HARM – Journal of Hostility Aggression Repression and Malice
Journal Data
| Type | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Universitatsbibliothek der Ruhr-Universitat Bochum |
| ISSN | 2940-3073 |
| OpenAlex | S4387287808 |
| Total publications | 23 |
| Coverage period | 2023 - 2026 |
| Language | EN |
| Impact factor | 0.059 |
This journal focuses on hostility, aggression, repression, and malice. These themes are directly relevant to psychological anthropology and cultural anthropology's studies of emotion, conflict, and social control, making it a closely cognate venue
Attachment and Relationship Dynamics · Cultural Differences and Values · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Gender, Security, and Conflict · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Human-Animal Interaction Studies · Interpreting and Communication in Healthcare · Intimate Partner and Family Violence · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration
The Violence of Aspiration
This essay critiques contemporary development paradigms in postcolonial democracies such as India by exposing the symbolic and aesthetic violence embedded within them. It argues that development today operates not only through material exclusion but also via symbolic harm—governing through aspiration, aesthetic legibility, and bureaucratic temporality. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence and insights from feminist political …
Locating Harm in Education
This paper tells a story; a story of harm; subtle albeit. It moves in the process from coercive violence to the subtle harm of hegemony – hegemony of disciplines, hegemony of texts, and hegemony of pedagogic methods. Specifically, it tries to elucidate the harm of teaching Economics in an indigenous context in India. The paper, in the process highlights how the indigenous life worlds and worldviews get interpellated by the hegemonic language, log…
Rethinking Symbolic Violence on Social Media
The aim of this article is to discuss the notion of symbolic violence and to foreground a psychoanalytic conceptualisation of the term. Having been popularised by Pierre Bourdieu and other thinkers, the term is routinely used to describe forms of violence that stop short of the physical. It remains under-theorised. Following a brief literature review, it is argued that psychoanalysis has much to add when it comes to conceptualising symbolic viole…
“Just Run Over Them” - Experiences, Perceptions and Evaluations of Violence Among Activists of Letzte Generation
In the last years, Letzte Generation has been a prominent and controversial group of climate activists in Germany. In 2021, the group began protesting across Germany, inspired by strategies of civil disobedience throughout Germany. Since then, a broad debate has erupted about Letzte Generation, their strategies, goals and legitimacy. Videos of attacks, threats and verbal abuse of activists by bystanders appeared. To get an understanding of the ac…
“All I did was cry”
This article explores how migrant women experience harm, resilience, and agency while in transit through the Americas. It focuses on the ways sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) shapes mobility, everyday life, and perception, drawing on women’s own words to trace how harm accumulates both through direct acts of violence and through the constant threat of it. The article situates these experiences within the continuum of violence framework, un…
Zone of Interest – On Negation and Denial
Jonathan Frazer’s film Zone of Interest (2023) is a film about the Höß family during the three and a half years in which Rudolf Höß, as camp commander of Auschwitz, was responsible for the cruelty, torture, murders, and destruction of evidence of the crimes committed in the extermination camp. The house and garden where the family lived and cared for were directly adjacent to the camp wall. The visual images in the film remain outside the camp, w…
“We Were Striving For Our Revolution” — Navigating Harms in the Pursuit of Change
The death of Zhina-Mahsa Amini on September 16, 2022 ignited widespread protests against the oppression in various parts of Iran. The response from the Islamic Republic (IR) to these protests has been characterised by extreme violence since their inception in September 2022. This raises the question of how and why individuals continue to protest and resist such oppression despite facing them persistently. To explore this question, we conducted qu…
Translating Trauma into Testimony
Research involving highly vulnerable groups, such as those with deeply traumatic experiences, presents researchers with significant ethical and methodological hurdles. This article outlines a project conducted in northern Iraq with former ISIS child soldiers. We reflect on our methodological and ethical decisions within the framework of the do no harm imperative — a cornerstone of research ethics that has faced criticism for its perceived inadequ…
Arrest Matters
Using Conversation Analysis (CA), this article focuses on the ways in which participants invoke vulnerability in phone calls to the former East German State Security Service, better known as the Stasi. The calls were made in the late 1970s and the 1980s and pertained in one way or the other to political arrests. The main aim is to understand the linkage between vulnerability as an attribute of an institutional setting and vulnerability as the mut…
Memory, Religion, and Authoritarianism in Post (1994)-Genocide Rwanda
This article attempts to theorise governmental efforts of the Kagame regime to construct a common national identity that precariously hinges on the adoption of an official revisionist history. Guided by Jan Assmann’s theory of cultural memory and Maurice Halbwachs’ collective memory, it may be argued the government’s official narrative of Rwanda’s idyllic history is a strategy for securing Rwanda’s future by linking it to an ancestral past. This …
