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Weaving together political, sociological, psychological, and epidemiological analyses, Social and Political Representations of the COVID-19 Crisis provides revealing insights into the transformations wrought by the pandemic and the social divisions it has exposed. Accounting for the realities of the pandemic across the globe, with a strong focus on experiences in the Global South, this book challenges readers to question their beliefs about the societies they live in and how these societies should respond to collective catastrophes. Originally published in Spanish, this English edition is thoroughly revised and updated. Social and Political Representations of the COVID-19 Crisis analyzes the varied strategies attempted in different parts of the world to deal with the pandemic, including elimination, mitigation, flattening the curve, and herd immunity, and the ramifications of these approaches. It argues that the different strategies are guided by social representations that can be analyzed on epistemological, emotional, and ethical-moral levels. Drawing upon a wide range of thinkers, the book also investigates the key role of psychological defense mechanisms, including different ways of denying the seriousness of the pandemic and different paranoid responses to pain and frustration, such as scapegoating and conspiracy theories. This timely book analyzes the transformations in the social fabric brought about by the pandemic and the questions it poses for the future of our societies. It will therefore be of great interest to students and researchers in the humanities, social sciences, and public health, as well as the general reader.

Guerra, genocidio, violencia política y sistema concentracionario en América Latina / Daniel Feierstein -- El Salvador : de la masacre de 1932 a la guerra civil / Lucrecia Molinari -- Doctrina de Seguridad Nacional y políticas de contrainsurgencia en Honduras / Esteban de Gori -- Interpretaciones de la historia reciente y memoria colectiva : Guatemala y el proceso de democratización / Julieta Carla Rostica -- Genocidio reorganizador en Colombia (a propósito de una sentencia del Tribunal Permanente de los Pueblos) / Marcelo Ferreira -- Prácticas estatales criminales en dictadura y relaciones sociales degradadas en democracia, Uruguay / Álvaro Rico -- La Ley de Caducidad en Uruguay : dimensiones y tensiones de las leyes de impunidad y olvido en las democracias pos-dictatoriales del Cono Sur / Pamela Morales -- El genocidio en Chile : la construcción sociodiscursiva de la verdad / Carlos José Pérez Ramos -- La doctrina militar contrainsurgente como fuente normativa de un poder "de facto" exterminador basado sobre la excepcionalidad / Gabriel Périès -- Contrainsurgencia, catolicismo intransigente y extremismo de derecha en la formación militar argentina. "Influencias francesas en los orígenes del terrorismo de estado (1955-1976)" / Mario Ranalletti

The initial search for a strategy to contain the COVID-19 in Argentina took place in a context of political agreements and strong social support. However, this climate of cooperation and consensus was short-lived, and the authorities were soon forced to turn to mitigation strategies. Emotional and ethical-moral considerations gradually displaced a rational, scientific approach to fighting the pandemic, and social representations of it became increasingly impervious to evidence. The results of this defeat of the precautionary principle were an unnecessarily large number of deaths and the undermining of the notions of community responsibility, rights, and mutual obligations. La búsqueda inicial de una estrategia para contener el COVID-19 en Argentina se dio en un contexto de acuerdos políticos y fuerte apoyo social. Sin embargo, este clima de cooperación y consenso duró poco, y las autoridades pronto se vieron obligadas a recurrir a estrategias de mitigación. Las consideraciones emocionales y ético-morales desplazaron gradualmente el enfoque racional y científico para combatir la pandemia, y las representaciones sociales de la misma se volvieron cada vez más impermeables a la evidencia. Los resultados de esta derrota del principio de precaución fueron un número de muertes innecesariamente grande y un deterioro en las nociones de responsabilidad comunitaria, derechos y obligaciones mutuas.

Si el pensamiento moderno se caracteriza por un desarrollo que tiende apriorizar totalidades y estructuras, su transformación posmoderna tiende a construir abordajes micro, hiperespecializados y fragmentarios. Esto ha llevado en el desarrollo académico actual en la historia y las ciencias sociales no sólo a cuestionar las teleologías o estructuras cerradas sino a cuestionar cualquier posibilidad de utilización de aquellos conceptos ahora estigmatizados bajo el adjetivo de "totalizantes". Las historias de la vida cotidiana o las micro-reconstrucciones, escindidas de perspectivas más amplias y explicativas, han tendido a hegemonizar estas disciplinas y, muy en especial, el campo historiográfico. En el caso de la historia reciente en Argentina esto se ha expresado, entre otras cuestiones, en trabajos fundamentalmente "descriptivos", con una sospecha instalada sobre la posibilidad de utilización de conceptos con carga teórica (guerra, genocidio, movimiento social, clase social, revolución). Estos constructos explicativos fundamentales de las ciencias sociales han tendido a ser reemplazados por expresiones que, paradójicamente, tienen escasa o nula elucidación (como en el caso de términos como violencia, violencia política, terrorismo, terrorismo de Estado, masacre, represión). La argumentación fundamental para justificar estos desplazamientos sostiene que los hechos históricos en la región no serían equiparables a aquellos que dieron origen a los conceptos originales (lo cual ha sido especialmente fuerte en el caso del concepto de genocidio pero también aplica a otros, como guerra o revolución, que se descartan a partir del mismo procedimiento). El objetivo de esta presentación es aportar una reflexión epistemológica sobre el sentidode los conceptos y la teoría en las ciencias sociales y el rol del trabajo comparativo, en tanto la historia de creación de conceptos se basa en la elección de constructos reflexivos que dan cuenta de similitudes estructurales que pueden encontrarse en observables empíricos diferentes.Se ...

