{"id":131620,"date":"2014-10-11T11:27:20","date_gmt":"2014-10-11T05:57:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=131620"},"modified":"2014-10-19T00:34:49","modified_gmt":"2014-10-18T19:04:49","slug":"the-politics-of-university-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/the-politics-of-university-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"The Politics Of (University) Violence"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Suren R\u0101ghavan<\/span><\/a> –<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Dr.<\/a>

Dr. Suren R\u0101ghavan<\/p><\/div>\n

The Greeks had no single term to express what we mean by the word \u2018life.\u2019 They used two terms that, although traceable to a common etymological root, are semantically and morphologically distinct: zo\u0113, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group\u201d –\u00a0<\/i>(Gerogoi Agamban 1998)<\/i><\/p>\n

The news that a section of the faculty of University of Colombo had decided to stop their academic engagements<\/span><\/a> to bring an end to the on-going rather inhuman ragging within their university (and other higher education institutions) is disturbing and welcoming.<\/p>\n

Disturbing because ragging<\/span><\/a> of such cruel nature should still exist, welcoming as the faculty members have decided to address this seriously.<\/p>\n

Universities are not only about earning a degree or helping towards that. They are centers of societal citations and (re)form process within the context of knowledge gaining and transferring. Passing exams and achieving a degree is considered a core element of that process aimed at the discipline of systemic thought analysis. Yet the full objective of university education is severely undermined if the advancement of essential nonacademic person building sphere is non-existing or deliberately dismantled.\u00a0 In such definitions, Sri Lanka universities have a checked history of individual and collective violence. I am not certain if a thorough going research has been ever undertaken to examine the culture of (physical, sexual and social) violence within the universities of Sri Lanka. If not, it appears an urgent necessity.<\/span><\/p>\n

The nexus of violence<\/b><\/p>\n

When we explore the issue of university violence, it robotically gravitates around the question as if the epicenter of such phenomena is correlated to the waves of political power struggles outside of these universities. As all universities in Lanka are still state funded and operate under the political sub structure, such cross fertilization of state power politics and normativity of violence cannot be separated. Lanka\u2019s postcolonial history is fractured with junctures of direct body politics of violence. 1971 JVP armed struggle showed that by then Lankan universities had become the ideological cradle of legitimization of collective violence. Such process and their historical weight crushes the thin layer of social fabric within universities.\u00a0\u00a0 In a Foucauldian sense, Lankan university politics quintessentially submerges with the biopolitcal dynamics outside. For Foucault (1997) \u201cbiopolitics is a new technology of power for violence [that] exists at a different level, on a different scale, and has different bearing areas, and makes use of very different instruments within the state governing structure\u201d. In Lanka, indeed such biopolitics and sovereign exceptionalism\u00a0 often constructs the primary filed of politics. Under biopolitics, life, society and power become indistinct. Violence against the new comers by the seniors -who ironically were ragged by their seniors when entering university, then becomes the recurrent dynamic connected to the nature of politics at large.<\/p>\n