Power, Violence and Justice: Reflections & Responsibilities from the African Diaspora

This is a proposal to the XIX ISA Conference, RC56, to present a paper that explores the long forgotten African Diaspora regarding issues of “Power, Violence and Justice” as such an exploration can help global public intellectuals, policy makers, journalists activists and others re-contextualize their 21^stcentury thinking toward justice. The paper proposes that historical facts of the African Diaspora, among human history’s largest, longest, and most traumatic global phenomena, is inextricably embedded in modernity’s capstone features of democracy, capitalism, globalism, and freedom. It is generally understudied, fully mis-understood, unknown and/or deemed insignificant to contemporary social life. Generally, the thinking is that the African Diaspora has little or no contributions to our modern world.

For example, institutionalized value premises and organizational arrangements upon which many criminal justice systems have evolved, and that gave substance to many global parameters about race, racism, and other topics that pervade our modern world, were initially designed, explored and refined in the social context of the African Diaspora. Such prison systems that do not train inmates to re-enter society upon “paying their debt” are based on experience with members and processes of the African Diaspora that never intended African people to ever be integral members of any euro-centric society. Rather, current public intellectuals, policy makers, journalists, activists and even academics tend to episodically engage contemporary social issues without the historical context that produced them

This paper assumes an historical sociological approach to study and understand attitudes and practices of the this and other phenomena that have evolved from the African Diaspora as global experience. The paper focuses on the African Diaspora as analytical tool for reviewing the global phenomenon and its relation to historical and contemporary modernity.