New open-access research article by Mariam Salehi, Jannis Grimm, and Hannah Franzki published in Critical Studies on Terrorism:

Theorising the violence-resistance-nexus in the context of Gaza: towards a situated research perspective

Abstract: 

Divergent, often implicit, concepts of violence shape judgements about what counts as legitimate resistance or illegitimate harm, and about which actors and grievances become visible. Against this backdrop, academic and public debates seeking to make sense of the violence in Gaza frequently talk past one another: they shift registers between analytical descriptions, moral arguments, and legal assessment without naming their starting assumptions thus conflating analyses of the conditions and effects of violence and resistance, and justifications thereof. In this paper, we propose an explicitly situated research perspective that embraces the multiperspectivity of conflict and accounts for the inherent double situatedness of research on the violence-resistance-nexus: first, the situatedness of the phenomena under study in specific temporal, spatial, and institutional frames that delimit episodes, agents, and harms; second, the researcher’s situatedness in terms of their analytical frame, normative commitments and epistemic frameworks. Making this double situatedness transparent is essential for analytical precision and normatively defensible evaluation. We operationalise this perspective through a coordinate system that distinguishes ontological assumptions, normative premises, and epistemological commitments, and that separates legality from legitimacy while tracking their interaction in practice. The result is a template for rigorous, reflexive scholarship under conditions of conceptual and political contestation.

Link to the research article