“My Life Has Ended”
Much of refugee protection focuses on the legal aspects within the international refugee protection regime, which arguably results in less attention being paid to the more practical aspects to the realisation of that protection including the processes the refugees have to undergo as well as its impacts. As a cornerstone of the international refugee protection regime, non-refoulement (the forcible return of people to countries where they face pers…
Harm Through Those Supposed To Heal
This article bases its findings on an extensive praxeological reconstruction of medical involvement in torture in Syria since 2011. The research was conducted from 2021–2023 by examining reports of human rights organisations and activists, the accounts of survivors as well as trial reports and academic literature. After outlining an inexhaustive list of prevalent patterns of medical involvement in torture compiled for the overall reconstruction o…
Harm as a Psychological Concept
This paper outlines the not-so-sharp contours of the concept of harm. It sees harm as largely a psychological concept and argues for the need of a third concept — harm, in addition to the two incumbents upon us — violence and trauma. It also argues that it is the relative blur in the use of the concept of harm that makes it fecund in terms of its capacity to unveil multiple forms and facets of human experience, including the process of self-harm
Epistemic Harm in Empathy
This paper delves into the intricacies of the concept of epistemic harm. Particularly, epistemic harm is used as a case study to gain insights into the efficacy and distinctiveness of the concept of harm vis-à-vis related constructs such as violence and trauma within the domain of social psychology. The paper underscores the pertinence of the concept of epistemic harm in the context of empathetic testimonial exchange using autism studies as a sam…
There Is Harm Even In Harmony
In the following pages, we — a documentary filmmaker and a cultural psychologist — share some of the thoughts that we have been concerned with since we started thinking together about some issues that are as much on the minds of the filmmaker as they are on the minds of the scientist. On the one hand, this is our way of encouraging scientific research on the harmful aspects of life to open up to alternative perspectives, methods of exploration, d…
“You Have Blood On Your Lips” — Experiencing and Articulating Animal-Related Violence in Veganism
This article outlines critical research perspectives on the human-animal relationship. It uses exemplary analyses of empirical data collected through qualitative interviews with vegans to shed light on how they perceive certain ways of treating animals as violent practices. The analysis in this article focuses on the functions and effects of language, not only in terms of its role in maintaining existing carnivorous structures and practices, but …
Harm — Concept and Aims of an Open Journal
On Enmity, Terror and Fear
In this article, HARM presents a small excerpt from Ernst E. Boesch’s book “Von Kunst bis Terror - Über den Zwiespalt in der Kultur” [From art to terror - On the dichotomy in culture], published in 2005. The editors of HARM want to draw attention to a psychologist and social theorist who saw himself as a cultural psychologist and, as such, wanted to show how much more complex, ambivalent, opaque and unpredictable human thinking, feeling, behaviou…
The Meaning of Concepts
The article analyses the different concepts used to conceptualise State Crimes (politicide, massacre, State Terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity) in order to explore the theoretical advantages and disadvantages in comparison with the concept of genocide. The article highlights the conceptual problems of the different terms and the theoretical strength of the concept of genocide when compared with any of the other possibilities
Differential Harm
This essay opposes the idea that contemporary critical events like pandemics, global warming, environmental deterioration, et cetera, are to be considered as affecting humanity in a uniform way. Instead of seeing these phenomena like abstract universal threats, I propose to look at them through the lens of my concept of differential harm. By drawing on interdisciplinary sources, this concept aims at covering a series of processes that are best de…
Rape and Sexual Abuse Against Women in the Holocaust — Deprived Credibility and Refused Recognition as a Form of Harm
Sexual violence research is often not limited to the direct perpetration of violence, but also focusses on the (inter-)personal processing of the violence experienced. This article presents the various ways in which female survivors of sexual violence in German concentration camps were denied recognition of their suffering, both by the representatives of the Nazi regime in the camps, as well as by their fellow prisoners and finally by the German …
Personhood, Masculinity, and Male-Perpetrated Intimate Partner Violence
Most international violence research that are firmly rooted in the ontology and cultural background of individualism make rash generalisations about violence and human nature by taking the examples of self and gender concepts in Western settings as the only reference point for their claims. Based on the understanding of self in Western cultures, many social psychological studies have over the years blamed interpersonal violence, including intimat…
Who likes kidneys?’ ‘Fried in the pan?’
