 00:13:45:04
Abigail Acton
Okay. And that's obviously what what inspired you to try and plug that gap, But was it leading to assumptions that were false? Did you did you find that that because there was a lack of really in-depth research, people were assuming things?
00:13:45:06 - 00:14:09:20
Halvard Buhaug
Yeah, I think in especially in policy circles, both in terms of national security assessments but also in intergovernmental panels like the UN Security Council. You very much heard very strong statements, very bold statements that at the time was not even studied or to the extent that it was already studied. Research at the time did not provide strong evidence to support those claims.
00:14:09:21 - 00:14:15:17
Abigail Acton
And what were the presumptions that they were making, what the climate change was affecting resources and therefore what were they coming up with?
00:14:15:19 - 00:14:26:16
Halvard Buhaug
Yeah, very often you have this narrative that climate change leads to an increase in competition of scarce resources such as water, but also fertile land.
00:14:26:18 - 00:14:35:19
Abigail Acton
Okay, so I must admit, I mean, that does kind of feel logical. One would imagine that that would cause stresses and fractures. But so what did your project do and what did you find?
00:14:35:22 - 00:15:13:09
Halvard Buhaug
Yeah, So what we wanted to do was to provide a bit more nuanced and more evidence, obviously, about or how and through which pathways, climatic conditions could affect peace and security. So first we wanted to move beyond simple statistical analysis of direct associations between climatic conditions and conflict, and rather focus more on enabling conditions, on on vulnerability factors that could make societies more vulnerable to climate change and therefore perhaps also more susceptible to to experience conflict as a result of climate change impacts.
00:15:13:11 - 00:15:23:17
Halvard Buhaug
And so that meant that we were studying the role of discriminatory political systems, prevalence of agricultural livelihoods, poverty and inequality more generally.
00:15:23:19 - 00:15:37:01
Abigail Acton
Can we can we be a bit more precise when we talk about discriminatory systems, for example? I mean, could you make that a bit more concrete and give me an example, not necessarily an example in a certain country, but, you know, set it out as what you actually mean by that? So what? Certain people not allowed access to Landau.
00:15:37:04 - 00:15:56:17
Halvard Buhaug
Yeah. So what we studied in particular were what we call ethnic political exclusion. So that means ethnic minority groups that are prevented from having influence over national politics, even influence over local politics on their own future. So really discriminating discrimination of a minority groups that make these groups more vulnerable.
00:15:56:19 - 00:16:11:05
Abigail Acton
Okay, great. And so what did you actually find? I mean, if it isn't the case, that scarcity resources provokes competition, that can turn out to be violent in the end, what actually was the the impact of climate change on security?
00:16:11:07 - 00:16:37:24
Halvard Buhaug
Yeah, so this project, but also research more generally have converged in the sense that we do not find very strong general links between climatic conditions and increased conflict risk. But under some of these vulnerability conditions, we do see a more consistent climate effect, meaning that among the most vulnerable social groups, conflict risk does increase during adverse environmental conditions.
00:16:38:01 - 00:17:02:18
Halvard Buhaug
There are various pathways or various explanations for why this could be the case. Local competition over scarce resources could be one thing. For example, we do see a tendency towards increasing conflict between different land user groups in parts of Africa during droughts. So this is because farmers and herders basically battle for the same land. But for different purposes.
00:17:02:23 - 00:17:12:06
Halvard Buhaug
So we do see some evidence of that, but that is under very specific vulnerability conditions and not a very general pattern that can be generalized to the global such.
00:17:12:06 - 00:17:26:19
Abigail Acton
As it had been in the past. Yeah. So if climate change wasn't provoking on a wider level, on a more general level, a conflict between different groups wanting to manage territory and access to resources, what actually was the impact of climate change? Was it more to do with resilience? Maybe?
00:17:26:22 - 00:17:52:23
Halvard Buhaug
Yes. I mean, don't get me wrong here. Climate change and climatic extremes can have very devastating impacts on on on human security in terms of livelihood loss, in terms of income loss, in terms of compromised food security, for example. And all of those impacts can be devastating for the affected communities. But we do not necessarily see very strong increase in conflict risk because of that.
00:17:53:04 - 00:18:01:05
Halvard Buhaug
People might try to stay out their misery, they might relocate, but very rarely do they decide to fight because of this.
00:18:01:11 - 00:18:18:22
Abigail Acton
Right. Okay. You mentioned that you wanted to make sure that the project findings could be available to people beyond just academia, such as national governments and the UN. Did you manage to do that with your project results? How have they fared in Wider? After all, you are one of the lead writers in the latest chapter. So tell us more about this.
00:18:18:23 - 00:18:56:21
Halvard Buhaug
Yes, I guess that is the main question, right? And yeah, I do think that the project has made a bit of a difference, in particular through the work of the IPCC. So the IPCC just released the second part of the sixth Assessment report on impacts of climate change, on nature and society and if you compare the conclusions from that report to the previous fifth assessment report, which was published shortly before this project started, you will see that the new report makes clearer conclusions about the conditions under which climatic extremes could lead to increased conflict risk.
00:18:56:23 - 00:19:26:03
Halvard Buhaug
But at the same time, and this is quite important, the project also highlights how armed conflict can be a driver of vulnerability and leading to worse outcomes of climate change also outside of of of conflict. And so the conclusion both of the climate projects and of this new IPCC report is that while climate change may increase, conflict based armed conflict also very much increases vulnerability to climate change.
00:19:26:07 - 00:19:35:02
Halvard Buhaug
And so the result could be such a vicious cycle of fragility, political instability and adverse impacts from climate change.
00:19:35:04 - 00:19:45:16
Abigail Acton
And what are the mechanisms whereby armed conflict can actually provoke a problem regarding climate change? Is it to do with resilience building or the ability of communities to pull together? How does that play out?
00:19:45:17 - 00:20:04:13
Halvard Buhaug
Yeah, that could be part of the story. Certainly in terms of climate change, making society more vulnerable. You see a again, loss of finance, loss of income, destruction of physical infrastructure and importantly of forced displacement that make people more vulnerable to to subsequent climate extremes.
00:20:04:15 - 00:20:11:06
Abigail Acton
Okay, excellent. Thank you. Thank you very much. That was very interesting. Do we have an does anyone have any questions for Harvard? Yeah.
00:20:11:08 - 00:20:25:15
Mihaela Mihai
Thank you again for such a fascinating account of your of your findings. If you were to rerun your project in 2050 or in 2100, what do you think your findings were? Do you think they would change? What do you anticipate?
