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Public Emotions and Variations of Violence: Evidence from Colombia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2020

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Abstract

In 2010 Colombia experienced an unexpected surge in acid attacks against women, and from 2010–2014, it had more acid attacks per capita than any other country in the world. No other form of violent crime in the country demonstrated such a spike. What explains this unusual variation in violence? I argue that this unique pattern of violence was made sensible by the 2005–2011 nation-building campaign Colombia Is Passion that redefined the enduring violence plaguing the country as men’s misunderstood passion for beautiful women. By valorizing violence toward women and making women’s membership in the nation contingent upon their beauty, the campaign created an affective economy under which acid attacks became both intelligible and effective in producing social death and national ostracization. In this paper, I have denaturalized violence against women and suggest that political scientists might do more to explain important variations of violence outside of armed conflict. Finally, I demonstrate the explanatory power of interpretive studies of political culture, national identity, and public emotion in structuring the meaning and patterns of violence.

Type
Special Section: The Uses of Violence
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , September 2020 , pp. 788 - 804
Copyright
© American Political Science Association 2020

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Footnotes

A list of permanent links to Supplemental Materials provided by the authors precedes the References section.

*Data replication sets are available in Harvard Dataverse at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/IUCOEP

She is grateful to participants at the 2015 Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, four anonymous reviewers, and Editor-in-Chief Michael Bernhard for their critical feedback that immensely improved this article. In addition, special thanks are due to Alexandra Filindra, Marta Zambrano, Suzanne Wilson, Leela Fernandes, and Pellumb Kelmendi for their many comments, suggestions, and conversations.

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