Theory of Exterminist Violence. On the Centrality of Legitimated Physical Violence

Abstract

Emphasis on simbolic or structural violence and on the nowadays effects of neoliberalism are neglecting an urgent topic of research: exterminist physical violence. We may consider adding exterminist violence to other contemporary violences, as those derived from the neoliberal turn, to fully understand modernity and our own contemporary times. Despite the number of mortal victims in the last two hundred years and the extension of the exterminist violent logic within our times, physical violence seems to have disappeared too easily from the social sciences recent accounts of the present. Reframing Frase's and Thompson's concept of ?exterminism? while considering contemporary research on genocides and violence may give birth to a new research agenda: a sociology of exterminism.