00:20:25:17 - 00:20:50:05
Halvard Buhaug
Yeah, that's that's a very good question. And in fact, one aspect of the project that we ended on was to try to look more into the long term future. So what what can we tell about long term implications of this research? And so our current findings and this is still a work in progress, suggests that other conditions that then climate change will continue to be influential in shaping future conflict risk.
00:20:50:07 - 00:21:19:08
Halvard Buhaug
But when we get towards 2050, 20, 80, 20, 100, you know, if the worst comes true and we really fail in mitigating climate change, I certainly expect climate to have a much stronger impact also on peace and security, negative impact than we see today. But on the other hand, if we succeed in mitigating climate change, hopefully we will continue to see a relatively modest climate effect on on conflict also 50 years from now.
00:21:19:10 - 00:21:44:23
Abigail Acton
Halvard, I've got a question for you, actually, when it comes to the idea of disruption in societies, undermining a society's ability to strategically plan to mitigate the impact of climate change because they are so focused on dealing with the conflict that's in front of them in order to. I know this isn't exactly your field, but maybe you have some ideas on this in order to bring an end to that conflict and make the society itself more cohesive.
00:21:45:00 - 00:22:00:12
Abigail Acton
Did you come across any ideas or did you have any ideas at all on on how societies can can turn the focus away from the conflict to to the actual more pressing need of mitigating forthcoming climate change? How can societies become more cohesive to address that challenge? Any ideas on that one?
00:22:00:14 - 00:22:27:19
Halvard Buhaug
Yeah, that's a tough question. You know, armed conflict, violent conflict is political failure. And I think that definition and that understanding also points to some entry point for solution. You need to fix governance. You need to fix relationship between communities, building trust, building transparent and accountable institutions. Saying that is easy. Doing it is, of course, extremely challenging.
00:22:27:21 - 00:22:55:00
Abigail Acton
Yes. Thank you. Yeah, indeed. And actually, Mihaela I'm going to turn to you because in a way, perhaps the GREYZONE project that you were involved with could confirm that this this rapprochement, this this connection between previously disrupted communities. So the Gravesend project you were involved with was considering the ways in which communities remember their violent pasts, who is excluded from history's cast of characters and what the political implications are in the present of that kind of selective memory.
00:22:55:02 - 00:23:01:02
Abigail Acton
So it's very interesting, but it sounds a little abstract. Could you could you tell us how did you actually set about analyzing that?
00:23:01:04 - 00:23:33:04
Mihaela Mihai
So I was interested in how societies remember, or rather misremember those who are not heroes, who are not victims and who are not perpetrators of violent histories, those who are usually called in everyday parlance, ordinary people. And I wanted to unpack a little bit this idea of ordinary people and focus on how various subgroups within the ordinary people navigated what we could call the choppy waters of authoritarian, violent regimes.
00:23:33:06 - 00:24:11:21
Mihaela Mihai
And here I included in my study both left wing and right wing authoritarian regimes. And I wanted to answer a question of specific question Why do some people end up collaborating with such violent regimes, and why do others end up resisting them? And this is a question that has troubled historians of the 20th century particularly. I want you to understand what social factors influenced where people ended up in this vast space that opens up between perpetrators on the one hand, and the heroic resisters that usually enter societies repositories of valor and courage on the other.
00:24:11:23 - 00:24:19:12
Abigail Acton
So could I just ask you with which case studies were you particularly interested? Which situations did you look at, and how did you conduct your research?
00:24:19:14 - 00:24:48:19
Mihaela Mihai
Yes, So I looked at four different case studies. I looked at Vichy, France. So France, under their German occupation, which combined authoritarianism with a military occupation. I look at apartheid South Africa, which combined authoritarianism and colonial and the white supremacist elements, communist Romania, and the most recent Argentine military junta, military authoritarian regime. And the project was eminently interdisciplinary.
00:24:48:21 - 00:25:14:13
Mihaela Mihai
Together with my team members, we used tools from a variety of discipline, philosophy, sociology, social theory, history, but also esthetics and the sociology of art. And we first wanted to delineate the official story How do these societies retell their past? How did this attacked societies, narrate their past and what is included and what is excluded from these narratives?
00:25:14:15 - 00:25:43:13
Mihaela Mihai
And the question then becomes, what are the costs of of certain specific types of of exclusions? And so what we found out is that these societies have a very reductive understanding of political agency in the past. What do I mean by that? They tend to erase this great space of the in-between of the ordinary people who could neither fit the hero role or the perpetrator role.
00:25:43:15 - 00:25:53:04
Mihaela Mihai
But they also erase messy, punctual, morally ambivalent forms of resistance that do not fit the heroic model of the heroic life.
00:25:53:06 - 00:25:57:13
Abigail Acton
What type of resistance would you mean when you say messy or doesn't doesn't fit the model?
00:25:57:15 - 00:26:28:12
Mihaela Mihai
Well, some some there are commonalities across the four case studies. And one of the the most evident pattern is that women's resistance is very much erased and in general, organized resistance relegated women to subordinate roles. And when they did engage in forms of resistance that could be coded as masculine, such as armed resistance, they did not get post violence recognition in the way in which the conflict or the dictatorship was remembered.
00:26:28:14 - 00:27:05:09
Mihaela Mihai
And so the resistance is as such as those by people who did not engage in big armed struggles but were sheltering victims, or where enabling armed resistance or where publishing illegal illegal documents very often gets subordinated or completely erased from from the annals of courage. I wanted to make a quick point about the key selection, because I don't want to give this impression that, you know, this problem of how societies misremember difficult, violent past is a problem that happens elsewhere.
00:27:05:10 - 00:27:37:09
Mihaela Mihai
Right. It is not here in affluent democratic societies because again and again in various member states of the European Union and also in the UK, we've had many public debates about the colonial, racist, intolerant histories that inform our current democratic politics and their exclusions. Right. So the past imprint on present institutions, relationships, norms, understandings of the nation must be reckoned with everywhere, including in societies with long and and robust democratic traditions.
00:27:37:09 - 00:27:39:22
Mihaela Mihai
So everybody has a skeleton in the past, as it were.
00:27:39:24 - 00:27:54:17
Abigail Acton
Yeah, And it's a question of opening the cupboard and looking at the skeleton in the face, as it were. And of course, that's something that it's difficult for human nature to do. People don't like to rethink what they've built up into a structure of their own identity, who they believe really that they are. It's very challenging on all sorts of levels.