Taking a video of the Serbian paramilitary Scorpions unit recording killing as a starting point and drawing upon my own research on WWII and the German genocide, the purpose of this essay is to probe the methodological and ethical challenges of visual sources (videos, photographs) that mediate acts and experiences of violence. Today’s viewers might first notice the striking violence and horror of the Scorpions unit video, reacting in many cases w…
No prominent publications on this page.
Harm Through Those Supposed To Heal
This article bases its findings on an extensive praxeological reconstruction of medical involvement in torture in Syria since 2011. The research was conducted from 2021–2023 by examining reports of human rights organisations and activists, the accounts of survivors as well as trial reports and academic literature. After outlining an inexhaustive list of prevalent patterns of medical involvement in torture compiled for the overall reconstruction o…
Harm as a Psychological Concept
This paper outlines the not-so-sharp contours of the concept of harm. It sees harm as largely a psychological concept and argues for the need of a third concept — harm, in addition to the two incumbents upon us — violence and trauma. It also argues that it is the relative blur in the use of the concept of harm that makes it fecund in terms of its capacity to unveil multiple forms and facets of human experience, including the process of self-harm
Epistemic Harm in Empathy
This paper delves into the intricacies of the concept of epistemic harm. Particularly, epistemic harm is used as a case study to gain insights into the efficacy and distinctiveness of the concept of harm vis-à-vis related constructs such as violence and trauma within the domain of social psychology. The paper underscores the pertinence of the concept of epistemic harm in the context of empathetic testimonial exchange using autism studies as a sam…
There Is Harm Even In Harmony
In the following pages, we — a documentary filmmaker and a cultural psychologist — share some of the thoughts that we have been concerned with since we started thinking together about some issues that are as much on the minds of the filmmaker as they are on the minds of the scientist. On the one hand, this is our way of encouraging scientific research on the harmful aspects of life to open up to alternative perspectives, methods of exploration, d…
“You Have Blood On Your Lips” — Experiencing and Articulating Animal-Related Violence in Veganism
This article outlines critical research perspectives on the human-animal relationship. It uses exemplary analyses of empirical data collected through qualitative interviews with vegans to shed light on how they perceive certain ways of treating animals as violent practices. The analysis in this article focuses on the functions and effects of language, not only in terms of its role in maintaining existing carnivorous structures and practices, but …
Harm — Concept and Aims of an Open Journal
On Enmity, Terror and Fear
In this article, HARM presents a small excerpt from Ernst E. Boesch’s book “Von Kunst bis Terror - Über den Zwiespalt in der Kultur” [From art to terror - On the dichotomy in culture], published in 2005. The editors of HARM want to draw attention to a psychologist and social theorist who saw himself as a cultural psychologist and, as such, wanted to show how much more complex, ambivalent, opaque and unpredictable human thinking, feeling, behaviou…
The Meaning of Concepts
The article analyses the different concepts used to conceptualise State Crimes (politicide, massacre, State Terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity) in order to explore the theoretical advantages and disadvantages in comparison with the concept of genocide. The article highlights the conceptual problems of the different terms and the theoretical strength of the concept of genocide when compared with any of the other possibilities
Differential Harm
This essay opposes the idea that contemporary critical events like pandemics, global warming, environmental deterioration, et cetera, are to be considered as affecting humanity in a uniform way. Instead of seeing these phenomena like abstract universal threats, I propose to look at them through the lens of my concept of differential harm. By drawing on interdisciplinary sources, this concept aims at covering a series of processes that are best de…
Rape and Sexual Abuse Against Women in the Holocaust — Deprived Credibility and Refused Recognition as a Form of Harm
Sexual violence research is often not limited to the direct perpetration of violence, but also focusses on the (inter-)personal processing of the violence experienced. This article presents the various ways in which female survivors of sexual violence in German concentration camps were denied recognition of their suffering, both by the representatives of the Nazi regime in the camps, as well as by their fellow prisoners and finally by the German …
Personhood, Masculinity, and Male-Perpetrated Intimate Partner Violence
Most international violence research that are firmly rooted in the ontology and cultural background of individualism make rash generalisations about violence and human nature by taking the examples of self and gender concepts in Western settings as the only reference point for their claims. Based on the understanding of self in Western cultures, many social psychological studies have over the years blamed interpersonal violence, including intimat…
Who likes kidneys?’ ‘Fried in the pan?’
