Can Political Violence Ever Be Justified?

Elizabeth Frazer, Kimberly Hutchings

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509529230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Violence – from state coercion to wars and revolutions – remains an enduring global reality. But whereas it is often believed that the point of constitutional politics is to make violence unnecessary, others argue that it is an unavoidable element of politics.

In this lucid and erudite book, Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings address these issues using vivid contemporary and historic examples. They carefully explore the strategies that have been deployed to condone violence, either as means to certain ends or as an inherent facet of politics. Examining the complex questions raised by different types of violence, they conclude that, ultimately, all attempts to justify political violence fail.

This book will be essential introductory reading for students and scholars of the ethics and politics of political violence.

1
Violence and Justification

Introduction

To address the question of whether political violence can be justified, we need to establish what we mean by political violence, and what counts as justification. This chapter sets out some preliminary thoughts.

Politics and violence

The term ‘political violence’ usually conjures up pictures of people rioting, damaging property, or visiting physical violence on each other in the context of political events and processes, for explicitly political purposes. It often involves police and security personnel whose job is to protect the existing social and political order, including policing demonstrations and counter-demonstrations. Protests around the world against economic-cultural globalization, against the treatment of landless people, against environmentally damaging public policies, and against unjust economic and fiscal regimes have sometimes turned into battles with the security personnel protecting conferences and meetings of the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and others. During violence after the disputed Kenyan elections in 2007, police shot violent demonstrators, in front of TV cameras, with the predictable effect that more violence was generated.

At least as frequent as this picture of rioters and protestors engaging with state officers are clashes between demonstrators and counter-demonstrators, campaigners and counter-campaigners. Counter-campaigners use physical threat or attack – from low-level breaking of cameras, or shouting down a speaker, to setting fire to or bombing rival organizations’ offices. Equally frequent are cases of established governments or influential people within them using the institutions and forces of the state to attempt to suppress opposition – arresting opposition leaders and activists, for example as opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been imprisoned in Russia, or as Catalan political leaders have been arrested and charged, by the Spanish government and judiciary, for holding an unconstitutional referendum on national independence. In Zimbabwe, during the presidency of Robert Mugabe, there were many reports of intimidation of opposition activists by members of the ruling party.

Some readers might think that these examples muddle up political violence proper with state violence. Some thinkers, indeed, reserve the former category for the violence of citizens and denizens against an established state and government. In the chapters that follow we discuss reasons why thinkers and philosophers have made this distinction, between the political-legal ‘force’ reserved to and deployed by states, and the illegal (although perhaps morally justified) ‘violence’ that is used by citizens, denizens, aliens and other people who are members of the polity. Clearly, this is a difficult distinction to sustain.

First, the distinction ‘state’ and ‘non-state’ is too simple to capture the range of positions of the various members of a polity: those who exercise sovereign power and authority; police and security forces; civil servants; agents of the state who contract with governments to deliver public services; citizens (i.e. those who have the full set of rights to a passport, to vote, to stand for office); denizens (i.e. those who live on the territory of a state but are not citizens); aliens (visitors, illegal denizens); members of parties competing for office and governmental power; members of campaigning groups trying to put pressure on, or to oppose, government; members of cultures which are positioned in opposition to the dominant cultural groups, or don’t participate in public life. There are others. In the theory of popular sovereignty and democracy some of these people, but not all, constitute ‘the state’ – although which do varies from theory to theory. In law, some are deemed to be citizens and others not, and these various classes of person are accorded various rights and obligations. But these laws are always politically contested. In popular political culture some are outsiders and some insiders. Again, the distinction is invariably contested.

Second, from the point of view of political science, ‘core state’ institutions, including the executive (and the ‘core executive’), the judiciary, the police, the military and the legislature, are clearly ‘state’ institutions. But there is a continuum of state power, through corporations and agents contracted to the state for the supply of goods and services including security, through the political parties that contend for state power, to schools, cultural organizations and other institutions that discharge ‘state’ functions like education and health, and rely on state resources for their survival. Violence occurs in and around all of these institutions, sometimes, and some of it is political violence in the sense that it has political functions, is for political purposes, has political effects, or takes place in the midst of explicitly political processes like elections, or contestations over policy, or revolutions.