00:27:54:17 - 00:28:24:03
Abigail Acton
I mean, inter-personal right the way through to international. So you considered, as you said, it was interdisciplinary. In other words, you used various methods and various ways of analyzing data and information and so on. What did you find with regards to how messages that were not the traditional messages were transmitted? What was the role, for example, of the arts in getting something and a little bit more perhaps realistically and a little bit more accurate over to two people?
00:28:24:05 - 00:28:48:23
Mihaela Mihai
Yes, that's a very important question. So as I said, we first met up near the official story and then we looked for sources for alternative sources of memory making. Where is where are the alternative stories being told? Where are the counter stories being told? And of course, we found that historians and sociologists had actually produced a lot of works that challenged these reductive and self-serving stories about the past.
00:28:49:00 - 00:29:16:14
Mihaela Mihai
But of course, academic books don't make for great bestsellers. So the impact of these works was very rarely very important and actually led to processes of social transformation. Whereas if we looked at art and in particular at films and novels, we saw that they can actually seduce publics because of their esthetic value to embrace a more honest, the more accurate image of of their past.
00:29:16:16 - 00:29:46:09
Mihaela Mihai
And so we built on work in film and literary studies to analyze a series of artworks that undid or that reverse this double erasure I was mentioning at the beginning. And we looked at novels and films that showed how gender, class, ideology, religion, age, geographical location, that is to say, individuals, complex position within a society determined how they acted in relation to state violence, either as accomplices or as resistors.
00:29:46:11 - 00:30:01:14
Mihaela Mihai
And we also found in these works that we analyzed what I earlier called impure resisters who are usually excluded from countries or repositories of of of value, but also from monuments from history books, from all the places where commemoration happens.
00:30:01:16 - 00:30:16:04
Abigail Acton
So some of the forms of art, as you mention, novels and films were offering a more of a spotlight on elements of resistance that had actually been almost neglected or perhaps even swept under the carpet because it didn't match a notion of national identity.
00:30:16:06 - 00:30:47:02
Mihaela Mihai
Absolutely. And even more than that, they also shed light on the underside of heroism, of the fact that, you know, what we call heroes, what these societies consecrated as heroes were fabrications to a great large extent, they were fabrications. And these biographies and these saintly biographies were usually purged of any unsavory elements. So the hero's own abuses and violence and compromises and moral ambivalence was, as you said, swept under the carpet.
00:30:47:04 - 00:30:49:00
Mihaela Mihai
And these are puts shed light on it.
00:30:49:00 - 00:31:02:14
Abigail Acton
Right. Because this human nature requires something a little bit more simplistic and perhaps not actually particularly accurate or real. Yeah, very interesting. Thank you very much. Does anyone have any questions for Michela? Because this is a fascinating subject area, I think. Yeah, Halvard.
00:31:02:16 - 00:31:32:08
Halvard Buhaug
Yeah, I agree. This is super fascinating. So within an empirical research on armed conflict, the strongest predictor of a new conflict is a recent history or a recent experience with conflict. And so that suggests that the way history is rewritten perhaps may contribute to maintaining a very high conflict risk, maintaining animosity, perhaps, or even increasing nationalism and awareness of own identity.
00:31:32:10 - 00:31:51:06
Halvard Buhaug
And therefore, I think it's super fascinating when you also discuss the role of art. And do you see that the art in a sense could contribute to building lasting peace precisely by tearing down some of these flawed stories of heroes and providing a better insight of of of the experiences from the other side, to put it that way.
00:31:51:10 - 00:32:18:20
Mihaela Mihai
Thank you. This is such an important question. I want to begin by specifying that I don't have trust in the power of art per se to do anything for the good or for the bad. There are artworks that have been used political to fuel conflict and to fuel violence, right. That have, as you said, you know, institutionalized ideas of the nation, of the people that are intolerant, violent, exclusionary.
00:32:18:22 - 00:32:47:22
Mihaela Mihai
For some people. Sometimes certain types of artworks will do the kind of peacebuilding work that you are referring to. But there is no such thing as a progressive force of art. Passé or too cool. Yeah, it's always qualified. We have to apply the lens of the critical theorist and figure out what kind of narratives told in what type of esthetic style can potentially trouble these reductive narratives and pave the way for a more peaceful future.
00:32:47:24 - 00:32:58:17
Abigail Acton
And also, I would imagine sometimes there's a necessity for a certain passage of time before these challenging films or challenging books or paintings or whatever actually become accepted by society. Maybe.
00:32:58:21 - 00:33:28:20
Mihaela Mihai
Yes. And also it takes time for them to be produced. And one of the selection criteria for or for these for case studies was that enough time had passed for a rich artistic production to to flourish and to begin to tell a counter stories without facing massive political risks. So that is another important aspect. Many of the artists were facing personal and professional risks in telling these these counter stories that publics were not yet ready to receive.
00:33:28:20 - 00:33:36:18
Mihaela Mihai
And many of the films and books we analyzed in the project caused great scandals and great public indignation when when they came out.
00:33:36:18 - 00:33:57:08
Abigail Acton
When they first came out. Yes. I think this has been really fascinating. I think that there is one common element that runs through this, which is the ability to recognize responsibility in the past as being a way to build some more abiding, calm or peace in the present. So thank you very much for your time. It's been a very great pleasure talking to you.
00:33:57:09 - 00:33:58:11
Mihaela Mihai
Thank you.
00:33:58:13 - 00:33:59:14
Catharina Vogt
Thank you. It's been great.
00:33:59:16 - 00:34:03:16
Halvard Buhaug
Thank you so much for having us. These three.
00:34:03:18 - 00:34:24:20
Abigail Acton
Are you interested in what other EU funded projects are doing to look at the mechanisms behind violence and ways forward? Through that, the Cordis website will give you an insight into the results of projects funded by the Horizon 2020 program that are working in this area. The website has articles and interviews that explore the results of research being conducted in a very broad range of domains from entropy to elephants.
00:34:24:22 - 00:34:48:20
Abigail Acton
Something there for you. Maybe you're involved in a project or would like to apply for funding. Take a look at what others are doing in your domain. So come and check out the research that's revealing what makes our world tick. We're always happy to hear from you. Drop us a line. Editorial at cordis dot Europa dot EU until next time.
This is an AI transcription.
