Is organised violence central to capitalism? @ BISA 2025

How are technologies used by militaries to enact organised violence produced? How are post-industrial regions of the UK becoming dependent on the supply chains of the global war industry? What narratives enable organised violence perpetrated by elites, and how are they resisted? What is the role of everyday tedium and mundanity in producing such violence?

Dr Joanna Tidy is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at University of Sheffield. Dr Beryl Pong is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. Dr Frank Maracchione is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at University of Kent. Dr Elena Simon is a doctoral alumnus of the University of Sheffield. Vicki Reif-Breitwieser is a postgraduate researcher at University of Sheffield and co-convenor of the SPERI Doctoral Researchers Network.

They join Dr Remi Edwards to discuss the political economy of organised violence enacted by, between and within states. They consider the relationship between ruling elites' violence and capitalist economies; how violence is produced by particular ways of knowing; the boundary (or lack thereof) between the civil and the military; the everyday as an important site where violence is made and contested in the global political economy; and how novel forms of data collection can help us more effectively study organised violence.

This SPERI Presents... episode is a live recording of the roundtable "Towards a Political Economy of organised violence: war, technologies, labour, and (re)production" at BISA 2025 conference. It took place in Belfast on Wednesday 18 June 2025.