Critical essay: (In)sensitive violence, development, and the smell of the soil: Strategic decision-making of what?

Abstract

Firms may commit aspects of violence in a sophisticated way. To this end, I argue that, as firms and their influential agents (e.g. government bodies and NGOs that often work as third parties and claim neutrality) participate in designing and performing violent activities under an influence of ideological beliefs, certain aspects of violence are difficult to trace. In other words, it is not always easy to point out exactly which powerful actors did what to result in violence such as injury and killing. Because of this limited traceability of actions, certain consequences of such violence remain invisible for a long period of time. However, such violence has devastating effects that go beyond the physical and mental harm suffered by the victim, affecting even the socio-emotional situations of marginalized people. Accordingly, I conceptualize a form of violence with limited traceability and invisible negative consequences, which is termed as insensitive violence. By doing so, I also discuss fundamental flaws of economic and human perspectives of development that encourage recursive use of insensitive violence at the expense of environmental damage and emotional degradation of marginalized communities.