2015/03/12 by Ipsita Chatterjee, Chatterjee, Ipsita
Social Sciences · #Political Conflict and Governance #Political Economy and Marxism #Sociology and Norbert Elias #class #cultural analysis #economic analysis #human condition #identity #violence
paper · doi:10.14288/acme.v10i2.896
openalex publication_date 2015/03/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
Understanding violence is a major pre-occupation in social sciences and approaches to violence range from neoclassical perspectives, to regression models, to pure cultural analysis of difference. This paper attempts to understand violence by examining how class and identity positions are variously juxtaposed in different socio-spatial settings to produce contestations over the human condition. Through a comparative understanding of recent violence in two places—the riots of 2005 in Paris, France, and of 2002 in Ahmedabad, India—I indicate how class and identity overlap to produce fused realms of othering and violation. Through comparative analysis, I argue that in a globalizing world, class and identity will overlap in multifarious ways depending on the socio-spatial particularities of systemic exclusion. Therefore, studies of violence must move away from purely economistic and mathematical model building and instead move towards combining economic and cultural analysis.