00:00:10:05 - 00:00:16:02
Abigail Acton
This is CORDIScovery
00:00:16:04 - 00:00:37:18
Abigail Acton
Hello and welcome to this episode of CORDIScovery With me, Abigail Acton. Violence reaches into our lives insidiously at a personal level. It can be happening next door in the form of domestic violence further afield as the impact of climate change demands strategic planning, Violence prevents communities from putting into place the means to protect themselves. How does the memory of violence shape our societies?
00:00:37:18 - 00:00:58:20
Abigail Acton
Think of themselves? And how good are we looking at our histories in the eye and rethinking our pasts? The 24th of March is the United Nations International Day for the Right to the Truth concerning gross human rights violations and for the dignity of victims. Our three guests whose projects have been supported by the EU Horizon 2020 program.
00:00:59:01 - 00:01:18:06
Abigail Acton
I here to talk about violence, its triggers and perspectives. A very warm welcome to Catharina Vogt, member of the think tank Respect Research Group at the University of Hamburg. Catharina is interested in the effect of respect in the workplace, and she's been looking into how to enable first responders to better manage domestic abuse cases. Welcome, Catharina.
00:01:18:10 - 00:01:19:08
Catharina Vogt
Hello, everybody.
00:01:19:14 - 00:01:40:15
Abigail Acton
Halvard Buhaug is research professor at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo and professor of political science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He has led research projects on the security dimensions of climate change and geographical aspects of armed conflict. Halvard was the lead author of a chapter for the recently published Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Report.
00:01:40:17 - 00:01:41:19
Abigail Acton
Welcome, Halvard.
00:01:41:21 - 00:01:42:09
Halvard Buhaug
Good morning.
00:01:42:14 - 00:01:55:20
Abigail Acton
Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Edinburgh and the co-director of the Center for Ethics and Critical Thought, Mihaela Mihai’s research focuses on political memory, art and politics, theories of oppression and political emotions. Welcome, Mihaela.
00:01:56:01 - 00:01:57:10
Mihaela Mihai
Thank you for having me.
00:01:57:12 - 00:02:10:22
Abigail Acton
Catharina, let's turn to you. Your project in IMPRODOVA looked at how policies and training shape frontline workers responses to domestic violence. Can you tell us more about the inherent weaknesses in how societies deal with domestic violence?
00:02:10:24 - 00:02:39:19
Catharina Vogt
So when we look at the numbers, for example, from the Fundamental Rights Agency 2014, with 24% of the women who say that they had been shocked, of course, by their current partner. And the majority of this woman, they did not experience this once, but more often. So we have a real problem here. And although this costs a lot of money to societies, we are not aware how large the epidemic is.
00:02:39:21 - 00:03:11:07
Catharina Vogt
So we see a because in many ways, for example, we have a lack of shelter places, we have a lack of perpetrator work. And at the same time, domestic violence is very hard to spot. So it often takes quite a long time and to victims unveil what is happening to them until they understand what's happening to them. And if we do not interrupt domestic violence early enough, this will have so bad effects on the victims on their children.
00:03:11:07 - 00:03:14:14
Catharina Vogt
And we cannot leave this after this right now.
00:03:14:16 - 00:03:22:16
Abigail Acton
No, indeed. And that's what inspired you to to take up the improve a project. So how did your project go about identify, knowing what changes are needed practically?
00:03:22:19 - 00:03:51:02
Catharina Vogt
So we looked at three frontline groups police, medical staff and social workers. And what we see there is, for example, that medical staff, like dentists and ecologists and others, do a very high probability see patients of domestic violence each day. They are not prepared to support domestic violence. They are not trained to be the first ones to break the silence.
00:03:51:02 - 00:04:18:08
Catharina Vogt
But they had the major go to address for victims. At the same time, the police, we find that there are some specialists, but the majority are not trained on death in the on the topic of domestic violence. And that leads to situations that police officers on the beat, if they are not informed enough and trained enough on this topic, they do not meet victim's needs as they could.
00:04:18:10 - 00:04:42:13
Catharina Vogt
So, for example, they do not follow what the victims to a support services. And we have the social workers who are working as victim support. They are very well trained, but they cannot do the job alone. For example, their voices are not heard in front of the court. We also have a lack of cooperation between these frontline responder groups and especially this cooperation.
00:04:42:15 - 00:04:48:23
Catharina Vogt
Victims needs best so and comprehensively. And that is where our research started.
00:04:49:00 - 00:04:56:07
Abigail Acton
So what did you actually do in your research? You established these weak points in these areas that needed improving. And then what did your project actually do?
00:04:56:09 - 00:05:11:11
Catharina Vogt
We looked at the data statistics. We looked at policies. We looked at risk assessment. We looked at case documentations and we looked at training and all these sectors. And we did this in eight European countries.
00:05:11:13 - 00:05:15:18
Abigail Acton
When you brought it all together, what did you find was necessary?
00:05:15:20 - 00:05:51:04
Catharina Vogt
So we found that the most necessary thing was training. And so we established a training website. You can find it for free access under training.improdova.eu where we have specifically training material design for police, medical profession and social sector. And then we have also a tool on domestic violence risk assessment where you can learn about your ability, factors, risk assessment, process and so on.
00:05:51:06 - 00:06:05:08
Catharina Vogt
We also have a policy maturity checklist for persons when to set up a local domestic violence policy and want to check that checklist aside. So because we also found that there is a lack of policies.
00:06:05:10 - 00:06:23:20
Abigail Acton
Yeah, right. Could you give me an example of where you found that there was something that wasn't working very well on the ground and you worked with a maybe a first responder and maybe the police or something? Could you give me an example of where you managed to perhaps suggest a change in their approach? So what are they doing differently after your project?
00:06:23:22 - 00:07:00:22
Catharina Vogt
So, for example, in France, a lot of energy on collaborating with the French ministries and as a result, they learned from the project and from the management techniques of domestic violence in the other countries that they really needed a risk assessment tool on the ground. And so in 2020, they made a change in their law and to to our contribution that they now at every domestic violence encounter, the police, together with the domestic violence victim, is doing the risk assessment.
00:07:00:24 - 00:07:11:17
Catharina Vogt
And as we said, we now see that in France there's a significant increase of persons who want to press charges against the perpetrators in the domestic violence hit.
00:07:11:22 - 00:07:26:19
Abigail Acton
Excellence as a direct consequence of your work. Yes, that must be very fulfilling. Excellent. And the professionals that you you interviewed and worked with and so on with a welcoming of your advice and your suggestions, did you meet with resistance or were they keen, in fact, to improve their services?
