Mass Violence as Tragedy
Analyzing the Transmission of Discourses
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22169171 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Juliane Prade-Weiss, Juliane Prade‐Weiss (0000-0003-1431-1961, LMU Klinikum, corresponding author), Dominik Markl (0000-0002-5202-048X, Pontifical Biblical Institute, corresponding author), Vladimir Petrović (0000-0002-8306-0396, Institute of Contemporary History, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2023-03-15 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Perpetrator Research (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2514-7897 • E-ISSN: 2514-7897 |
| Publisher | Winchester University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.21039/jpr.5.1.97 |
| OpenAlex | W4383958670 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 15 |
Mass violence—killings and other forms of violence that aim at exterminating large groups of people—is often called a tragedy. The trope can be found in testimonies of victimization, justifications of perpetration, journalistic, political, and academic language as well as in popular parlance. The article examines the divergent usages of the travelling trope of tragedy with particular emphasis on its role in forming justificatory discourse. The issue at stake is that the trope of tragedy does not remain confined to outright justifications such as juridical legitimization, moral vindication, political propaganda etc., but permeates condemnation and critique as well. The rationale of the analysis is that justifications of acts of mass violence that are negotiated in key areas of the cultural canon give a culturally specific, often identificatory, meaning to acts that are, from a critical perspective, mostly either considered senseless or comprehended in economic and sociopolitical terms. Yet it is largely owing to justificatory discourses that acts of mass violence do not remain single, exorbitant events, but have a lasting impact by shaping the linguistic and heuristic framework of their subsequent evaluation. When condemnation and critique adopt these terminologies and frameworks—such as the notion of purity underlying the term ‘ethnic cleansing’, or the ethnopolitical paradigm informing the concept of genocide—this effects an uneasy mimetic participation in transmitting justifications of mass violence. The trope of tragedy makes it possible to address the issue of mimetic participation by drawing attention to the audience as an indispensable element of the discourse
Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Genocide · Literature · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Law · Nuclear Issues and Defense · Philosophy · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2023 (2) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |