Talking to ... Brad Evans

If you follow the rise of populism and conflicts emerging in
post-industrial societies, you see the same picture emerging
everywhere: a society lost in the thin air of our moral economy,
struggling with very tangible problems that people are reluctant
to confront. Brad Evans' perspective can be highly informative
when analyzing this landscape, which exhibits some features of
what Hans Magnus Enzensberger called the ›molecular civil war‹.
Born in Rhondda, Wales, at a time when the striking miners were
the victims of Thatcherite neoliberalism, his perspective is
shaped by that conflict, which plunged the people living there
first into unemployment—then into a crisis of meaning even more
terrible than exploitation: that of no longer being considered
worthy of exploitation, in this sense: being completely
invisible. Strangely enough, the young political scientist had to
travel to Mexico and experience the Zapatista uprising before he
could describe his own homeland with such an alien perspective in
his beautifully titled book, „How Black Was My Valley.“ Here, the
uninitiated reader isn’t only confronted with the insight that
the Welsh are a kind of Indigenous minority confronted with the
dark side of colonization through mining – but that Wales was
already confronting the effects of globalization even before the
great financial crisis in 1929. After the Treaty of Versailles,
which obliged the Germans to supply coal in restitution,
unemployment in Wales soared to alarming heights. In this sense,
the personal alienation of having risen into the world of
Academia from the working class gives him an unusual historical
perspective of the lived experience while simultaneously allowing
him to reach the heights of contemporary thought, the Philosophy
of a René Girard or a Giorgio Agamben as he looks back.


Brad Evans is Professor of Political Violence at the University
of Bath. He's the author of several highly creative books that
transcend the narrow confines of academia. He has also founded
the Centre for the Study of Violence.


Brad Event has published


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