00:07:26:21 - 00:07:54:20
Catharina Vogt
I mean, usually they were very keen to to have this improved. Of course, we have some partners where our partner countries where there was a huge lack of knowledge and who benefited a lot. And we had other countries who were very elaborate and rather gave us the input, but who also saw by our research that they had some kind of validation of what they were actually already doing.
00:07:54:22 - 00:08:03:03
Abigail Acton
Right. That's excellent. Thank you very much, Catherine. Does anyone have any questions for Catherine or any comments at all that they would like to to say or make? Yeah.
00:08:03:24 - 00:08:22:20
Mihaela Mihai
thank you so much for sharing your very exciting findings. I mean, I'm a social scientist, so perhaps my question is a bit unfair, but I was wondering whether there was room in your project to consider what could be done earlier, not at the point where the violence has already happened and the prosecution and you are enabling prosecutions. Is there space for thinking temporarily a little bit earlier, preventively, as opposed to punitively?
00:08:22:22 - 00:08:51:08
Catharina Vogt
So I think a point where we have to be at a very early stage. When you are at the at the medical profession where people come to you with psychosomatic problems and we see and in some countries or often rather in some organizations where it is obligatory to ask how is this going at home?
00:08:51:10 - 00:09:29:16
Catharina Vogt
For example, midwives at some places. And this is a very critical point because the tensions often do not arise out of taboo, but it's building up and building up and to start as early as you can with the detection and then also with the prevention, and that is very important. So there is also a lot of numbers, for example, pregnant women where due to the pregnancy, the violence that's not stopped, but or we just we do not only speak of violence, but also of abuse or the other psychological forms of violence.
00:09:29:18 - 00:10:01:05
Catharina Vogt
And in pregnancy, this is a very critical point that violence can increase, very dangerous for mama and baby. But we also see it we know it from the from research that the point of splitting up the relationship is very critical. And so especially towards this high impact domestic violence, so homicides and very strong violence so that we know this before, I think your point is very, very good.
00:10:01:09 - 00:10:06:24
Abigail Acton
To be able to anticipate a little bit when we might get dangerous. A It sorry, you had a question as well. Would you like to pose it?
00:10:07:02 - 00:10:39:02
Halvard Buhaug
Yeah, I mean, I really found this a very hands on project, extremely fascinating. I just wanted to ask you briefly about something that you touched upon a little bit, and that is, did you experience any kind of friction or some kind of disagreements in your understanding of what is the major problem here and what could be possible solutions between partner practitioner communities, perhaps especially practitioner communities that are not necessarily partners in this project?
00:10:39:08 - 00:10:43:06
Halvard Buhaug
On the one hand, and then academic research on the other.
00:10:43:08 - 00:11:07:24
Catharina Vogt
A main point of friction is already the the understanding of what the main cause of domestic violence is. So we have these two big fields of family violence and others who say it's the gender inequality. So these these two fields and of course, we also had a lot of discussion within our project on these topics within the field.
00:11:08:01 - 00:11:31:05
Catharina Vogt
We tried to foster interagency cooperation and we need respect and meeting each other on a high level and to say, okay, I have my definition, you have your definition, but I do not have to change my way of thinking, but I need to learn how you the other one thing so that we can interact good and in the end for the benefit and the satisfaction of the victim.
00:11:31:05 - 00:11:39:12
Catharina Vogt
And that must be the if this is the priority that we benefit victims, then we can learn to step back from our different views.
00:11:39:16 - 00:11:56:19
Abigail Acton
Yes, it motivates people to work together more smoothly because they see that the end goal is so important. Yeah, absolutely. No, I mean, it must be difficult bringing together so many different organizations and cultures maybe or approaches that perhaps are different. It's an interesting question, but I was wondering about the friction thing as well. Thank you very much, Catherine.
00:11:56:19 - 00:12:13:14
Abigail Acton
I'm going to turn to Halvard now and talk about his project, The CLIMSEC project took a look at the security implications of climate change, which were at the time the project kicked off, still a little obscure Halvard that climate change must have a destabilizing impact on societies. What were the gaps in our knowledge, the CLIMSEC wanted to fill?
00:12:13:15 - 00:12:19:15
Abigail Acton
And did those gaps lead to mistaken assumptions before about how climate shapes the risk of conflict?
00:12:19:17 - 00:12:51:05
Halvard Buhaug
Yeah. So when the CLIMSEC project started back in 2015, we still knew very little actually, about how climatic changes could affect conflict risk. And so, for example, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC had published its fifth assessment report only months before, and that report concluded that research on climate and conflict was too patchy and with too many diverging findings to support a conclusion about a general relationship between climate and conflict.
00:12:51:07 - 00:13:25:09
Halvard Buhaug
In some contrast, policy debates on climate and security at the time often were founded on strong assumptions about how climate climatic changes directly threaten peace and security. So both the official justification for the Nobel Peace Prize Award to the IPCC and Al Gore in 2007 and also subsequent years of debates in the UN Security Council on Climate Security, often make explicit connections between climate and violent conflict, but without rigorous scientific evidence.
00:13:25:09 - 00:13:32:18
Halvard Buhaug
To back up these claims. And so when this project started, there was a clear need for more systematic research on this issue.
00:13:32:20 - 00:13:45:04
Abigail Acton
Okay. And that's obviously what what inspired you to try and plug that gap, But was it leading to assumptions that were false? Did you did you find that that because there was a lack of really in-depth research, people were assuming things?
00:13:45:06 - 00:14:09:20
Halvard Buhaug
Yeah, I think in especially in policy circles, both in terms of national security assessments but also in intergovernmental panels like the UN Security Council. You very much heard very strong statements, very bold statements that at the time was not even studied or to the extent that it was already studied. Research at the time did not provide strong evidence to support those claims.
00:14:09:21 - 00:14:15:17
Abigail Acton
And what were the presumptions that they were making, what the climate change was affecting resources and therefore what were they coming up with?
00:14:15:19 - 00:14:26:16
Halvard Buhaug
Yeah, very often you have this narrative that climate change leads to an increase in competition of scarce resources such as water, but also fertile land.
00:14:26:18 - 00:14:35:19
Abigail Acton
Okay, so I must admit, I mean, that does kind of feel logical. One would imagine that that would cause stresses and fractures. But so what did your project do and what did you find?
