What Constitutes the State's Culture of Political Violence?

• Author: Rak, Joanna
• Position: Designing Peace: Cyprus and Institutional Innovations in Divided Societies; Domestic Role Contestation, Foreign Policy, and International Relations; Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations: (De - Book review

Designing Peace: Cyprus and Institutional Innovations in Divided Societies

By Neophytos Loizides

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015, 264 pages, $75.00, ISBN 9780812247756.

Domestic Role Contestation, Foreign Policy, and International Relations

Edited By Cristian Cantir and Juliet Kaarbo

New York and London: Routledge, 2016, 228 pages, $28.90, ISBN: 9781138653818.

Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations: (De)fatalizing the Present, Forging Radical Alternatives

Edited By Anna M. Agathangelou and Kyle D. Killian

New York and London: Routledge, 2016, 342 pages, $160.00, ISBN: 9780415712712.

A culture of political violence is the configuration of factors which exist lastingly in a political subject's milieu, and determine if and to what extent the use of violence is acceptable to and allowable by this subject. This theoretical category is highly applicable to explain why some states, political groups, social movements, and individuals use political violence eagerly while others are reluctant to do so. Its model may consist of various analytical levels determined according to the type of its subject. This review article introduces and critically discusses recent contributions to studies on states' cultures of political violence. Their authors agree with the assumption that a culture of political violence cannot be directly measured; they have diverse analytical proposals for what variables should be taken into consideration when a model is constructed. Designing Peace: Cyprus and Institutional Innovations in Divided Societies by Neophytos Loizides concentrates on the analytical levels of domestic politics and international relations by showing the relationships between institutional innovations and designing peace processes. Although the same levels are covered by Domestic Role Contestation, Foreign Policy, and International Relations edited by Cristian Cantir and Juliet Kaarbo, they are elaborated in the latter from the perspective of different factors. The contributors scrutinize national role conflict in advanced democracies, thus shedding light on role contestation among political elites and between elites and the general public. In turn, Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations: (De) fatalizing the Present, Forging Radical Alternatives, edited by Anna M. Agathangelou and Kyle D. Killian, offers important insights into political violence at the individual, social, and international relations level. Its authors delve analytically into the experiences and structures of political violence in relation to time, oppression, neocolonization, slavery, war, poverty, and exploitation. These books differ considerably in terms of their methodological, theoretical, and empirical approaches towards individuals, society, domestic politics, and international relations as the analytical levels of the state's culture of political violence. This article summarizes them, and then provides an analysis and critical evaluation of their approaches by assessing their contributions to existing studies on the culture of political violence.

N. Loizides addresses the following research questions: Why do some societies choose federal or consociational institutions to accommodate ethnic or religious variety while others avoid doing so? How do postconflict societies combine such arrangements with reconciliation and other institutional mechanisms to support victim groups? What conclusions may be drawn from case studies (pp. 1-2) by examining the Cypriot case and comparing it with examples from Bosnia, South Africa, and Northern Ireland? Designing Peace deals with the failure to enter into a federal agreement in Cyprus in spite of considerable endeavors to that end since 1974. As Loizides shows, in contrast to other divided societies that transcended their stalemates, Cyprus has been divided for decades, even though the two communities have tentatively accepted the general conditions of reunification since the High-Level Agreements of 1977 and 1979. The federal vision has...