Clashes between student protesters and armed security (whether public or private) compel South Africans to consider the role of use of force in the context of protests.
Genocide has occurred throughout history, from the very beginnings of the social organisation of human communities until the present. But working out what do about it is no easy task.
Victory over Nazi Germany is one unambiguously positive accomplishment of the 20th century; and yet, constructing a positive narrative about the Soviet second world war has proven hard – largely because there are some stubborn facts to contend with.
As Australians commemorate the Anzacs who died at Gallipoli, spare a thought for the 10,000 French soldiers who also died on the Dardanelles in the first world war.
In 1915 and 1916, the Ottoman Armenians were destroyed as an organised community and more than one million of their number were killed – just as the Allies’ failed invasion of Gallipoli took place.
We’ve been burning things for hundreds of thousands of years. Australian Aboriginals practised fire-stick farming to regenerate the soil and drive out animals for hunting. Yet manmade fires not only enable…
Estimates are that there are more than 60 Australian citizens in the ranks of the Islamic State (IS) armies sweeping through Syria and Iraq. In a recent case, reported by the Sydney Morning Herald last…
Tom Gregory, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau
Every year on Remembrance Day, we pause to look back on old wars and recount the tallies of the dead, including 16 million killed in the first world war and 60 million in the second world war. And every…
The Jack the Ripper murders are the most potent cold case ever. More than a century on from the first killing in 1888 they are still attracting global attention. Academics of many disciplines publish on…
It’s not just the horses that wear blinkers during the Melbourne Cup, the so-called “race that stops a nation”, which takes place next Tuesday. Perhaps it’s the excitement, the champagne or the extraordinary…
The flood of coverage of the centenary of Gallipoli and the first world war profoundly shapes the way we think of Australia’s history; but we suppress other violent events in our own country that also…
Ideas about personal honour are a major key to understanding violence. This is so today, when “honour” is often replaced by terms such as respect - with “dissing” as its opposite. It was even more true…
The petrol bomb – or “Molotov cocktail” – is an iconic symbol of 20th-century political violence. Simple, cheap and effective, it has become a staple feature of protest, riot and rebellion; a weapon of…
When we talk about violence, there is an implicit assumption that we mean human-to-human violence. Yet behind the veneer of our civilised society, economy and culture is a massive edifice of violence of…
Over the coming months, we’ll be running pieces looking at the history and nature of violence. Here Philip Dwyer explains why. Violence – to state the obvious – isn’t new. But interest in the history of…