Third, the arrest and imprisonment of opposition figures must clearly count as political violence – it is for explicitly political purposes. But is this ‘state’ violence? Or is it the violence of governmental actors taking advantage of their control of state resources for their personal or partisan political purposes?

Fourth, there are hazy and contested distinctions between ‘political’ and other forms of violence. Personal, and local, antagonisms are very likely to get muddled up with political issues at times of contention. In civil wars, it is difficult to say what the causes and explanations of patterns of antagonism are, because people’s position in the war can be to take the opposite side from that of those who are already their enemies. ‘Political violence’ is often mixed up with inter-communal violence – especially, but not only, where party loyalty follows ethnic, or religious, or clan or other communal identification and membership. In cases of riot, or electoral violence, criminal gangs can take the opportunity to get involved, for the sake of theft, or for territorial purposes. The fact that police and government spokespersons, especially in broadly liberal democratic polities, associate political demonstrators with ‘criminals’ as a way of delegitimizing the political action, and use criminal law for the purposes of prosecution, only intensifies this contested relationship between crime and politics.

Given the vagueness of these distinctions, between institutions, actors and kinds of violence, a more plausible approach might be to include in the category of political violence all violence connected to political purposes broadly conceived, including winning, securing, stabilizing, destabilizing, deploying and challenging power. President Putin’s treating political opposition as criminal is a political use of violence, just as surely as is the physically intimidatory shouting down of a campaigner for a controversial position in a dispute over an issue like abortion, or sex and gender identity. The justificatory work these actions might involve is likely to vary: a president will talk of state security, and the sovereign deployment of legal force, where a protestor will talk of constitutional rights, governmental accountability, moral rights, popular sovereignty or freedom of speech. We should not, either, confine matters of politics to affairs of state. Changes in society, or in culture, when pursued or argued about publicly, are political. They rely on legislation and protection for particular positions. Some positions that today are illegal might be legalized in future, and vice versa. That’s the point of a good deal of politics. There’s more to it than legalization or illegalization, however. Political power – the power to influence, to get things done, to persuade, to organize, to win the authority to rule (or to lose it) – is not exhausted by law. Violence that asserts, expresses or enforces the denigration or subjugation of others on grounds of race, nationality, sexuality or gender is political, since it is about the preservation of power privilege, whether carried out by state or private actors.

Thinking about political violence also raises the question of what counts as violence. The distinction between state ‘force’ and other violence identifies political violence with what is illegal, or unjustified. The concept of violence, when applied to human affairs, always involves an idea of ‘violation’ of a norm, but that does not amount to illegality or illegitimacy. For example, there is a norm against punching someone on the jaw. On the face of it this is criminal assault. But the norm is overridden in the context of boxing practice or competition. The boxer uses a degree of force that overcomes the resistance of the opponent; the action is so speedy that the opponent can’t evade the punch; the blow hurts, or even injures. Boxing is violent, but it is a regulated, legal violence. There is a norm against using a chemical like CS gas to incapacitate a person. That too is on the face of it a criminal act. But the norm is overridden when tear gas is used, in accordance with law and authority, by police officers against protestors. We do not say that boxing, or uses of CS gas in crowd control, are not violent. Rather, they are legal violence. Nor does this imply that they are justified. In both cases, there are principled objections to the relevant laws. Some argue, coherently, that fist fighting should not be elevated to the sport of boxing, precisely because the underlying violence and risk of the engagement make it morally different to other athletic contests. Some argue that police officers should not be allowed to use tear gas, water cannon or Tasers against protestors. Although, in some countries, these policing techniques are legal, that does not in itself justify them.

So far we have focused on instances of physical assault and threats of physical violence. During the anti-globalization protests in Seattle in 1999 the shop windows of global brands were broken; police used weapons, and enforced routes for protestors, and confined them in certain areas; protestors threw stones and other missiles at police. In Kenya there were deadly attacks and deliberate killings of rival party members and individuals from particular ethnic groups. In Russia and Spain leaders of opposition political parties and movements have been arrested and imprisoned, on charges ranging from treason to public disorder.

