NIOD Rewind | Episode 25 - What is 'Violence'? Debates and Directions

Ever since its founding an important theme within NIOD research has been 'violence': the perpetration of violence, the legacies of violence, and the multilayered experience of violence and its effects on individuals, communities and nations. To renew thinking on the core question of what constitutes violence and how to study it, in June 2022 the NIOD organised, together with the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) a workshop on the question ‘What is violence? Debates and Directions’. In this episode, scholars Sinisa Malesevic, Tatjana Tönsmeyer, Avi Sharma and Ton Zwaan discuss how they use the concept of violence in their work. How to address less visible kinds of violence, such as long-term pollution or climate change, which have the potential to kill entire populations and destroy entire regions of the world? How can research on violence draw attention to institutionalised inequalities and exploitation? And who actually decides what counts as violence – in the past but also in the present and future?