Virtual Coffee Hour

Rio de Janeiro’s favelas have become among the most well-known of Latin America’s neighborhoods, under siege by armed drug gangs and invading militarized police. Since the 1970s, dangerous networks between drug traffickers and corrupt state actors have transformed these poor neighborhoods into sites of armed conflict and political repression, limiting residents’ ability to speak out against violence or demand their democratic rights. Despite these challenges, non-violent politics remains an integral element in Cidade de Deus, one of Rio’s most dangerous favelas. In this talk, Fahlberg will describe some of the main findings from her new book, Activism under Fire, which examines the strategies that activists in Cidade de Deus have deployed to make demands for rights and resources while navigating severe violence and political repression. Findings are based on fieldwork, virtual ethnography, and Participatory Action Research she conducted between 2014 and 2020. The talk will provide an account of how conflict activism operates in Cidade de Deus and offer ideas and concepts that will be useful to researchers examining activism in other areas of violence and repression.

The past and current chairs of PWSC, Lisa Hajjar and Ori Swed,

will discuss how sociology can be deployed to understand the

events of October 7 and the current war in Gaza. Following brief

presentations and a conversation between the two, the floor will

be opened for questions and discussion with the audience.

Optional material that people who plan to attend can read are Dr.

Hajjar's new article, "Gaza Is a Crime Scene" and Dr. Swed's

new manuscript, "Mass Atrocities and Forensic Evidence: The

October 7th Atrocities as a Case Study.” 

Since the declaration of martial law in 1972 until its downfall in 1986, the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos suppressed Filipino activists in the United States using hard tactics such as surveillance, harassment, and assassination. Marcos was able to pursue hard repression due to the dense and strong relations between the U.S. and the Philippines, which both had interests in maintaining the dictatorship. While cross-border state repression initially threatened the movement, it became an opportunity for the activists to promote their agenda, especially since it created cleavages within Marcos’s diplomatic corps. On the other hand, the populist Rodrigo Duterte who was democratically-elected in 2016 has not actively repressed his critics abroad. This has been mostly due to Duterte’s overwhelming support in the diaspora and entrenchment of his power in civil society. Instead of hard tactics, Duterte—referred to by Philippine mainstream media as “The Social Media President”—engaged in soft repression, silencing activists in online spaces through an army of social media influencers, bloggers, and commentators. Despite divergent strategies of repression due to different historical conditions, both Marcos and Duterte were identical in the manner by which they have called into question the loyalty to the nation of diaspora activists.

How do we understand violent moments in otherwise nonviolent movements? In Street Rebellion: Resistance Beyond Violence and Nonviolence, which received an honorable mention for the 2023 PWSC Outstanding Book Award, Dr. Benjamin Case unpacks the theory and empirics of the violence/nonviolence question. Using innovative mixed-methods research on riots and nonviolent demonstrations in multiple countries and contexts, Dr. Case argues that political violence is not only common in the kinds of civil resistance movements that routinely get labeled "nonviolent," but can play a crucial role in the dynamics of social change from below. 

How does sexual harassment and assault remain prevalent in an organization that has dynamic policies, prevention strategies, and evolving education programs designed to combat sexual violence? In this PWSC Virtual Coffee Hour, Dr. Stephanie Bonnes will discuss sexual violence in the United States military and findings from her new book Hardship Duty. 

In the past thirty years, it has become evident that the U.S. military has faced widespread and ongoing challenges related to harassment and sexual assault. Despite prevention efforts, estimated sexual assaults are increasing, reporting is decreasing, and the problem persists across all branches of the military. Drawing primarily on in-depth interviews with fifty servicewomen, Dr. Bonnes will discuss how masculinity and misogyny are entangled in the organization's structure, policies, values, physical spaces, and culture in ways that create sexual abuse vulnerability. In her book, she demonstrates how privileging masculinity and denigrating femininity at the organizational level encourages harassment at the interpersonal level, how servicewomen are often forced to cope with harassment and sexual abuse on their own--despite policies designed to assist victims--and how women who do report are often treated like institutional enemies, harassed more, and face resistance from the institution.

Prof. Louis Kriesberg from Syracuse University discusses his new book "Fighting Better." In this book, Prof. Kriesberg looks at how conflict shapes inequality in the US and how to fight for equality constructively.

How do states coerce citizens into compliance while simultaneously minimizing backlash? In this coffee hour, Prof. Ong will discuss her recent book Outsourcing Repression (2022, Oxford University Press) which has won the International Studies Association Human Rights Section Best Book Award. In this book, she examines how the Chinese state engages nonstate actors to coerce and mobilize the masses for state pursuits, while reducing costs and minimizing resistance. She draws on ethnographic research, a unique and original event dataset, and a collection of government regulations in a study of everyday land grabs and housing demolition in China. Theorizing a counterintuitive form of repression that reduces resistance and backlash, Prof. Ong invites us to reimagine the new ground state power credibly occupies.

