“‘The New Violence.’ An Essay on Johan Galtung and the Technological Society“

While minimalist conceptions of violence focus on violations of autonomy and bodily integrity, new conceptions encompass the infliction of physical and psychological injuries and any kinds of social injustices/inequalities. The main contention of this research project is that the conflict between these two conceptions of violence is symptomatic of the increasing technologization of peacebuilding and peacekeeping that fosters broader conceptions of violence.

I shall argue that this trend of technologization can be traced back to the works of Johan Galtung who moved away from traditional conceptions of violence (i.e., understood “as an intentional act of excessive or destructive force”) to redefine violence as “the cause of the difference between the potential and the actual” for the sake of more effective peacebuilding. Drawing on the works of Jacques Ellul, I aim to show that the rise of broad conceptions of violence must be interpreted in light of the main features of the technological society.

If my findings are correct, their consequences on how we study violence today would prove significant. We would have, for instance, to acknowledge that current debates on ‘victimhood culture’ are pointless if we disregard their technological background. We would also have to recognize that current debates on violence are much less political than we might think. Finally, we would have to face the fact that our current ways of putting an end to violence are more and more dependent on the ambivalence, unpredictability, and internal contradictions of technological progress.

Ph.D. degree in philosophy, currently a lecturer at the Pázmány Péter Catholic University (Budapest).

His doctoral dissertation aimed at inquiring into sexual and serial homicide through the lenses of epistemology and anthropology. His published articles focus on topics such as jihadism, psychopathy, public perceptions of police brutality, and the status of the notion of violence within Western philosophy. Editor-in-chief of The Philosophical Journal of Conflict and Violence (PJCV) which he founded in 2017. Andreas’s forthcoming publications are an edited volume on René Girard and the Western philosophical tradition (MSU Press, due end 2023) and a study on Girard’s early critique of Hegel’s philosophy titled The Novelistic Dialectic (MSU Press, due 2024).

His current research deals with how technology impacts our ways of defining and perceiving violence.