Conceptualization of Violence in the Parliamentary Debate in the National Assembly of Serbia

Vukomanović, Dijana and Marković, Ksenija (2024) Conceptualization of Violence in the Parliamentary Debate in the National Assembly of Serbia. In: Конференција Друштво и структурно насиље. Univerzitet Filozofski fakultet, Institut društvenih nauka,, Beograd, p. 57. ISBN 978-86-6427-336-7

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Abstract

Parliamentary debates legitimize hierarchical power relations in politics, in the relationship between the government and the opposition, the majority and the minority, and thus become a source of reproduction of symbolic violence, verbalization and normalization of the concept of violence in society. Parliamentary debates are marked by toxic narratives that contaminate the wider space of public discourse and create a suitable platform for further circulation and reproduction of violent patterns in social relations. Although violence and discursive violence are different concepts, they interact with each other. Symbolic – rhetorical, metaphorical, verbal violence in parliamentary discourse, which is a reflex of political power relations, at the same time constructs a wider field for generating and normalizing violence as a socially acceptable norm of behavior. Debates between MPs are a medium through which symbolic violence is naturalized and produced as an indigenous and acceptable pattern and a key strategy for resolving social conflicts and crises in society, and thus ultimately establishing itself as structural violence. The analysis of political discourse in this paper is limited to a narrow, institutionalized group of the political elite – MPs in the Serbian Parliament, and to their public speeches – a parliamentary debate on the occasion of two extreme cases of mass shootings in Serbia, which occurred in May 2023. The paper aims to identify and analyze the verbalization and conceptualization of this extreme social phenomenon. The analysis is aimed at testing three research hypotheses: there is no universal definition of the concept of violence in parliamentary discourse; there is a difference in the perception and conceptualization of violence between the ruling coalition and the opposition in the Serbian Parliament; it is impossible to reach a political consensus with the aim to blueprint a systemic response to manifestations of violence in society. The hypotheses will be tested through the process of analyzing the content of the parliamentary debate – transcripts of the plenary session in the Serbian Parliament and the formation and accelerated dissolution of the Inquiry Committee to determine the circumstances that led to the mass shootings, in the period May-July 2023. The final outcome of the analysis is focused on predicting the trends in the circulation of violent forms of political culture in parliamentary and political discourse in Serbia.

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