Some critics are concerned that focus on killing, imprisonment, destruction of property and physical injury misses a whole dimension of violence, which is very effective, and very injurious, but does not confine persons as imprisonment does, or leave scars on the body. These critics argue that in order to understand the relative severity of instances and patterns of violence, we have to take into account the structural and symbolic violence of states, the global system of capitalism, white and masculine privilege as much as the physical injury and trauma that are visited on people by them. You don’t have to actually hit a poor person to injure them or shorten their life: that is already done by depriving them of the goods needed for flourishing, like clean water. You don’t often have to kettle a citizen on a demonstration, or hit them with tear gas, in order to quell opposition to the dominant political and economic order. That is already done by narrowing down people’s options and values to the point where they only want what global capitalists are willing to sell them, and don’t value political participation for themselves. You don’t often have to physically attack young black men if none of them has the economic opportunity to live in your neighbourhood. You don’t often have to actually beat a woman as long as she is already persuaded of her inferiority and incapacity to make decisions. These, according to critics, are material and ideological processes that are as violent as the truncheons or water cannon of the security services, the shooting and incarceration of black men, or the killing of women in domestic settings. They are also processes that enable and support such direct violence. The imprisonment of opposition leaders, on this account, is only the tiniest tip of a massive iceberg of state- and status-quo-preserving violence, most of which is perpetrated silently, without leaving visible scars, but which oppresses, represses and damages. If we are to ask whether it can be justified for a campaigner to set a bomb, or a protestor to throw stones at security personnel, we might also consider how, if at all, this more widespread violence might be justified.

Justification

What is it to justify an action or course of action? When we think about something being justified or justifiable, we think of it as in some sense being made right. One influential way of thinking about this is that an action, or a circumstance, system or rule, is justified if its consequences or outcomes are good. There are various and rival ways of formulating this. An act of violence might be justified because it brings about good and eliminates evil. The apparently negative qualities of the violence are outweighed by the positive value of the consequences, on a cost–benefit analysis. Violence is the price of a good. Or (bad) violence is a means to the (good) outcome or end. In this means–ends frame violence is an instrument that might be used to achieve certain ends. It’s a dangerous instrument, to be sure, but for particular ends the risks and the damaging side effects involved are worth it. The ends, or goals, obviously, have to be very good and desirable – justice, equality, the defeat of evil – before we can consider using a bad like violence as means. Racist or ethnically discriminatory attacks and killings in order to establish ethnic political dominance in a polity and society cannot be justified by their ends, which are permanent discrimination and exclusion, the establishment of inequality. Using violence when an electoral process is going against you, in order to gain or maintain governing power, is not justified. But when an unjust government or international governance organization fails to adopt policies and processes that deliver justice, when the normal political processes that should be oriented to the securing of justice for all fail, then it may be justified to turn to violent means.

A problem, obviously, for this line of reasoning is the contestation of the concept of justice or good which is the required end or aim for a justified violent action. All kinds of political actors – authoritarians, fascists, racists and capitalists, as well as socialists, libertarians, feminists and cosmopolitans – claim justice as their goal. They have radically divergent understandings of what is just: for some it is established hierarchy and oppression of the ‘inferior’, for others it is equality and the satisfaction of all persons’ basic needs. For some it is whatever emerges from individual choice and free contract; for others it is an equalized, or unequal, distribution of goods and burdens that requires continual social, political and legal action to achieve and maintain.

Consequentialist reasoning poses further problems. Obviously, the outcomes of a course of action can’t be known in advance. They can be calculated, given what we know about causes and effects in normal circumstances. We can estimate the probabilities of things working out according to the plan. But of course...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction: The Question of Political Violence
• 1 Violence and Justification
• 2 Simple Justifications of Simple Violence
• 3 Complicating Matters
• 4 The Meaning of Political Violence
• 5 Against the Justification of Political Violence
• Conclusion: Political Violence Can Never Be Justified
• Sources and Further Reading
• End User License Agreement