"Overt and Discreet Violence: Ruptures and Continuities in Latin America and the Caribbean."

On March of 2010 the doctorate students of Latin American history at Columbia University invited graduate students from all disciplines and institutions to participate in the conference, "Overt and Discreet Violence: Ruptures and Continuities in Latin America and the Caribbean."

The year 2010 marked the centennial of the beginning of the Mexican Revolution and the bicentennial of upheavals and Independence movements in several of Spain's American colonies. The purpose of the conference was to highlight the connections between violence as massive historical rupture -revolutions, wars, riots, rebellions- and violence as historical continuity- the experience of unremarked violence in everyday life: What are the ideologies behind violence and how are they put to work?  How does violence become justified, rationalized, or respected?  When does the state seek a "monopoly of violence" and when does it marginalize, coopt and redirect already-existing violence? Rather than focus exclusively on instances of mass upheaval represented by revolutions and wars of independence, the conference invited participants to re-think violence historically in terms of:

• Institutional torture
• Banditry and crime
• Public display of violence, torture and execution
• Disciplinary violence
• Racialized violence
• Violence based on gender
• Exclusionary violence
• Border, frontier and transnational violence
• Civil War
• Military and institutional violence
• Guerrilla warfare
• Environmental conflicts: land displacement and conflict over natural resources.

"Overt and Discreet Violence: Ruptures and Continuities in Latin America and the Caribbean" was sponsored by the Department of History at Columbia University, the Institute for Latin American Studies (ILAS) and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER).

Resources:

Conference Program (PDF)

Event Flyer (PDF)