By Gisli Vogler

How should those profiting from injustice and violence respond to their complicity? And how can they remain responsive when faced with the many ways in which they are entangled in an unjust world? We are at a deciding moment in affluent (Western) societies when it comes to addressing these kinds of questions. On the one hand, there is cause for optimism: the last decade has seen a significant shift towards open discussion of patriarchal society, institutional racism, capitalist exploitation, and the destruction of the environment, amongst many other contemporary political problems. Social movements such as #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Fridays for Future, and Occupy Wall Street have helped turn assuming responsibility for violence and injustice into a dominant political issue. As a consequence, unjust practices, as diverse as Amazon’s working conditions and the Oxfam sexual exploitation scandal, are met with global condemnation. Debates about how those benefiting from exploitation and expropriation can act more responsibly now pervade many aspects of everyday life, from what to eat and wear, to who has what kind of opportunities. On the other hand, societies continue to be characterized by a failure to act upon the omnipresent demands for facing up to one’s involvement in injustice. Racism, sexism and ableism, and the exploitation of minorities, poorer countries and people, and nature all remain integral parts of human existence. The re-emergence of reactionary populist forces and parties in the US and large parts of Europe, together with the consolidation of power by authoritarian leaders across the world, has exacerbated the problem. The enduring failures by complicit actors to address injustice are cause for much despair and frustration. However, they have also served as catalysts for a sustained scholarly reflection on the complexities of complicity and how to address them (Beausoleil, 2019;  Hayward, 2017; Mihai, 2022; Schaap, 2020). It is my intention in this book to contribute to this interrogation and to think further how people can appropriately respond to their complicity in injustice and violence. To this end, I begin with a constructive evaluation of recent scholarship on complicity.  

Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 2024. 194p.

By Jamie J. Fader and Kenneth Sebastian León

This review, published on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Code of the Street (1999), considers the legacies of Elijah Anderson's groundbreaking analysis of the interactional rules for negotiating street violence within the context of racism and structural disadvantage in Philadelphia. Empirical testing has yielded substantial support for Code of the Street’s key arguments. In the process of assessing its generalizability, such scholarship has inadvertently flattened and decontextualized the theory by, for example, reducing it to attitudinal scales. We identify a more politically conscious analysis in the original text than it is generally credited with, which we use to argue that “code of the street” has outgrown its reductive categorization as a subcultural theory. We conclude that the pressing issue of urban gun violence makes now an ideal time to refresh the theory by resituating it within the contemporary structural and cultural landscape of urban violence, analyzing the social-ecological features that shape the normative underpinnings of interpersonal violence, and studying the prosocial and adaptive features of the code.

Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 7, Page 19 - 38

By Stan Baker.

Republished, by permission, from the American Magazine for April, 1907, the first of a series called “Following the Color Line,” now being published in that magazine.

American Magazine. (1907) 31 pages.

By Philip Berge Benny.

According to the Talmud.

London, Smith Elder (1880) 156 pages.

By Ida Well-Barnett.

“Immediately after the awful barbarism which disgraced the State of Georgia in April of last year, during which time more than a dozen colored people were put to death with unspeakable barbarity, I published a full report showing that Sam Hose, who was burned to death during that time, never committed a criminal assault, and that he killed his employer in self- defense.”

Harrow and Heston Classic Reprint (1892) 63 pages.