Social strategies of representing violence

Social strategies of representing violence: reconstruction - reconciliation - mobilisation - rearming

Coordination : Anna Krykun, Emmanuelle Käes, Roxana Ilasca et Liudmyla Harmash (chercheuse invitée LE STUDIUM 2025-26 au sein de l’UR ICD)

• María Paulina Arnal, Sebastián Martínez Fernández, María Gabriela Trompetero Vicent and Nelson Camilo Forero Medina (University of Bielefeld, Sociology – Philosophy): “Wording violence: narratives as peace action” 

This presentation, developed within the Peace and Mobilities project (MSCA-SE, EU), examines narrative as a cultural response to organized violence and a performative space for peacebuilding. Drawing on Narraciones sobre migración (I, II, III), produced with displaced children from Venezuela and Central America in Mexico and Colombia, we explore how children in forced mobility articulate a "narrative urgency": putting violence into words not only enables processing but, through sharing with others, becomes an act of peace and collective memory. We then propose a phenomenological framework that understands peace as entangled with conflict, challenging paradigms that define it solely through absence. Finally, we incorporate autoethnographic voices of researchers who are themselves forced migrants from the Venezuelan diaspora, offering a polyphony that moves beyond geopolitical readings and invites reflection on processes leading to radicalization. These plural voices - childhood, academic, diasporic - propose alternative ways of linking the individual and collective in contexts of violence.

María Paulina Arnal obtained her MA in Inter-American Studies (Bielefeld/Guadalajara) and is now a researcher at Peace and Mobilities project at the University of Bielefeld. She is also a co-author of Narraciones sobre migración I, II & III (2025).

Sebastián Martínez Fernández is a PhD student at the Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies (CALAS) and a research assistant at the Leibniz University Hannover. He co-edited ¿Latinoamérica y Paz? (Teseo, 2021), Paz: Visiones, estrategias, luchas (Teseo, 2024) and Peace in Latin America: Shifting Paradigms (Routledge, 2025). Co-author of The Epistemological Foundations of Peace Studies, Sebastián Martínez Fernández collaborates actively with his colleagues from the University of Bielefeld on Peace and Mobilities project.

María Gabriela Trompetero Vicent is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Bielefeld), a researcher in Peace and Mobilities and a former consultant for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the Inter-American Development Bank. Her research centers include forced migration and migration policies.

Nelson Camilo Forero Medina holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Bielefeld where he is currently lecturing. He is a principle investigator of the Peace and Mobilities project, a member of Colombian Discourse Analysis Group and Colombian Philosophy of Technology Group. In 2024, he organised a workshop "Entanglements of (Il)legality and Violence" at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF). His publications mainly deal with the questions of memory, film and transmedia narratives.
 

• Gabriel Kos (University of Bielefeld, Performing Arts): “The war you give – German rap about the individual consequences of military service and the fight to resist it”

Following the Russian attack on Ukraine in 2022, the debate about military strength rose again in European countries. In Germany this especially concerns the "Wehrpflichtdebatte", the question whether young men (and possibly women) should be obliged to commit to the military (again). German rap songs from artists like Prinz Pi, Casper and Disarstar deal with the consequences of war on those who fight it and their loved ones, raising questions about grief, the reproduction of violence and the obligation to oppose any violence including government mandated. This way these songs follow traditional hip-hop concerns about the cycle of violence, shaped by the famous Tupac-idiom “The hate you give little infants fucks everybody.”

Suggested reading: Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative and History (1996) - p. 57-72.

Gabriel Kos studied literary studies and philosophy at the University of Bielefeld where he is currently finishing his PhD thesis about the production of communities in German rap music. Among his latest publications on this subject, the reference must be made to his article 'Schlechtes Vorbild?–Gemeinschaftsbildung zwischen Subversion und Teilhabe bei und mit Sido' in 20 Jahre »Mein Block« - Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf ein popkulturelles Ereignis. Gabriel Kos is also lecturing on German hip-hop as well as on performative texts in general in the University of Bielefeld.