00:14:35:22 - 00:15:13:09
Halvard Buhaug
Yeah, So what we wanted to do was to provide a bit more nuanced and more evidence, obviously, about or how and through which pathways, climatic conditions could affect peace and security. So first we wanted to move beyond simple statistical analysis of direct associations between climatic conditions and conflict, and rather focus more on enabling conditions, on on vulnerability factors that could make societies more vulnerable to climate change and therefore perhaps also more susceptible to to experience conflict as a result of climate change impacts.
00:15:13:11 - 00:15:23:17
Halvard Buhaug
And so that meant that we were studying the role of discriminatory political systems, prevalence of agricultural livelihoods, poverty and inequality more generally.
00:15:23:19 - 00:15:37:01
Abigail Acton
Can we can we be a bit more precise when we talk about discriminatory systems, for example? I mean, could you make that a bit more concrete and give me an example, not necessarily an example in a certain country, but, you know, set it out as what you actually mean by that? So what? Certain people not allowed access to Landau.
00:15:37:04 - 00:15:56:17
Halvard Buhaug
Yeah. So what we studied in particular were what we call ethnic political exclusion. So that means ethnic minority groups that are prevented from having influence over national politics, even influence over local politics on their own future. So really discriminating discrimination of a minority groups that make these groups more vulnerable.
00:15:56:19 - 00:16:11:05
Abigail Acton
Okay, great. And so what did you actually find? I mean, if it isn't the case, that scarcity resources provokes competition, that can turn out to be violent in the end, what actually was the the impact of climate change on security?
00:16:11:07 - 00:16:37:24
Halvard Buhaug
Yeah, so this project, but also research more generally have converged in the sense that we do not find very strong general links between climatic conditions and increased conflict risk. But under some of these vulnerability conditions, we do see a more consistent climate effect, meaning that among the most vulnerable social groups, conflict risk does increase during adverse environmental conditions.
00:16:38:01 - 00:17:02:18
Halvard Buhaug
There are various pathways or various explanations for why this could be the case. Local competition over scarce resources could be one thing. For example, we do see a tendency towards increasing conflict between different land user groups in parts of Africa during droughts. So this is because farmers and herders basically battle for the same land. But for different purposes.
00:17:02:23 - 00:17:12:06
Halvard Buhaug
So we do see some evidence of that, but that is under very specific vulnerability conditions and not a very general pattern that can be generalized to the global such.
00:17:12:06 - 00:17:26:19
Abigail Acton
As it had been in the past. Yeah. So if climate change wasn't provoking on a wider level, on a more general level, a conflict between different groups wanting to manage territory and access to resources, what actually was the impact of climate change? Was it more to do with resilience? Maybe?
00:17:26:22 - 00:17:52:23
Halvard Buhaug
Yes. I mean, don't get me wrong here. Climate change and climatic extremes can have very devastating impacts on on on human security in terms of livelihood loss, in terms of income loss, in terms of compromised food security, for example. And all of those impacts can be devastating for the affected communities. But we do not necessarily see very strong increase in conflict risk because of that.
00:17:53:04 - 00:18:01:05
Halvard Buhaug
People might try to stay out their misery, they might relocate, but very rarely do they decide to fight because of this.
00:18:01:11 - 00:18:18:22
Abigail Acton
Right. Okay. You mentioned that you wanted to make sure that the project findings could be available to people beyond just academia, such as national governments and the UN. Did you manage to do that with your project results? How have they fared in Wider? After all, you are one of the lead writers in the latest chapter. So tell us more about this.
00:18:18:23 - 00:18:56:21
Halvard Buhaug
Yes, I guess that is the main question, right? And yeah, I do think that the project has made a bit of a difference, in particular through the work of the IPCC. So the IPCC just released the second part of the sixth Assessment report on impacts of climate change, on nature and society and if you compare the conclusions from that report to the previous fifth assessment report, which was published shortly before this project started, you will see that the new report makes clearer conclusions about the conditions under which climatic extremes could lead to increased conflict risk.
00:18:56:23 - 00:19:26:03
Halvard Buhaug
But at the same time, and this is quite important, the project also highlights how armed conflict can be a driver of vulnerability and leading to worse outcomes of climate change also outside of of of conflict. And so the conclusion both of the climate projects and of this new IPCC report is that while climate change may increase, conflict based armed conflict also very much increases vulnerability to climate change.
00:19:26:07 - 00:19:35:02
Halvard Buhaug
And so the result could be such a vicious cycle of fragility, political instability and adverse impacts from climate change.
00:19:35:04 - 00:19:45:16
Abigail Acton
And what are the mechanisms whereby armed conflict can actually provoke a problem regarding climate change? Is it to do with resilience building or the ability of communities to pull together? How does that play out?
00:19:45:17 - 00:20:04:13
Halvard Buhaug
Yeah, that could be part of the story. Certainly in terms of climate change, making society more vulnerable. You see a again, loss of finance, loss of income, destruction of physical infrastructure and importantly of forced displacement that make people more vulnerable to to subsequent climate extremes.
00:20:04:15 - 00:20:11:06
Abigail Acton
Okay, excellent. Thank you. Thank you very much. That was very interesting. Do we have an does anyone have any questions for Harvard? Yeah.
00:20:11:08 - 00:20:25:15
Mihaela Mihai
Thank you again for such a fascinating account of your of your findings. If you were to rerun your project in 2050 or in 2100, what do you think your findings were? Do you think they would change? What do you anticipate?
00:20:25:17 - 00:20:50:05
Halvard Buhaug
Yeah, that's that's a very good question. And in fact, one aspect of the project that we ended on was to try to look more into the long term future. So what what can we tell about long term implications of this research? And so our current findings and this is still a work in progress, suggests that other conditions that then climate change will continue to be influential in shaping future conflict risk.
00:20:50:07 - 00:21:19:08
Halvard Buhaug
But when we get towards 2050, 20, 80, 20, 100, you know, if the worst comes true and we really fail in mitigating climate change, I certainly expect climate to have a much stronger impact also on peace and security, negative impact than we see today. But on the other hand, if we succeed in mitigating climate change, hopefully we will continue to see a relatively modest climate effect on on conflict also 50 years from now.
00:21:19:10 - 00:21:44:23
Abigail Acton
Halvard, I've got a question for you, actually, when it comes to the idea of disruption in societies, undermining a society's ability to strategically plan to mitigate the impact of climate change because they are so focused on dealing with the conflict that's in front of them in order to. I know this isn't exactly your field, but maybe you have some ideas on this in order to bring an end to that conflict and make the society itself more cohesive.