Over the last decades, Genocide Studies has entered in a "comfort zone." With fellowships and support from governments or NGOs, we have developed a very comfortable environment in which the knowledge we produce about genocide prevention is neither critical nor useful. We have become trapped by assumptions we have never checked against reality and many of us have chosen to work inside the circle of those assumptions: genocide and mass violence are horrible acts committed by horrible people; we cannot stand by and do nothing; we have the responsibility to protect civilian populations and that responsibility takes the form, as a last resort, of military intervention. This paper analyzes the validity of such assumptions against different data about the levels of violence in the world and the use of the "human rights" discourse as a new and effective tool (a good idea!!) to justify the same "military interventions" and the violation of the soverignty produced in the past with worst excuses.

Over the last decades, Genocide Studies has entered in a "comfort zone." With fellowships and support from governments or NGOs, we have developed a very comfortable environment in which the knowledge we produce about genocide prevention is neither critical nor useful. We have become trapped by assumptions we have never checked against reality and many of us have chosen to work inside the circle of those assumptions: genocide and mass violence are horrible acts committed by horrible people; we cannot stand by and do nothing; we have the responsibility to protect civilian populations and that responsibility takes the form, as a last resort, of military intervention. This paper analyzes the validity of such assumptions against different data about the levels of violence in the world and the use of the "human rights" discourse as a new and effective tool (a good idea!!) to justify the same "military interventions" and the violation of the soverignty produced in the past with worst excuses.

El artículo analiza las distintas interpretaciones de la Convención para la Prevención y la Sanción del Delito de Genocidio y sus impactos en la construcción de la memoria colectiva de las sociedades que han vivido esta experiencia histórica de terror masivo estatal. Centrando el eje de análisis en el grupo sobre el que se considera que se ejerció la violencia -y la novedad que implica pensarlo como el conjunto del grupo nacional sobre el que se implementó el terror-, se compara la jurisprudencia internacional con la producida por sistemas jurídicos nacionales -en especial en Argentina, pero con repercusión en Bangladesh, Camboya y Colombia-, con el fin de comprender sus consecuencias en la construcción de las identidades de las sociedades posgenocidas.

Since, December 9, 1948, the Third General Assembly of the UN adopted the Genocide Convention, international law is faced with a paradox. The international community is committed to the systematic annihilation of populations an imprescriptible crime within universal jurisdiction. But protecting certain groups and not others - such as groups united by political belief or affiliation gender or sexual - she created a legal instrument that has proved virtually useless, as almost all genocides Modern are, to some extent, politically motivated, if one examines the root causes of any mass violence perpetrated by a State. Moreover, despite the global proliferation of genocide in the second half of the twentieth century, the first convictions for genocide were made by an international tribunal in 1998, fifty years after the adoption of the Convention. And even in the cases in question - Srebrenica and Rwanda - it is possible to find clear political motivation in these crimes. Adapted from the source document.

This article analyses different criminological approaches to modern genocide. It starts from a critical review of authors (René Girard, Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni, and Alejandro Alagia) who explain genocide in terms of sacrificial violence; it contrasts these perspectives with Jean Piaget's empirically based distinction between two kinds of social relations: relations of constraint and relations of cooperation, and the different sanctions pertaining to each, developing tools to understand more complex ways of causality. Next, it reviews comparative studies of genocide, ignored in the works of the previous authors. The objective for doing it is to compare different causal explanations of genocide to add complexity to the previous analysis. Finally, it revisits Raphael Lemkin's pioneering vision of the role of annihilation in destroying identity. It argues that Lemkin provided some insights for a new criminological approach to genocide seen as a technology of power seeking to transform the social fabric with the terror of concentration camps.

Genocide not only annihilates people but also destroys and reorganizes social relations, using terror as a method. In Genocide as Social Practice, Argentinean social scientist Daniel Feierstein looks at the policies of state-sponsored repression pursued by the Argentine military dictatorship against political opponents between 1976 and 1983 and those pursued by the Third Reich between 1933 and 1945. He finds similarities, not in the extent of the horror but in terms of the goals of the perpetrators.