Introduction: Philosophy of Violence: A Multidisciplinary Perspective

This volume began as a project covering philosophical perspectives from within Africa on violence, and the scope of the chapters reflect this starting point. However, as the project took form and gained momentum, it became clear that questions on violence invariably give way to the consideration of perspectives that straddle various postcolonial places and spaces within both the Global South and North. For that reason, this volume has a distinct African flavour throughout but also includes work that consider a variety of perspectives on violence against the backdrop of the urgent dilemmas left behind by colonialism and which continues to this day in the postcolonies of the twenty-first century. This volume does not purely fall within the discipline of philosophy either, both because philosophy is such a diverse discipline that overlaps with many other fields but also because the questions and concepts that are explored here require a multidisciplinary perspective. The chapters in this volume follow a philosophical point of view but also draw from various other disciplines such as sociology, psychology, journalism, political science, art studies and history. The diversity of these chapters reveals the complexity of analysing the topic of violence, in the general sense but also within the context of postcolonialism and the Global South. These chapters should therefore be read as a part of the complex process involved in coming to grips with what exactly violence is in all its guises within the context of the twenty-first century.