Taking a video of the Serbian paramilitary Scorpions unit recording killing as a starting point and drawing upon my own research on WWII and the German genocide, the purpose of this essay is to probe the methodological and ethical challenges of visual sources (videos, photographs) that mediate acts and experiences of violence. Today’s viewers might first notice the striking violence and horror of the Scorpions unit video, reacting in many cases w…
“We Were Striving For Our Revolution” — Navigating Harms in the Pursuit of Change
The death of Zhina-Mahsa Amini on September 16, 2022 ignited widespread protests against the oppression in various parts of Iran. The response from the Islamic Republic (IR) to these protests has been characterised by extreme violence since their inception in September 2022. This raises the question of how and why individuals continue to protest and resist such oppression despite facing them persistently. To explore this question, we conducted qu…
Translating Trauma into Testimony
Research involving highly vulnerable groups, such as those with deeply traumatic experiences, presents researchers with significant ethical and methodological hurdles. This article outlines a project conducted in northern Iraq with former ISIS child soldiers. We reflect on our methodological and ethical decisions within the framework of the do no harm imperative — a cornerstone of research ethics that has faced criticism for its perceived inadequ…
Arrest Matters
Using Conversation Analysis (CA), this article focuses on the ways in which participants invoke vulnerability in phone calls to the former East German State Security Service, better known as the Stasi. The calls were made in the late 1970s and the 1980s and pertained in one way or the other to political arrests. The main aim is to understand the linkage between vulnerability as an attribute of an institutional setting and vulnerability as the mut…
Memory, Religion, and Authoritarianism in Post (1994)-Genocide Rwanda
This article attempts to theorise governmental efforts of the Kagame regime to construct a common national identity that precariously hinges on the adoption of an official revisionist history. Guided by Jan Assmann’s theory of cultural memory and Maurice Halbwachs’ collective memory, it may be argued the government’s official narrative of Rwanda’s idyllic history is a strategy for securing Rwanda’s future by linking it to an ancestral past. This …
“My Life Has Ended”
Much of refugee protection focuses on the legal aspects within the international refugee protection regime, which arguably results in less attention being paid to the more practical aspects to the realisation of that protection including the processes the refugees have to undergo as well as its impacts. As a cornerstone of the international refugee protection regime, non-refoulement (the forcible return of people to countries where they face pers…
Rethinking Symbolic Violence on Social Media
The aim of this article is to discuss the notion of symbolic violence and to foreground a psychoanalytic conceptualisation of the term. Having been popularised by Pierre Bourdieu and other thinkers, the term is routinely used to describe forms of violence that stop short of the physical. It remains under-theorised. Following a brief literature review, it is argued that psychoanalysis has much to add when it comes to conceptualising symbolic viole…
“Just Run Over Them” - Experiences, Perceptions and Evaluations of Violence Among Activists of Letzte Generation
In the last years, Letzte Generation has been a prominent and controversial group of climate activists in Germany. In 2021, the group began protesting across Germany, inspired by strategies of civil disobedience throughout Germany. Since then, a broad debate has erupted about Letzte Generation, their strategies, goals and legitimacy. Videos of attacks, threats and verbal abuse of activists by bystanders appeared. To get an understanding of the ac…
“All I did was cry”
This article explores how migrant women experience harm, resilience, and agency while in transit through the Americas. It focuses on the ways sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) shapes mobility, everyday life, and perception, drawing on women’s own words to trace how harm accumulates both through direct acts of violence and through the constant threat of it. The article situates these experiences within the continuum of violence framework, un…
Zone of Interest – On Negation and Denial
Jonathan Frazer’s film Zone of Interest (2023) is a film about the Höß family during the three and a half years in which Rudolf Höß, as camp commander of Auschwitz, was responsible for the cruelty, torture, murders, and destruction of evidence of the crimes committed in the extermination camp. The house and garden where the family lived and cared for were directly adjacent to the camp wall. The visual images in the film remain outside the camp, w…
The Violence of Aspiration
This essay critiques contemporary development paradigms in postcolonial democracies such as India by exposing the symbolic and aesthetic violence embedded within them. It argues that development today operates not only through material exclusion but also via symbolic harm—governing through aspiration, aesthetic legibility, and bureaucratic temporality. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence and insights from feminist political …
Locating Harm in Education
This paper tells a story; a story of harm; subtle albeit. It moves in the process from coercive violence to the subtle harm of hegemony – hegemony of disciplines, hegemony of texts, and hegemony of pedagogic methods. Specifically, it tries to elucidate the harm of teaching Economics in an indigenous context in India. The paper, in the process highlights how the indigenous life worlds and worldviews get interpellated by the hegemonic language, log…