Modernity and Violence

The liberal narrative, according to which Western modernity has overcome violence and brought peace to the world, is now virtually untenable. This is indicated not only by the recent escalations of violence in Ukraine, Israel/Palestine, Sudan and Iran, amongst other places. Rather, the history of the 20th century has already made this abundantly clear. It is a history of racist, (neo-)colonial and patriarchal violence, of wars, genocide and ethnic cleansing, and the violent exploitation of people, nature and animals on a scale which – as Nelson Mandela has observed – burdens us with a legacy of human violence and suffering such as has never before been seen or deemed possible in human history.

Yet sociological studies examining the links between modernity and violence – such as Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust or Mahmood Mamdani’s Neither Settler nor Native – have so far remained the exception. Liberal theories of Western modernity continue to ignore or marginalise violence or exclude it from the history of modernity by viewing it as a “rupture of civilisation”. By contrast, in this session we will further develop a sociological perspective that does not ignore the issue of violence but rather places it at the centre of our understanding of modernity. We will examine the relationship between modernity and violence from theoretical, historical and empirical perspectives, by discussing how violence is culturally and structurally enabled, motivated and escalated, with the aim of contributing to a better understanding of both violence in modernity and modernity itself.