00:21:45:00 - 00:22:00:12
Abigail Acton
Did you come across any ideas or did you have any ideas at all on on how societies can can turn the focus away from the conflict to to the actual more pressing need of mitigating forthcoming climate change? How can societies become more cohesive to address that challenge? Any ideas on that one?
00:22:00:14 - 00:22:27:19
Halvard Buhaug
Yeah, that's a tough question. You know, armed conflict, violent conflict is political failure. And I think that definition and that understanding also points to some entry point for solution. You need to fix governance. You need to fix relationship between communities, building trust, building transparent and accountable institutions. Saying that is easy. Doing it is, of course, extremely challenging.
00:22:27:21 - 00:22:55:00
Abigail Acton
Yes. Thank you. Yeah, indeed. And actually, Mihaela I'm going to turn to you because in a way, perhaps the GREYZONE project that you were involved with could confirm that this this rapprochement, this this connection between previously disrupted communities. So the Gravesend project you were involved with was considering the ways in which communities remember their violent pasts, who is excluded from history's cast of characters and what the political implications are in the present of that kind of selective memory.
00:22:55:02 - 00:23:01:02
Abigail Acton
So it's very interesting, but it sounds a little abstract. Could you could you tell us how did you actually set about analyzing that?
00:23:01:04 - 00:23:33:04
Mihaela Mihai
So I was interested in how societies remember, or rather misremember those who are not heroes, who are not victims and who are not perpetrators of violent histories, those who are usually called in everyday parlance, ordinary people. And I wanted to unpack a little bit this idea of ordinary people and focus on how various subgroups within the ordinary people navigated what we could call the choppy waters of authoritarian, violent regimes.
00:23:33:06 - 00:24:11:21
Mihaela Mihai
And here I included in my study both left wing and right wing authoritarian regimes. And I wanted to answer a question of specific question Why do some people end up collaborating with such violent regimes, and why do others end up resisting them? And this is a question that has troubled historians of the 20th century particularly. I want you to understand what social factors influenced where people ended up in this vast space that opens up between perpetrators on the one hand, and the heroic resisters that usually enter societies repositories of valor and courage on the other.
00:24:11:23 - 00:24:19:12
Abigail Acton
So could I just ask you with which case studies were you particularly interested? Which situations did you look at, and how did you conduct your research?
00:24:19:14 - 00:24:48:19
Mihaela Mihai
Yes, So I looked at four different case studies. I looked at Vichy, France. So France, under their German occupation, which combined authoritarianism with a military occupation. I look at apartheid South Africa, which combined authoritarianism and colonial and the white supremacist elements, communist Romania, and the most recent Argentine military junta, military authoritarian regime. And the project was eminently interdisciplinary.
00:24:48:21 - 00:25:14:13
Mihaela Mihai
Together with my team members, we used tools from a variety of discipline, philosophy, sociology, social theory, history, but also esthetics and the sociology of art. And we first wanted to delineate the official story How do these societies retell their past? How did this attacked societies, narrate their past and what is included and what is excluded from these narratives?
00:25:14:15 - 00:25:43:13
Mihaela Mihai
And the question then becomes, what are the costs of of certain specific types of of exclusions? And so what we found out is that these societies have a very reductive understanding of political agency in the past. What do I mean by that? They tend to erase this great space of the in-between of the ordinary people who could neither fit the hero role or the perpetrator role.
00:25:43:15 - 00:25:53:04
Mihaela Mihai
But they also erase messy, punctual, morally ambivalent forms of resistance that do not fit the heroic model of the heroic life.
00:25:53:06 - 00:25:57:13
Abigail Acton
What type of resistance would you mean when you say messy or doesn't doesn't fit the model?
00:25:57:15 - 00:26:28:12
Mihaela Mihai
Well, some some there are commonalities across the four case studies. And one of the the most evident pattern is that women's resistance is very much erased and in general, organized resistance relegated women to subordinate roles. And when they did engage in forms of resistance that could be coded as masculine, such as armed resistance, they did not get post violence recognition in the way in which the conflict or the dictatorship was remembered.
00:26:28:14 - 00:27:05:09
Mihaela Mihai
And so the resistance is as such as those by people who did not engage in big armed struggles but were sheltering victims, or where enabling armed resistance or where publishing illegal illegal documents very often gets subordinated or completely erased from from the annals of courage. I wanted to make a quick point about the key selection, because I don't want to give this impression that, you know, this problem of how societies misremember difficult, violent past is a problem that happens elsewhere.
00:27:05:10 - 00:27:37:09
Mihaela Mihai
Right. It is not here in affluent democratic societies because again and again in various member states of the European Union and also in the UK, we've had many public debates about the colonial, racist, intolerant histories that inform our current democratic politics and their exclusions. Right. So the past imprint on present institutions, relationships, norms, understandings of the nation must be reckoned with everywhere, including in societies with long and and robust democratic traditions.
00:27:37:09 - 00:27:39:22
Mihaela Mihai
So everybody has a skeleton in the past, as it were.
00:27:39:24 - 00:27:54:17
Abigail Acton
Yeah, And it's a question of opening the cupboard and looking at the skeleton in the face, as it were. And of course, that's something that it's difficult for human nature to do. People don't like to rethink what they've built up into a structure of their own identity, who they believe really that they are. It's very challenging on all sorts of levels.
00:27:54:17 - 00:28:24:03
Abigail Acton
I mean, inter-personal right the way through to international. So you considered, as you said, it was interdisciplinary. In other words, you used various methods and various ways of analyzing data and information and so on. What did you find with regards to how messages that were not the traditional messages were transmitted? What was the role, for example, of the arts in getting something and a little bit more perhaps realistically and a little bit more accurate over to two people?
00:28:24:05 - 00:28:48:23
Mihaela Mihai
Yes, that's a very important question. So as I said, we first met up near the official story and then we looked for sources for alternative sources of memory making. Where is where are the alternative stories being told? Where are the counter stories being told? And of course, we found that historians and sociologists had actually produced a lot of works that challenged these reductive and self-serving stories about the past.
00:28:49:00 - 00:29:16:14
Mihaela Mihai
But of course, academic books don't make for great bestsellers. So the impact of these works was very rarely very important and actually led to processes of social transformation. Whereas if we looked at art and in particular at films and novels, we saw that they can actually seduce publics because of their esthetic value to embrace a more honest, the more accurate image of of their past.
