Research on legacies of racialized control recognizes and examines how historical violence continues to exert effects on contemporary inequalities. Focused predominantly on histories of enslavement and lynching in the US South, studies have demonstrated the continuing hold of these institutions on a wide range of racialized outcomes, including income inequality and poverty, violent crime, incarceration and other criminal legal consequences, political polarization, residential segregation, and educational and health disparities. Over the past two decades, the literature has matured significantly, evolving from studies demonstrating these durable temporal connections to more recent robust attention to a unified theoretical framework and the mechanisms that enable legacy effects to persist over long time periods. This review emphasizes recent refinements associated with parsing sources of persistent inequalities, accounting for interrelationships among modes of control, and identifying factors that interrupt as well as produce durable legacy effects. It concludes with recommendations to more directly engage the systemic nature of racialized control, take fuller advantage of leverage provided by expanding methodological foci, and thicken connections to parallel work in cognate fields.

Can international sanctions prevent civil war? Despite the increased scholarly and policy focus on conflict prevention, we lack an understanding of the impact of a commonly used tool of the international community – economic sanctions. We examine the impact of sanctions targeted against states with self-determination (SD) disputes. We argue that the threat of sanctions leads states to decrease repression and increase accommodation in these disputes, thus decreasing the likelihood of civil war. The imposition of sanctions, however, incentivizes the state to increase repression and makes the state a more attractive target for dissidents. Both dynamics make civil war more likely in the short term. Over time, however, states can adapt to the new economic reality created by a sanctions regime, and the risk of escalation to civil war will decrease. We conduct a series of statistical tests of the effect of threatened and imposed sanctions against the state on armed conflict onset in SD disputes, accommodation of SD groups, and repression. We find that threatened sanctions decrease the likelihood of armed conflict onset, make government accommodation of SD groups more likely, and lead to overall decreases in repression by the state. Imposed sanctions, meanwhile, increase the risk of civil war in the next year, but this effect dissipates over time. These results suggest that sanction threats can be a useful tool of conflict prevention, but failed threats can increase the risk of escalations of violence in SD disputes.

Research has shown that international actors can contribute to resolving violent conflicts. In this article, we focus on conflict prevention, and argue that tools that are relatively non-invasive and rapid to deploy are effective at preventing conflict from escalating. We identify two tools that meet these criteria-rhetorical and diplomatic action, and argue that regional organizations are particularly poised to deploy these tools successfully. Drawing upon new data, we find that rhetorical and diplomatic actions deployed by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) are generally associated with reductions in violent events as well as fatalities in the following month.

Despite evident and oft-cited disparities in the policing of right-wing extremists and more progressive social movements, we understand much less about how such distinctions emerge and unfold as the police prepare for, and act within, protest events. How does the racial and political orientation of social movements affect how they are policed? What are the processes through which such effects are realized? In contrast with most existing studies of protest policing, which emphasize how the actions of authorities are conditioned by the degree of threat associated with, for example, the size or capacity for violence of a given protest target, the analysis here of a cluster of cases associated with the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, recognizes the constructed nature of protest threats and highlights how those assumptions inform and interact with police planning and action. Findings emphasize how the degree of alignment between police and protesters shapes policing agents’ preparations for, and operational considerations within, protest events. This alignment provides a basis for asymmetric communication, differential assessment, and—ultimately—distinct treatment of different protest targets.

Following the racially motivated shootings at an African American church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, a wave of contentious campaigns around Confederate statuary emerged, or at least intensified, in communities across the country. Yet local struggles have culminated in vastly different alterations to the built environment. This paper develops a framework for differentiating distinct “modes of recontextualization” rooted in the relocation and/or modification of commemorative objects. Building on models of memory as an iterative, path-dependent process, we track recontextualization efforts in three communities—St. Louis, Missouri; Oxford, Mississippi; and Austin, Texas—documenting how each mode alters the meaning of contested symbols. An analysis of local news sources in the year following recontextualization shows how each mode exerts identifiable proximate effects on broader political debates and, through that process, structures the horizon of possibility for longer-range outcomes.

ABSTRACT In 1979, during an anti-racism march in the city in Greensboro, North Carolina, KKK and Nazi Party members opened fire on demonstrators, killing five and wounding eight. On the cusp of the 25th anniversary of these killings, efforts by community members culminated in the convening of the first Truth and Reconciliation Commission (GTRC) in the US. Drawing on a unique collection of public testimonies and private interviews with GTRC staff, we use a novel relational approach to array and compare discursive accounts offered in these distinct settings. We find that narratives offered in private were more varied, yet also cohesive in locating blame in social actors. Public testimony, in contrast, was more consolidated and singular, placing the majority of culpability on social structures. Based on these significant distinctions, we draw out implications for future research and policy around transitional justice initiatives.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsElizabeth A. Herbin-Triant, Threatening Property: Race, Class, and Campaigns to Legislate Jim Crow Neighborhoods. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Pp. 335. $105.00 (cloth); $35.00 (paper).David CunninghamDavid CunninghamWashington University in St. Louis (USA) Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 107, Number 3Summer 2022 A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/720223 Views: 22Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Since its 2017 debut, the Slate podcast Slow Burn has offered incisive, immersive takes on well-known ­­political scandals. Beginning with seasons focused, respectively, on Watergate and Bill ­­Clinton’s ­­impeachment, the series detoured in its third ­­installment into a tragic political controversy of a different sort when it offered a close look into the fatal rivalry between hip-hop artists Tupac Shakur and Christopher George Latore Wallace (a.k.a. ­The Notorious B.I.G.­). The fourth iteration of the podcast both ­­fortifies and builds upon this oeuvre. Over the course of six episodes, released throughout the summer of 2020, producer and host Josh Levin takes on the ­­former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and his bids for state and national political office. Slow Burn has built a reputation for deeply researched portraits of its various subjects. A 2020 installment of The Daily Show with Trevor Noah: Ears Edition podcast even spoofed the lengths to...

