Author Meets Critics: Debra Javeline, "After Violence: Russia's Beslan School Massacre and the Peace that Followed"

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

This APSA meeting takes place just a day after the 20th anniversary of Russia’s most appalling act of terrorism in history, the seizure of School No. 1 in Beslan, North Ossetia. Starting on September 1, 2004, and ending 53 hours later, approximately 1,200 children, parents, and teachers were taken hostage, and over 330 —nearly one of every hundred Beslan residents— were killed, hundreds more seriously wounded, and all severely traumatized. Debra Javeline’s book, After Violence (Oxford University Press, 2023), is the first to analyze the aftermath of such large-scale violence with evidence from almost all direct victims. It explores the motivations behind individual responses to violence. When does violence fuel greater acceptance of retaliatory violence, and when does violence fuel nonviolent participation in politics? The mass hostage taking was widely predicted to provoke a spiral of retaliatory ethnic violence in the North Caucasus, where the act of terror was embedded in a larger context of ongoing conflict between Ossetians, Ingush, and Chechens. Politicians, journalists, victims, and other local residents asserted that vengeance would come. Instead, the hostage taking triggered unprecedented peaceful political activism on a scale seen nowhere else in Russia. Beslan activists challenged authorities, endured official harassment, and won a historic victory against the Russian state in the European Court of Human Rights. After Violence provides insights into this unexpected but preferable outcome. Using systematic surveys of 1,098 victims (82%) and 2,043 nearby residents, in-depth focus groups, journalistic accounts, investigative reports, NGO reports, and prior scholarly research, After Violence offers novel findings about the influence of anger, prejudice, alienation, efficacy, and other variables on post-violence behavior.

This author-meets-critics roundtable will bring together a diverse group of established and up-and-coming scholars of conflict and violence who have deep fieldwork experience in settings ranging from Latin America to the United States to the post-Soviet region. Panelists will not only reflect on After Violence but share their ongoing related research. By comparing and contrasting insights, the roundtable participants seek to advance a broader research agenda on the causes and consequences of violence, as well as peaceful political participation.

Sub Unit

• Division 21: Conflict Processes

Chair

• Regina A. Bateson University of Colorado - Boulder

Presenters

• Abby B. Cordova University of Notre Dame

• Debra Javeline University of Notre Dame

• Roya Talibova Harvard University

• Angie Torres-Beltran Michigan State University