In answering sociological questions about peace, war, and social conflict we have often overlooked the imperial milieu many sociologists are part of and the ways in which coloniality imprints on our theories. As we aspire towards a more just and peaceful world, distinguished scholars are calling to decolonize our discipline and they caution us against several aspects of "doing sociology." First, research based on Euro-American history and experiences is generalized to provide universal answers. Second, transnational connections between the imperial metropole and the formerly/currently colonized spaces and the impact of these connections on social patterns are understudied. Third, how experiences of colonization and racism relate to peace, war, and social conflict is generally overlooked. Lastly, our theories pay little attention to the role of the imperial and post-imperial societies that we are also part of – e.g., North America and Western Europe - in waging, creating, and supporting wars.

Does foreign aid promote human rights? As the world’s largest aid donor, the United States has provided foreign assistance to more than 200 countries. This presentation discusses the key arguments and findings from the recently published book Aid Imperium: United States Foreign Policy and Human Rights in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia (2021, University of Michigan Press, Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies Book Series). The core argument maintains that the convergence of donor and recipient governments’ interests as well as the domestic legitimacy of the donor government shape physical integrity rights outcomes.

Memorials are powerful mechanisms in transitioning societies from mass atrocity to more peaceful futures. This talk, based on her recently released book, investigates the ways memorials can shape the experiences of survivors decades after the violence has ended. Dr. Nicole Fox examines how memorials can both heal and hurt, especially when they fail to represent all genders, ethnicities, and classes of those afflicted. Drawing on extensive interviews with Rwandan genocide survivors, Dr. Fox reveals their relationships to these spaces and uncovers the micro processes in which survivors’ stories are made central to commemoration and how collective memory can also stratify.

The Arab Spring revolutions of 2011 sent shockwaves across the globe, mobilizing diaspora communities to organize forcefully against authoritarian regimes. Despite the important role that diasporas can play in influencing affairs in their countries of origin, little is known about when diaspora actors mobilize, how they intervene, or what makes them effective. Dana M. Moss presents a new framework for understanding the transnational dynamics of contention and the social forces that either enable or suppress transnational activism.

In an era of global crises, political unrest, and polarization, peace studies offers tools to help students diagnose and address the serious problems that we face. However, we also face challenges in our teaching-- politicization of peace studies, student despair, and student polarization. In this panel, we will explore the different challenges and opportunities for peace studies in our current environment. Everyone is welcome to join in the discussion.

The proliferation of contracts outsourcing military functions to private companies raises serious oversight concerns vis-à-vis regulation and accountability. While critics predict an unchecked industry, supporters have defended the lack of an adequate accountability mechanism by touting self-regulation as a potential solution. Following this discussion, we examine whether the frequency of contractor violations and legal repercussions within the overall contracting industry differed between those in the burgeoning security-contracting community and those in the traditional contracting community. 

Her research explores how individuals learn about the meaning, and interpret representations, of past racial violence, and how the content and placement of such representations affect individuals, communities, and intra/intergroup relations. Over the past three years she has collected data on the social impact of representations of racial violence in Virginia and Alabama. Her work has three intertwined objectives to: (1) identify and typologize the meaning-making strategies (i.e., related to interaction, family, education, etc.) that individuals utilize to interpret representations; (2) illuminate the ways that social position (i.e. race, class, gender, etc.) matters in the interaction and interpretation processes; and (3) determine how representations impact individuals and surrounding communities on social, emotional, and political levels.

Global Social Thought is an investigation into alternatives to classical Western social theory, an exploration of "The Great Books of the Nonwestern World" and contemporary Nonwestern scholarship. Given the current effort to address structural racism in our global community, the time is ripe to move forward with this project. Human knowledge is so profoundly influenced by the social context in which it is constructed that our theories should not be based exclusively on reflections of the Euro-American experience that provides the foundation for modern social sciences. This project is a collaborative effort that grew out of a workshop on Building Bridges designed to facilitate building alliances between whites and nonwhites to fight racism

Using a combination of newspaper articles, in-depth interviews and archival records, the author studies the evolution of social and symbolic boundaries between landlords and small farmers throughout the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in Colombia. The analysis reveals that major urbanization and economic growth in the mid- twentieth century radically transformed social relations between landlords and small farmers. Yet, these identities endured and reproduced in the cities. Over the years, interpretations of episodes of violence reaffirmed old biases that became hard to challenge because social groups, as imagined in cultural narratives, no longer interact with each other.

My research focuses on literary reception under war and occupation. It is based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kabul, Afghanistan among book clubs and oneon-one interviews with book readers. Using Elizabeth Long’s theory that subjectivity is fashioned through reception of cultural objects (2003) and W.E.B.DuBois’ theory of double consciousness (DuBOis 1903, DuBois 1940, Itzigsohn and Brown 2015) which posits that the subjectivity of a colonized subject is split, and through my fieldwork I will show that the reading of books largely meant for European or American readers, while living under occupation, young Afghans who I worked with explicitly manifested double consciousness.

Perpetrators of mass violence are often neighbors and, in politically supported violence, rarely convicted. By implication, victims are compelled to continue living alongside them for years after the violence. I examine intergroup relations in context of such heterogenous neighborhoods in India. The topic of my work faces consistent political and academic censorship in India; career advice would also be welcomed.

Text-modeling techniques demonstrate that the semantic structure of peace treaties has undergone significant shifts from 1975 to 2018 with world society-based language related to human rights discourse becoming institutionalized into the world’s peace processes over time.  Our findings suggest that this language begins to emerge in topic models and the network structure of the text most strongly at a key historic juncture, the end of the Cold War (1990/1991).