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She had to carry a bag of heads. Blood was dripping from the bag. The armed men made her laugh about this. When they arrived, the bag was emptied and she saw the heads of her children. This happened in Sierra Leone toward the end of the twentieth century. An account of the event was given by the woman who had been forced to carry the bag. Hers is a story of cruelty and suffering, reminiscent of similar stories told and sometimes recorded over the millennia. It is a story about the twin constellation of cruelty and suffering, perpetration and victimhood. Cruelty is the intentional inflicting of suffering. It is suffering plus agency. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it can also be to delight in or be indifferent to the pain or misery of others and to act in a merciless, hard-hearted fashion. There is, of course, also suffering without cruelty and perpetration: there can be no cruelty without suffering, but there can be suffering without cruelty. Human beings can and do suffer without anyone in particular being responsible for the suffering (although magical and conspiratorial thinking, with their belief in excessive agency, will attempt to identify a perpetrator, someone to hold accountable). Contemporary politics of life, with its focus on the maximization of vitality, is likely to define suffering as an absence of intervention, as an act of omission.

The relationship between researchers and their objects of study has varied and continues to vary across time and disciplinary traditions. A key element in such variations is the degree of reflexivity involved in the process of knowledge production. To what extent are researchers aware of how they themselves produce knowledge? This question is discussed in the context of political science. It is suggested that the various forms the study of culture has taken in political science can serve as an indicator of different levels of reflexivity or modes of engagement. Three influential conceptualizations of "culture" in political science are presented as examples: political culture theory, civilizational theory, and constructivism. Toward the end, the case is made for a cosmopolitan engagement with culture and examples from political science of this type of engagement are introduced.

The relationship between researchers & their objects of study has varied & continues to vary across time & disciplinary traditions. A key element in such variations is the degree of reflexivity involved in the process of knowledge production. To what extent are researchers aware of how they themselves produce knowledge? This question is discussed in the context of political science. It is suggested that the various forms the study of culture has taken in political science can serve as an indicator of different levels of reflexivity or modes of engagement. Three influential conceptualizations of "culture" in political science are presented as examples: political culture theory, civilizational theory, & constructivism. Toward the end, the ease is made for a cosmopolitan engagement with culture & examples from political science of this type of engagement are introduced. References. Adapted from the source document.

Political correctness has become a fighting word used to dismiss and discredit
political opponents. The article traces the conceptual history of this fighting
word. In anthropological terms, it describes the social life of the concept of political correctness
and its negation, political incorrectness. It does so by adopting a concept-in-motion
methodology, which involves tracking the concept through various cultural and
political regimes. It represents an attempt to synthesize well-established historiographic
and anthropological approaches. A Swedish case is introduced that reveals the kind of
large-scale historical movements and deep-seated political conflicts that provide the
contemporary context for political correctness and its negation. Thereupon follows an
account of the conceptual history of political correctness from the eighteenth century
up to the present. Instead of a conventional conclusion, the article ends with a political
analysis of the current rise of fascism around the world and how the denunciation of
political correctness is both indicative of and instrumental in this process.

Concepts have cultural biographies and social lives. Some concepts become social and political keywords that can be both indicative of and instrumental in social and political conflicts. (It might even be possible to speak of conceptual violence.) But they are not just contentious; they also tend to be contested. Contentious and contested concepts have been studied by historians and social scientists from varying temporal and spatial horizons. It is a research area that lends itself to cross-disciplinary approaches, as is demonstrated in the three contributions to this section, the first of which investigates the Russian obsession with the concept of "Europe." The second contribution to the section explores the military roots of the concept of "creative thinking," and the final contribution examines the social life of "political correctness" as a fighting word.

What follows is a set of paired articles, followed by a statement by both authors where they debate their distinct positions. Both articles treat irony, but while Rapport looks to it as a possible liberal virtue, a means of dealing with radical difference in a modern democracy, including the illiberal, Stade approaches irony from an ontological position that considers social relationships and cultural contingencies to be but one facet of human existence and irony and alienation to have an existential depth, the study of which can facilitate a rapprochement between sociocultural and philosophical anthropology. The paired articles are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, perhaps: irony as world-mocking as well as world-tolerant.

This special issue of Global Networks is devoted to the work of Ulf Hannerz, whose research in urban anthropology, media anthropology, and transnational cultural processes has established his international reputation.1 Over the years, this reputationhas earned him many distinctions – he is, for example, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, former Chair of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, and anthropology editor for the new International Enyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Such honours, however, never led to complacence. There has been a steady stream of publications and a continuous series of research projects. Most recently, Hannerz not only completed a study of the work of news media foreign correspondents, which included field research that took him to four continents, he has already started a new research project about the cultural and political dimensions of cosmopolitanism. All this attests to some measure of curiosity and resolve.

Violence, defined as the intentional inflicting of injury and damage, seems to always have been a fact of human life. Whether in the shape of raids, ambushes, wars, massacres, genocides, insurgences, terrorism, or gang assaults, socially organized violence, that is, human groups orchestrating and committing violent acts, has been a steady companion of human life through the ages. The human quest to make sense of violence is probably as old as violence itself. Academic conflict research both continues and advances this quest. As long as wars were waged between nations, the research on armed conflicts focused on international relations and great power politics. This paradigm was kept alive even when the asymmetrical warfare of decolonization spread across the world, because by then the frame of analysis was the binary system of the Cold War and regional conflicts were classifi ed as proxy wars. After the end of the Cold War, the academic interest in forms of organized violence other than international conflict became more general in the social sciences, not least in anthropology, a discipline whose long-standing research interest in violent conflict previously had been directed almost exclusively towards "tribal warfare." But, following their research tradition, anthropologists also began to conduct field studies in contemporary war zones and other violent settings.

Crude Domination: An Anthropology of Oil
Andrea Behrends, Stephen P. Reyna, and Günter Schlee, eds. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011. 325 pp. Hardcover ISBN 978-0-85745-255-9.The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia
Danny Hoffman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 295 pp. Paper ISBN 978-0-8223-5077-4.The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity
Yael Navaro-Yashin. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 270 pp. Paper ISBN 978-0-8223-5204-4.The Risk of War: Everyday Sociality in the Republic of Macedonia
Vasiliki P. Neofotistos. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. 216 pp. Hardcover ISBN 978-0-8122-4399-4.Maoists at the Hearth: Everyday Life in Nepal's Civil War
Judith Pettigrew. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 200 pp. Hardcover ISBN 978-0-8122-4492-2.In Memoriam