Project description
Violence and colonialism in Belgian Central Africa
Numerous studies have delved into colonial violence within Belgian Central Africa, encompassing Burundi, Congo and Rwanda, throughout the 19th to 20th centuries, However, only a few have ventured to explore the extent to which everyday violence contributed to the facilitation of colonialism. The ERC-funded VIOLENCE WORK project will investigate the violent practices within Belgian Central Africa that played a pivotal role in the establishment and perpetuation of the colonial state. The project will shed light on the colonisers and the colonised individuals who engaged in acts of violent labour. The realm of everyday workplace violence encompasses an array of actions, ranging from explicit physical measures like whipping to methods of punishment such as incarceration.
Objective
VIOLENCE WORK is a groundbreaking study of everyday violence in Belgian Central AfricaBurundi, Congo, and Rwanda (19th-20th C). Though colonial violence has been studied widely, few have explored how everyday violence enabled colonialism and allowed it to persist. This project combines hitherto neglected source materials and a novel conceptual entry pointviolence work(ers)to foreground the everyday violent practices crucial to creating and maintaining the colonial state. The projects core claim, and main innovation, is that violence work was not performed exclusively by formal violence workersthe men in uniformbut rather by a range of actors (colonizer and colonized) in- and outside the state. Everyday violence work includes not only direct acts of physical violence (e.g. whipping) but also other forms of punishment, such as incarceration and coercion through the threat of violence, as well as subtler forms of aggression forcing compliance (e.g. harassment) and the ways these different levels of violence reinforced each other. This inclusive definition enables an unprecedented, comprehensive view of the enforcement practices that colonial rule depended on. VIOLENCE WORK opens up new questions about the centrality of violence in theorizing, creating, and maintaining colonialism and the colonial state. This first in-depth, multi-sited, transnational/regional comparative study of everyday colonial violence will undergird further research on how colonial legacies persist and interact with local and new repertoires of violence work, contributing to dismantling persistent colonial myths about these regions and their inhabitants as inherently violent. The online database will be a crucial tool for future researchers and open up many new avenues of research. Its major innovation of a pluralistic approach to everyday violence work will reinvigorate the debate not only about colonial violence but also, ultimately, about colonial states and nation-states more broadly.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2022-STG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
9000 GENT
Belgium
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.