I smile but I want to be happy.
Nothing to stop me…nothing to hold me back…
With every dark night, there is a bright next day with new hopes
That the society will change and give me hope to be secure.
The sun can shine tomorrow, but not brighter than me
for I have burnt for my kind more than anyone can see.1
Among the various ways the Kroc IPJ’s VIP Lab is exploring power and its relationship to violence is a multi-year exploration of identity based mass violence (IBMV).
Identity based violence is ‘any act of violence – whether physical or structural – that is motivated by the perpetrator's conceptualization of their victim's identity, for example their race, gender, sexuality, religion or political affiliation.’ 2 Identity based violence is typically intended to assert or maintain power by one individual or group over another. Together with our partners, the VIP Lab is exploring how IBV reaches mass levels, namely levels that are chronic, widespread and systematic.
We have adopted a broad definition of mass violence, which includes crimes against humanity, genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, identity-based violence of all kinds, and other forms of lethal and nonlethal chronic and systemic communal violence by state and nonstate actors. We include violence that can be measured by numbers and traditional datasets, but also collections of personal experience and collective stories that may not be captured in traditional data collection.
Our exploration is focused on better understanding the ways in which systems, structures and norms condone or facilitate the processes through which identity based violence scales up to mass violence. When an individual attacks another due to that person's identity, it can be considered an isolated incident. But when individuals are attacked systematically or are not protected as a class or group of individuals, this is nearly always due to power inequities.
IBMV authors convened in Barcelona in July 2023
In July, VIP Lab Director, Rachel Locke, and Kroc IPJ Program Coordinator, Tori Luna, organized - together with our partners and co-editors from CRIES and the Stanley Center for Peace and Security - the third in a series of authors meetings for those contributing to an upcoming volume on Identity Based Mass Violence. The gathering included authors, reference group members, co-editors, and even a film crew working to document the incredible collective work of the group.
Among those attending were journalists from Central America and Mexico, human rights and atrocity prevention professors from South Africa and the US, restorative justice practitioners, data scientists, peacebuilders, architects, urban planners, boxing coaches, and more. The volume - in trying to represent not only the conceptual ideas behind IBMV, but also the implications and felt harms of IBMV at community and individual levels - has invited authors that reflect on IBMV from along a spectrum that ranges from highly academic to more personal perspectives, inviting in personal and reflective styles. Approaching the volume in this way has offered a 360 degree world view of how and why IBMV occurs, what can be done about it, while also humanizing the felt reality of identity based violence. To shine a light on the power structures that enable IBMV, it is essential to harness the power of our own humanity, which is what this volume aims to do.
This editorial decision has influenced all aspects of this work. For over a year, authors and reference group members have learned from one another, leaned on one another and had their ideas influenced and challenged by one another. The process has opened up space for authors to reflect on their own pain in such ways that have not only helped at the individual level, but is also influencing the design of the volume, including an intentionality around the use of art and other visual cues to allow for reader reflection and processing, as well as the very progression of chapters and the flow of the concepts and stories.
As articulated by our authors, a key goal of this work is to ‘make the invisible visible.’ Our collective humanity must be appalled not just by genocides and mass atrocity events when they take place, but also by the daily, repeated violence faced by women in India, or Black children in much of America, or youth caught up in Bukele’s mass incarceration in El Salvador. Looking directly at the faces of our common humanity - rather than dismissing one form of violence as less shocking than another and therefore less worthy of our attention - is essential in the struggle for collective human rights and equality. It is also an essential ingredient in preventing genocide, mass atrocity, or ethnic cleansing, which are nearly always preceded by slow-burn violations of human dignity and the scapegoating of certain communities as less worthy of protections than others.
The volume will be out in 2025. Follow the VIP Lab for updates.
1 Poem “I Am Meera” generated at a workshop in November 2021 organized by Red Dot Foundation in partnership with professors Verena Thomas and Jackie Kauli from the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Elsa Marie D’Silva, founder of Red Dot Foundation, is a chapter author.
2 This definition borrows heavily from Protection Approaches, a registered non-profit organization based in the United Kingdom whose two co-founders have contributed a chapter to the upcoming IBMV edited volume.