Between 1975 and 1979, thirty-one unidentified bodies bearing marks of torture appeared at various locations along Uruguays coastline. These bodies were material proof of the death flights implemented in neighbouring Argentina after the military coup. In Uruguay, in a general context of political crisis, the appearance of these anonymous cadavers first generated local terror and was then rapidly transformed into a traumatic event at the national level. This article focuses on the various reports established by Uruguayan police and mortuary services. It aims to show how,the administrative and funeral treatments given at that time to the dead bodies, buried anonymously (under the NN label) in local cemeteries, make visible some of the multiple complicities between the Uruguayan and Argentinean dictatorships in the broader framework of the Condor Plan. The repressive strategy implemented in Argentina through torture and forced disappearance was indeed echoed by the bureaucratic repressive strategy implemented in Uruguay through incomplete and false reports, aiming to make the NN disappear once again.
By expanding the geographical scope of the history of violence and war, this volume challenges both Western and state-centric narratives of the decline of violence and its relationship to modernity. It highlights instead similarities across early modernity in terms of representations, legitimations, applications of, and motivations for violence. It seeks to integrate methodologies of the study of violence into the history of war, thereby extending the historical significance of both fields of research. Thirteen case studies outline the myriad ways in which large-scale violence was understood and used by states and non-state actors throughout the early modern period across Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Atlantic, and Europe, demonstrating that it was far more complex than would be suggested by simple narratives of conquest and resistance. Moreover, key features of imperial violence apply equally to large-scale violence within societies. As the authors argue, violence was a continuum, ranging from small-scale, local actions to full-blown war. The latter was privileged legally and increasingly associated with states during early modernity, but its legitimacy was frequently contested and many of its violent forms, such as raiding and destruction of buildings and crops, could be found in activities not officially classed as war.
for the title of being the driving forces of globalization. African rhetoric, looking back to the autarkic logic of dependency theory, only intensifies the continent’s marginalization. Instead, the way forward must be for African struggles against external economic domination, militarism, state repression and cultural imperialisms to link up with similar struggles elsewhere. Cheru (1996) admits that in the African context there is much hard work to be undertaken by social movements in developing a counter-project to current oppressions, yet this is vital if Africa
bourgeois Jacobin waters”’ (Gildea 2002: 315). In Britain and Germany, the political elite maintained its ascendancy throughout the nineteenth century. Constitutional monarchies maintained a firm grip on the state and the political process in both spaces (in Germany this meant until 1871 the thirty-odd states remaining after Napoleonic consolidation). Intermittent manifestations of the ‘the people’s will’ were contained with comparative ease, partly by efficient state repression but also because of the willingness of the elite to give ground under pressure, often slowly
is essential in this war. Because they want to capture man in body and mind. The struggle of ideas is therefore fundamental in this war’ (La Nación, 29 October 1977). The military’s dual use of bio- and necropower is manifested in the daily practices of state repression. They tried to influence the minds of the Argentine people through a strict control over school and university curricula; the censorship of books, films and music; the fostering of religious faith – especially Roman Catholicism – and the inculcation of patriotism and respect for authority. Torture
/intolerable situation. The political action of migrant strikers shifts from being defined as a university occupation needing direct state repression, to a transformation of the Law School to a hotel or inn, which is, moreover, being run under shady circumstances, on to a migrant camp and even a form of impromptu mosque. The culmination of these themes can be seen as occurring in the somewhat paradoxical representation of the hunger
7 State violence and death politics in post-revolutionary Iran 1 Chowra Makaremi 2 From 9 January to 19 July 2012, the Iranian daily Gooya News, one of the Iranian diaspora’s main information sites, published a series of forty-one articles, entitled ‘Interviews with a torture and rape witness’. The tortures and rapes in question were from the period of violent state repression that gripped the Islamic Republic throughout the 1980s. The interviews give voice to the anonymous testimony of an official involved in the penitentiary and judicial sphere of that period
interests in Eurasia. Even more problematic, as conservative and repressive regimes work to sustain the status quo they are able in the short term to combat international terrorism. However, in the long term, it is this very state repression of freedoms that often fuels the radicalisation of Islam. Thus the United States faces an uncomfortable policy choice between promoting stability and values. The prospects for a lasting regional concert system for Eurasia will depend on whether the United States asserts its regional role with restraint and whether it pursues
’s foundations. Their use of violence was not simply a response to state repression but reflected a great historical transformation when the ruled themselves confronted the crisis of the times and fought for their own sociopolitical visions. The result was one of the most turbulent times in Vietnam’s history. The Nguyen state survived the turmoil, but its continued failure to modernize would cost the Vietnamese dear over the following decades. Notes 1 The author would like to thank Peter H. Wilson, Marie Houllemare, and Erica Charters for their thoughtful support and
the guerrilla organizations. For decades, a negative conception of otherness had been constructed in military social circles and training settings – one that threatened Argentina’s Catholic essence. According to this conception, the guerrilla was only the ‘tip of the iceberg’ of a broader and heterogeneous group, referred to as ‘the subversion’. Within this interpretative framework, state repression focused on the guerrilla, but included a much wider population. The personnel assigned to carry out repressive acts and the facilities used for the purpose belonged to