Home SOS. Katherine Brickell

Чтение книги онлайн.

Chapter Two Conceptualising Domestic Crises

      Introduction

      In Chapter 1, I introduced the overarching ways that the book synthesises its analysis of domestic violence and forced eviction, as crisis ordinaries, as sources and forms of survival‐work, and as types of gender‐based violence, which have been unduly overlooked in academic writing. Over the next five sections, the crisis ordinary and survival‐work, bio‐necropolitics and precarity, intimate war and slow violence, law and lawfare, and rights to dwell, I continue to set up the conceptual parameters through which domestic violence and forced eviction can be best understood. Their exchange and prognosis‐seeking contribute to efforts in geography to trace and explain the intimate violences of world (un)making and their multi‐origin and multi‐scalar manifestations.

Crisis Ordinary and Survival‐Work

While Rebecca Solnett (2009, p. 10) writes that ‘emergency is a separation from the familiar, a sudden emergence into a new atmosphere, one that often demands we rise ourselves to the occasion’, the crisis ordinarily frames domestic violence and forced evictions as long emergencies of slow violence that are unrelenting in their normative unfolding. They are domains ‘where an upsetting of living is revealed to be interwoven with everyday life after all’ (Berlant 2007, p. 761). Eminent in Cambodia, Naly Pilorge, Director of the Cambodian NGO LICADHO, discerned more than a decade ago that ‘everyone claims Cambodia has come through a period of barbarism, but the sadism is still bubbling beneath the surface. Extreme violence, greed, and disregard for the most basic rights – of giving people a place to live – are still with us daily’ (cited in Levy and Scott‐Clark 2008, np). Home SOS thereby explores the paths of Cambodian homes and lives (still) submerged in protracted circumstances of violence. These are paths that in various ways have global reach and wider relevance beyond Cambodia.

      Domestic violence has been described as ‘one of the starkest collective failures of the international community’ (Action Aid 2010, p. 1). It is likely that there has been an under‐estimate, given the non‐reporting of cases, of worldwide data, which indicates that 35% of women have experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non‐partner sexual violence (World Health Organization 2014a). In the last 40 years, violence against women has become visible as a major social issue and has been labelled ‘a global health problem of epidemic proportions’ (WHO 2014a). Domestic violence has also been described in the media and international health arena as a ‘hidden crisis’ worldwide (BBC 2018; WHO 2014b), thus rhetorically challenging its non‐eventful status in popular and political consciousness. The ‘hidden crisis’ of violence against women has additionally been raised within the context of other, more archetypal crisis scenarios, including academic work on the current refugee ‘crisis’ in Europe (Freedman 2016) and in the wake of natural disasters (Nguyen 2019; Parkinson and Zara 2013).

In a similar discursive vein to domestic violence as a global problem, forced eviction – when people are forced out of their homes against their will often with the threat of use of violence (Amnesty International 2012, p. 2) – has been described as a ‘global phenomenon’ and a ‘global crisis’ (UN‐HABITAT 2011b, p. viii). Forced eviction is ‘the permanent or temporary СКАЧАТЬ