Communication In times of political violence: the Vasque case

Abstract

From Vietnam to Iraq and then to Ukraine, there has been a paradigm shift away from information and towards the trenches. For some types of conflict, cultural violence, including communicative violence, may not simply legitimise other forms of violence - in contrast to what Galtung points out - but may be nodal, as befits the performative power of defensive identities. Cultural identities may not be expressions of structural violence or of political and military violence, but rather drivers or the very origin of conflicts that turn into violence with economic, political or structural consequences. Based on this framework, the paper provides a systematic analysis of the communicative treatment of the Basque conflict over five decades, through five stages, highlighting the failure of this communicative model to reorientate the social pulse.