New Book

Histories of Violence: Post-war Critical Thought

17th Feb 2017

Histories of Violence: Post-war Critical Thought

Edited by Brad Evans and Terrell Carver

Published 15 January 2017

  • The first dedicated volume to the problem of violence as developed and critiqued in post-war thought
  • Introduces the ideas of the period’s most influential thinkers, including Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler

While there is a tacit appreciation that freedom from violence will lead to more prosperous relations among peoples, violence continues to be deployed for various political and social ends. Yet the problem of violence still defies neat description, subject to many competing interpretations.

Histories of Violence offers an accessible yet compelling examination of the problem of violence as it appears in the corpus of canonical figures – from Hannah Arendt to Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault to Slavoj Žižek – who continue to influence and inform contemporary political, philosophical, sociological, cultural, and anthropological study.

Written by a team of internationally renowned experts, this is an essential interrogation of post-war critical thought as it relates to violence.

Brad Evans is reader in political violence at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol, UK. He is a regular contributor to The New York Times blog, a columnist for The Los Angeles Review of Books and director of the Histories of Violence project (www.historiesofviolence.com).

Terrell Carver is a professor of political theory at the University of Bristol. He is currently editor for the prestigious journal Contemporary Political Theory.

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