00:29:16:16 - 00:29:46:09
Mihaela Mihai
And so we built on work in film and literary studies to analyze a series of artworks that undid or that reverse this double erasure I was mentioning at the beginning. And we looked at novels and films that showed how gender, class, ideology, religion, age, geographical location, that is to say, individuals, complex position within a society determined how they acted in relation to state violence, either as accomplices or as resistors.
00:29:46:11 - 00:30:01:14
Mihaela Mihai
And we also found in these works that we analyzed what I earlier called impure resisters who are usually excluded from countries or repositories of of of value, but also from monuments from history books, from all the places where commemoration happens.
00:30:01:16 - 00:30:16:04
Abigail Acton
So some of the forms of art, as you mention, novels and films were offering a more of a spotlight on elements of resistance that had actually been almost neglected or perhaps even swept under the carpet because it didn't match a notion of national identity.
00:30:16:06 - 00:30:47:02
Mihaela Mihai
Absolutely. And even more than that, they also shed light on the underside of heroism, of the fact that, you know, what we call heroes, what these societies consecrated as heroes were fabrications to a great large extent, they were fabrications. And these biographies and these saintly biographies were usually purged of any unsavory elements. So the hero's own abuses and violence and compromises and moral ambivalence was, as you said, swept under the carpet.
00:30:47:04 - 00:30:49:00
Mihaela Mihai
And these are puts shed light on it.
00:30:49:00 - 00:31:02:14
Abigail Acton
Right. Because this human nature requires something a little bit more simplistic and perhaps not actually particularly accurate or real. Yeah, very interesting. Thank you very much. Does anyone have any questions for Michela? Because this is a fascinating subject area, I think. Yeah, Halvard.
00:31:02:16 - 00:31:32:08
Halvard Buhaug
Yeah, I agree. This is super fascinating. So within an empirical research on armed conflict, the strongest predictor of a new conflict is a recent history or a recent experience with conflict. And so that suggests that the way history is rewritten perhaps may contribute to maintaining a very high conflict risk, maintaining animosity, perhaps, or even increasing nationalism and awareness of own identity.
00:31:32:10 - 00:31:51:06
Halvard Buhaug
And therefore, I think it's super fascinating when you also discuss the role of art. And do you see that the art in a sense could contribute to building lasting peace precisely by tearing down some of these flawed stories of heroes and providing a better insight of of of the experiences from the other side, to put it that way.
00:31:51:10 - 00:32:18:20
Mihaela Mihai
Thank you. This is such an important question. I want to begin by specifying that I don't have trust in the power of art per se to do anything for the good or for the bad. There are artworks that have been used political to fuel conflict and to fuel violence, right. That have, as you said, you know, institutionalized ideas of the nation, of the people that are intolerant, violent, exclusionary.
00:32:18:22 - 00:32:47:22
Mihaela Mihai
For some people. Sometimes certain types of artworks will do the kind of peacebuilding work that you are referring to. But there is no such thing as a progressive force of art. Passé or too cool. Yeah, it's always qualified. We have to apply the lens of the critical theorist and figure out what kind of narratives told in what type of esthetic style can potentially trouble these reductive narratives and pave the way for a more peaceful future.
00:32:47:24 - 00:32:58:17
Abigail Acton
And also, I would imagine sometimes there's a necessity for a certain passage of time before these challenging films or challenging books or paintings or whatever actually become accepted by society. Maybe.
00:32:58:21 - 00:33:28:20
Mihaela Mihai
Yes. And also it takes time for them to be produced. And one of the selection criteria for or for these for case studies was that enough time had passed for a rich artistic production to to flourish and to begin to tell a counter stories without facing massive political risks. So that is another important aspect. Many of the artists were facing personal and professional risks in telling these these counter stories that publics were not yet ready to receive.
00:33:28:20 - 00:33:36:18
Mihaela Mihai
And many of the films and books we analyzed in the project caused great scandals and great public indignation when when they came out.
00:33:36:18 - 00:33:57:08
Abigail Acton
When they first came out. Yes. I think this has been really fascinating. I think that there is one common element that runs through this, which is the ability to recognize responsibility in the past as being a way to build some more abiding, calm or peace in the present. So thank you very much for your time. It's been a very great pleasure talking to you.
00:33:57:09 - 00:33:58:11
Mihaela Mihai
Thank you.
00:33:58:13 - 00:33:59:14
Catharina Vogt
Thank you. It's been great.
00:33:59:16 - 00:34:03:16
Halvard Buhaug
Thank you so much for having us. These three.
00:34:03:18 - 00:34:24:20
Abigail Acton
Are you interested in what other EU funded projects are doing to look at the mechanisms behind violence and ways forward? Through that, the Cordis website will give you an insight into the results of projects funded by the Horizon 2020 program that are working in this area. The website has articles and interviews that explore the results of research being conducted in a very broad range of domains from entropy to elephants.
00:34:24:22 - 00:34:48:20
Abigail Acton
Something there for you. Maybe you're involved in a project or would like to apply for funding. Take a look at what others are doing in your domain. So come and check out the research that's revealing what makes our world tick. We're always happy to hear from you. Drop us a line. Editorial at cordis dot Europa dot EU until next time.
Insights and ideas
The 24th of March is the United Nations International Day for the Right to the Truth Concerning Gross Human Rights Violations and for the Dignity of Victims, so this episode is considering three aspects of violence. The IMPRODOVA project has developed tools to help first responders understand how best to meet the needs of victims of domestic violence. Information the project has developed is now being used across the board by the police in France, resulting in more charges being pressed than before. Catharina Vogt, member of the Think Tank ‘Respect Research Group’ at Universität Hamburg, tells us more. Halvard Buhaug, research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, and professor of political science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology is interested in the security dimensions of climate change and the geographic aspects of armed conflict. He was involved in the CLIMSEC project. As the lead writer on one of the chapters of the recently published Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report, Halvard tells us how our understanding of the dynamics between climate change and violence is becoming more nuanced. Senior lecturer in political theory at the University of Edinburgh, and the co-director of the Centre for Ethics and Critical Thought, Mihaela Mihai’s research focuses on political memory, art and politics, theories of oppression and political emotions. Her GREYZONE project considered how the perception of historic violence plays into cultural identity.
Happy to hear from you!
If you have any feedback, we’re always happy to hear from you! Send us any comments, questions or suggestions (but hopefully never a complaint!) to the usual email address, editorial@cordis.europa.eu.
Keywords
CORDIScovery, CORDIS, IMPRODOVA, CLIMSEC, GREYZONE, climate change, domestic violence, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, political memory