Violence is historically an integral part of social and political processes even though it is often constructed as deviant and from the dark side. Explores contemporary political violence and its relationship to social space, self and community. Focuses on contemporary civil wars and ethnic and religious violence. Explores themes such as massacre, ethnic cleansing, and martyrdom as ways in which individual death is given collective meaning in the context of the crisis of the nation-state. Its methodology involves a micropolitics of violence and the semiotics of pain. Explores concepts such as the abject, torture, war, terrorism, trauma, testimony, witnessing, reconciliation and post-violence worlds. Draws on the work of Scarry, Kristeva, Nordstrom, Massumi, Foucault, Zulaika and Taussig.