Research on power has made remarkable advances in the study of horizontal, soft, and discursive power that produces subjects, identities and consent. But currently, we are witnessing the forceful return, re-enforcement, or re-entrance to center stage of vertical, hierarchical, and coercive forms of power, or brute force, in world politics as well as in various local developments, threatening the whole variety of democratic freedoms and human rights as we know them. At the same time with this return of vertical and coercive power “softer” means of domination continue to play a key role. Harsh coercion is possible because it is justified by discourses and tactics that make it seem legitimate.
It is increasingly pressing that social scientists manage to tackle the current conjunctions of war, violence and coercion as they lurk into more and more people’s everyday lives both through media coverage and very directly. We are currently witnessing in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and elsewhere a new phase of a long process in which organized brutality has been steadily increasing in the process of consolidation of the bureaucracies of modern states and their machineries of violence. These have, among other things, caused the two world wars in the 20th century and may well bring forth a third one in our century. How can social scientists address such a threatening situation, and what kind of old and new conceptual and methodological tools are needed to grasp the social realities touched by these circumstances? How to make social sciences best analyze and serve a world at loss of an enlightened cosmopolitan optimism that by and large has marked much of the Western scholarly thought for decades, cautiously estimated.
Violence and brutality, obviously, scale from world wars to micro situations of domestic, gendered, racial, physical, emotional violence. How to address this bleak chain of seemingly unavoidable human darkness? In his (in)famous experiment, Stanley Milgram showed that when positioned in a situation of submission to authority, most people obey the experimenter, ready to bend their moral convictions up until shocking an innocent man to his ostensible death. But not all of them did. What about those who resisted? Milgram’s well-known findings may offer new insight for today’s social scientists still: can we find hope and potential for non-violent resolutions in the practical choices of those who eventually refused? If the Arendtian banality of evil resides in everyday acts and practices, are there new avenues and potential to be found to study the banality of benign?
Gender is a particularly topical issue of power at the moment, considering the attacks on abortion rights and trans rights, the anti-gender movement, and the justification of racism in the name of women's rights. In other words, gender is once again a key target of power struggles and an object of conflict, and through it, many other forms of social criticism get articulated and politicized, related, for example, to nationalism, belonging and citizenship. It is, and has been, however, also a mobilizing and empowering force, providing people powerful means of identification, belonging, and collectivity building, as the gender fluidity and trans-politics of today’s youth for its part indicates. A similar duality of power dynamics - both the repressive attacks and the mobilizing force - emerge around race, as well as many other identifying aspects crucial to human societies. Migrancy, poverty, disabilities, and so many other aspects make people vulnerable to power abuse in increasing force, but also provide them with tools, communities, and potential to politicize in new ways.
The two-day conference includes keynote talks from the following:
Abstract submission: