Post by Dr. Jannis Julien Grimm

This article has been a very long time in the making, going back to a 2024 workshop in Frankfurter, organised by Timothy Williams and Dr Hanna Pfeifer. All the more I'm happy that my joint piece with Mariam Salehi and Hannah Franzki has now been published in Critical Studies on Terrorism: Theorising the violence-resistance-nexus in the context of Gaza: towards a situated research perspective Abstract: Divergent, often implicit, concepts of violence shape judgements about what counts as legitimate resistance or illegitimate harm, and about which actors and grievances become visible. Against this backdrop, academic and public debates seeking to make sense of the violence in Gaza frequently talk past one another: they shift registers between analytical descriptions, moral arguments, and legal assessment without naming their starting assumptions thus conflating analyses of the conditions and effects of violence and resistance, and justifications thereof. In this paper, we propose an explicitly situated research perspective that embraces the multiperspectivity of conflict and accounts for the inherent double situatedness of research on the violence-resistance-nexus: first, the situatedness of the phenomena under study in specific temporal, spatial, and institutional frames that delimit episodes, agents, and harms; second, the researcher’s situatedness in terms of their analytical frame, normative commitments and epistemic frameworks. Making this double situatedness transparent is essential for analytical precision and normatively defensible evaluation. We operationalise this perspective through a coordinate system that distinguishes ontological assumptions, normative premises, and epistemological commitments, and that separates legality from legitimacy while tracking their interaction in practice. The result is a template for rigorous, reflexive scholarship under conditions of conceptual and political contestation. The article is available #openAccess, please follow the link in the first comment to this post!