Emergent Axioms of Violence

This book highlights the diverse and complicated ways that violence becomes axiomatic, namely through political rhetoric, epistemological impositions, and colonial legacies. Considering how axiomatic violence emerges from events of rupture as well as slow-moving structural inequalities, authors interrogate both the novelty and mundane quality of the current political moment. Approaching violence as axiomatic expands the conceptual lexicon for discussing how rhetorics, metaphors, and prescriptive assumptions can be inherently violent and become normalised, losing their event-like status. Through the routinisation of the extraordinary, truths become indisputable. Axioms combine neoteric and foundational violence to lend legitimacy to apparently incontestable categories of domination, disenfranchisement, and epistemological governance.

This book will be an asset to students and researchers of political theory, philosophy, and social anthropology and those interested in learning about the intersections of post-colonial and post-liberal anthropology, violence, and power.

The chapters in this book were first published as a special issue of Anthropological Forum and are accompanied by a new Afterword.

Stavroula Pipyrou is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Founding Director of the Centre for Minorities Research at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Her most recent book is Lurking Cold War: Life Through Historical Communion (2025). She is co-editor of the series Routledge Advances in Minority Studies.

Antonio Sorge is Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, and Director of the Centre for Ethnography in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He has published widely on Sardinia and more recently on Sicily, where he is conducting research on the political, economic, and cultural legacies of post-Unification history.