Critical Essay: (In)sensitive Violence, Development, and the Smell of the Soil: Strategic Decision-making of What?

By Rashedur Chowdhury

From Human Relations

 ‘Powerful actors such as multinational corporations (MNCs), mainstream non-governmental organizations (NGOs), government institutions and western aid agencies expend considerable efforts to dominate marginalized groups such as powerless communities and labor forces. It is not always easy to point out exactly which powerful actors did what to result in violence such as injury and killing. Because of this limited traceability of actions, certain consequences of such violence remain invisible for a long period of time. However, such violence has devastating effects which go beyond the physical and mental harm suffered by the victim, affecting even the socio-emotional situations of marginalized people.  Insensitive violence manifests in emotional wounds to various members of a community to perpetuate collective effects of violence. For instance, if someone is killed purposefully, the entire community may be in fear, especially if they know that they would never receive justice.

This research indicates that such insensitive violence took place during the Phulbari movement in Bangladesh where a corporation took certain advantage of limited tractability to pursue an open-pit mining. However, poor Bangladeshi villagers resisted such mining. Their resistance shows major flaws in economic and human perspectives of development. Development perspectives do not consider emotions of poor when it comes to mining and other projects that can destroy environment and bring substantial human miseries. Asia Energy initially told the Phulbari people that they would compensate them by 400 to 500 times more money than the existing value for their resources such as trees and paddy fields, if the Phulbari accepted Asia Energy’s compensation offer and re-located elsewhere. In addition, they were told that locals would be given jobs in the mining field. These were purely instrumental offers to persuade Phulbari people to give up their lands and other resources.

I argue that although they differ in their interpretation and conceptualization of violence, Butler (2004), van der Linden (2012) and Zizek (2008) underestimate certain elements of subjective violence, such as emotional wounds, which are not only significantly harmful to the recipient community but may also perpetuate systemic violence in response. My analysis essentially highlights the need for more research on insensitive violence because one must not underplay the fact that systemic violence receives more focus. Further, I argue that when insensitive violence occurs, although emotional wounds are not immediately visible, they have devastating effects on victims, their families and whole societies over time and the pain of these wounds can even be transferred from one generation to another. Such invisible marks then change the characteristics of the local cultures, customs and norms, or even the behavior of the local population. This research argues that crisis such as climate change and other grand problems of our time cannot be tackled unless shared emotions of marginalized people receive serious attention. Also, social science needs to resolve the problem of limited tractability because such grey zone works as vantage point for corporations and their multi-million projects in disputed spaces where institutions are fragile.’

Article details
Critical Essay: (In)sensitive Violence, Development, and the Smell of the Soil: Strategic Decision-making of What?
Chowdhury, Rashedur
First published October 21st 2019
DOI: 10.1177/0018726719874863
From Human Relations

About

Rashedur Chowdhury (PhD, Judge Business School, University of Cambridge) is an Associate Professor at Southampton Business School, University of Southampton, and a Batten Fellow at Darden School of Business, University of Virginia (UVA). Prior to working in Southampton, he was an Assistant Professor at Michael Smurfit Business School, University College Dublin (where he is now a Visiting Scholar). His thesis, ‘Reconceptualizing the dynamics of the relationship between marginalized stakeholders and multinational firms’, received the Society for Business Ethics Best Dissertation Award in 2014. He has been invited as a Visiting Scholar by INSEAD Business School; Darden, UVA; Faculty of Business and Economics, HEC Lausanne, Switzerland; Department of Anthropology and Sociology, University of the Western Cape; School of Government, Peking University; School of Social Sciences, University of California, Irvine; and Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. His most recent works focus on the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh and the Rohingya and Syrian refugee crises.