Critical essay: (In)sensitive violence, development, and the smell of the soil: Strategic decision-making of what?

Abstract

Firms may commit aspects of violence in a sophisticated way. To this end, I argue that, as firms and their influential agents (e.g. government bodies and NGOs that often work as third parties and claim neutrality) participate in designing and performing violent activities under an influence of ideological beliefs, certain aspects of violence are difficult to trace. In other words, it is not always easy to point out exactly which powerful actors did what to result in violence such as injury and killing. Because of this limited traceability of actions, certain consequences of such violence remain invisible for a long period of time. However, such violence has devastating effects that go beyond the physical and mental harm suffered by the victim, affecting even the socio-emotional situations of marginalized people. Accordingly, I conceptualize a form of violence with limited traceability and invisible negative consequences, which is termed as insensitive violence. By doing so, I also discuss fundamental flaws of economic and human perspectives of development that encourage recursive use of insensitive violence at the expense of environmental damage and emotional degradation of marginalized communities.

From Black Pain to Rhodes Must Fall: A Rejectionist Perspective

“…For example, the removal of a statue is not just a physical act; it is also a psychological one. It is the moment where liberation of a soul through a consciousness permeates others and has positive effects on societies (Chowdhury 2019). As a result, I postulate that an important implication of the rejectionist perspective is a continuous process of decolonization through which a person achieves representation of their true self and the courage to engage with multiple truths.…”

“…Stakeholder value creation can be defined as the societal and economic gains that firms distribute among their stakeholders (who are affected by or can affect focal firms) (Freeman 1984). Normatively, stakeholder scholars suggest that powerful actors distribute such values fairly to all stakeholders with some tradeoffs (Harrison et al 2010), although CMS scholars consistently show that such tradeoffs have little significance for marginalized groups (Khan et al 2007), and even bring them further misery (Chowdhury 2017(Chowdhury , 2019. This situation is perpetuated, enabling powerful actors to become more influential and to continue to dictate how marginalized groups should live their lives, thus restricting them from expressing their grievances against injustice (e.g., Ehrnström-Fuentes 2016).…”

“…One of the long-lasting negative outcomes of such legacy is that it has transformed into a neoliberal Westernized-style capitalist system dominated by white populations (Hahn 2005;Harvey 2005) and has thus created safe passage for Western multinational corporations (MNCs) to dominate the everyday lives of marginalized groups of color (Onimode 1978;Udofia 1984). Such marginalized groups are dominated by powerful actors such as government agencies, MNCs, elite non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and Western aid agencies and institutions (Chowdhury 2019). Examples of marginalized groups include powerless communities, economically poor labor forces, religious minorities, and groups that are subject to racial biases and discrimination by being locked into white dominated neoliberalist mechanisms.…”

“…[See, for example, Khan et al (2007Khan et al ( , 2010, Maher (2018), Masika (2017) and Varman and Al-Amoudi (2016) who are concerned about such issues.] Instead, I focus on how racism is deeply embedded in colonial legacies that influence MNCs as dominant Westernized institutions that control marginalized groups (c.f., Chowdhury 2019;Girei 2017). Without this focus, it is difficult to conceptualize many ethical dilemmas that MNCs produce while continuing to normalize them in postcolonial countries (see, Pal 2016).…”

Micro-credit, trust, and social solidarity in Bangladesh: A socio-philosophical analysis

“…in NGOs may decrease when they see that they are being monitored. 19 This distrusting relationship causes what Chowdhury (2019) calls “emotional wounds” which are “invisible dark marks in the collective archetypical memory of communities that, in the long run, affect interpersonal relationships of community members” (p. 3).…”