Institutional Violence.(Value Inquiry Book Series 88) (Value Inquiry Book)

Violence can be physical and psychological. It can characterize personal actions, forms of group activity, and abiding social and political policy. This book includes all of these aspects within its focus on institutional forms of violence. Institution is also a broad category, ranging from formal arrangements such as the military, the criminal code, the death penalty and prison system, to more amorphous but systemic situations indicated by parenting, poverty, sexism, work, and racism. Violence is as complex as the human beings who resort to it; its institutional forms pervade our relational lives. We are all participants in it as victims and perpetrators. The chapters in this book were written in the hope that violence can be explicated, even if not fully understood, and that such clarification can help us in devising less violent forms of living, even if it does not lead to its total abolition. The studies bring new aspects of violence to light and offer a number of suggestions for its remedy.

DEANE CURTIN is Professor of Philosophy and Sponberg Chair of Ethics at Gustavus Adolphus College, where he directs the Community Development in India program, a national program for college students based in Madras. He has lived in Japan and India, recently returning from a semester in India spent studying the effects of the GATT agreement on indigenous peoples. In addition to coediting this volume, his books include (with Lisa Heldke) Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food (1992), and the forthcoming Chinnagounder’s Challenge: The Question of Ecological Citizenship.
ROBERT LITKE teaches philosophy at Wilfrid Laurier University. He specializes in issues of power, violence, and peace. He has published and delivered lectures on these themes in Canada, Great Britain, Israel, and the United States. He is coeditor of this volume.