Recent years have seen an incipient debate about the targeted violence against social activists, with a focus on the killing of human rights defenders, environmental activists, local community leaders, and representatives of civil society groups broadly speaking. Whereas violence against civilians in (civil) war contexts is an established field of study, research on this type of violence is much less developed and rather fragmented. Against this background, the international workshop aimed at taking stock of what we know – and don’t know – about the spatial patterns, the temporal dynamics, the causes as well as the consequences of the targeted killing of social activists. In order to do so, the workshop brought together scholars from different disciplines and research traditions and with different research focuses and regional expertise to discuss the state of research, critically review the quality of the data that exists as well as to identify preliminary findings, research gaps and avenues for future research.
The two-day workshop on July 22 and 23, 2024 was held in a hybrid format and included four sessions. The first panel, chaired by Verena Lasso Mena (TU Darmstadt and TraCe), featured three presentations on “Patterns, trends, and theories” by Amanda Murdie (University of Georgia, Athens), Laura Blume (University of Nevada, Reno) as well as Juan Albarracín (University of Illinois Chicago and TraCe), Rodrigo Moura (University of Illinois Chicago), and Jonas Wolff (PRIF, ConTrust and TraCe). The subsequent discussion on “Concepts and conceptualizations” was chaired by Laura Guntrum (TU Darmstadt and TraCe) and kicked off with an input from Philippe Le Billon (University of British Colombia, Vancouver). The second day started with a panel on “Cases and causes”, chaired by Peter Kreuzer (PRIF). Here, Mary Menton (University of Glasgow), Fran Lambrick (Not1More, UK), and Suparna Banerjee (TraCe Visiting Fellow at PRIF) presented their research. During the fourth session,chaired by Laura Barrios (PRIF), Matthew Krain (College of Wooster, Ohio) initiated a lively debate on “Data and measurement”.
The workshop was organized by Jonas Wolff and Juan Albarracín. For in-depth information on the topic of the workshop, see their TraCe Working Paper No. 3 “Targeted Violence Against Social Activists. Characteristics, Causes, and Transformations”.