Gendered Violence and the Dialectic of Context and Comparison: Insights from India and South Africa

This paper starts with an apparent paradox. Although gendered violence has existed in all societies and across time (as quantified through the fact that globally 1 in 3 women have faced physical or sexual violence), it is contextually produced in particular times and places. Violence, in other words, is general and particular at the same time. In contrast to broad theories of violence, and policy frameworks such as ‘What Works,’ I argue that violence is not only an act or event, but has a ‘social life’ that includes the meanings and rationales attributed to violence, the language through which it is talked about or deflected, in the context of historically developed institutions and political-economies. When we treat violence as a set of discrete acts rather than as a repertoire (Tilly) or sign (Das), the methodological corollary is to identify the underlying factors or variables that cause violence. This paper will argue that such approaches cannot account for the proliferation of violence, historical continuities in violence, as well as shifts in forms of violence in particular societies. However, this is not an argument for descriptive particularity; there is much we can learn by combining comparison and contextual arguments. This paper will draw upon research conducted as part of the ESRC project ‘Urban Transformation and Gendered Violence in India and South Africa’ (2020-24) to show that rather than eliding the contextual specificities of violence, juxtaposing two cases can generate important and unique insights through their similarities and differences.