Academic research demonstrates that international actors can contribute to the resolution of and reductions of violence in civil wars through actions such as mediation and peacekeeping. Many of these organizations also express a commitment to responding to escalating crises to resolve disputes before they become civil wars and to reduce violence at all stages of conflict. We argue that Regional Organizations are well positioned to intervene in violent intrastate disputes because they can respond quickly and their member states are directly affected by contention in the region. We present new data on conflict management activities by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), identifying four sets of tools—rhetorical, diplomatic, economic, and military. We examine how these activities affect violence in member states and find that conflict management activity by ECOWAS is generally associated with reductions in violent events as well as fatalities in the following month. We find a particularly strong effect of diplomatic and rhetorical action in reducing violence. The analyses in this article show that ROs can be effective conflict managers and that early engagement in intrastate disputes, including through relatively low-cost activities such as diplomacy and condemnations—can reduce violence.

Scholars increasingly agree that histories of racial violence relate to contemporary patterns of conflict and inequality, and growing interest exists among civic leaders in reckoning with these legacies today. This volume examines the contributions and limitations of scientific research on legacies of racial violence and suggests implications for policy, practice, and other forms of intervention aimed at redress.

Popular media and researchers have given increasing attention to the perceived growing alienation and despair of white Americans. The narrative of white decline has been particularly robust in light of the recent uptick in premature deaths of whites from opioid use, but this national conversation has lacked consideration of potential associations between opioid mortality among whites and durable legacies of white advantage that were established through historical racial violence. We provide an initial analysis of how contemporary patterns of white opioid mortality in the counties of southern states relate to the presence of slavery and postbellum institutions of racial social control in those counties. We find that areas in the South with higher rates of past enslavement are associated with contemporary reductions of white vulnerability, in this case, opioid mortality. This finding supports the thesis that historical institutions of racial control offer a protective benefit within the modern white population.

Research notes the broad complicity of white public officials in historical racial violence and repression. These discussions emphasize the role of criminal justice actors in perpetrating and enabling this repression. Extending this assessment, the authors examine coroners’ facilitation of white racial dominance through administrative performances constructing white innocence. Using cases from post-Emancipation South Carolina, the authors document race-related patterns of exculpatory effort, through the omission and curation of evidence amid the post-Reconstruction rise of white supremacist redemption. The authors theorize that these exculpatory efforts helped sustain an ideology of white innocence and institutional legitimacy by constructing a white “law-abiding” public. The authors argue that such coroner misconduct not only degrades the rule of law but has broader implications, including its corruption of the corpus of mortality and crime data. Finally, the authors suggest that these administrative performances persist in present-day coroner reporting, including in the exculpation of racist police violence.

Amid growing research on the history and legacies of racist violence in the United States, there has been limited development of theory and measurement pertaining to racist violence as a sociological process. Social science research has centered on lynching and, to a lesser extent, slavery and broader Jim Crow laws and customs, and rarely have these and other forms been engaged together and in relation to contemporary outcomes. We focus on racialized "legal violence"-uses of law in ways that are harmful to populations defined by race-and use the case of South Carolina "slave courts" to explore modes of racialized violence that are expansive and intertwined. Contrary to a more sequential and linear reading of successive and discreet modes of repression (e.g., "slavery ended. . ."), our analysis shows recursive, multidimensional, and cascading aspects of injurious legal action and inaction that accumulate and repeat over time. Continuities of racialized legal violence, which are contested and thus dynamic, modify and maintain age-old structural constraints. Rather than unfolding in sequence-from settler colonialism to enslavement, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration-"peculiar institutions" are more fluid, sharing repertoires and networks of racialized legal violence that recombine over time.

One of the proposed benefits of third-party involvement that has been offered to justify its use is that it helps reduce the severity of conflict. Existing work finding that peacekeeping operations reduce battle-related fatalities considers peacekeeping in isolation from other forms of third-party diplomatic involvement, such as mediation. We argue that mediation has its own effect on patterns of violence. Moreover, we argue that peacekeeping and mediation can have an interactive effect, in which each enhance the violence-reducing potential of the other. Using monthly data on battle-related deaths in African intrastate conflicts, we find that mediation is associated with reduced bloodshed. We also find, consistent with existing work, that a greater number of peacekeepers leads to a reduction in violence. In addition, we find that mediation and peacekeeping efforts reinforce one another, although each type of involvement is able to reduce battlefield fatalities independently.