Visions of Political Violence

Vincenzo Ruggiero

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000034288
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Genocidio y crímenes de guerra

In this book, Vincenzo Ruggiero offers a typology of different forms of political violence. From systemic and institutional violence, to the behaviour of crowds, to armed conflict and terrorism, Ruggiero draws on a range of perspectives from criminology, social theory, political science, critical legal studies and literary criticism to consider how these forms of violence are linked in an interdependent field of forces.

Ruggiero argues that systemic violence encourages more institutional violence, which in turn weakens the ability of citizens to set up political agendas for change. He advocates for a reduction of all types of violence, which can be enacted through fairer distribution of resources and the provision of political space for contention and negotiation.

This book will be of interest to all those engaged in research on violence, terrorism, armed conflict and the crimes of the powerful. It makes an important contribution to criminological and social theory.

1

INTRODUCTION

Violence is at the centre of theoretical elaborations around the creation of identities, the establishment of the law and the shaping of authority. Subjects are formed through violence, and the norms through which this formation is carried out ‘are by definition violent’: we are given genders, positions and status against our will (Butler, 2009: 167). Analyses of the state also focus on violence, describing it as a law-making force that establishes new systems and designates new authorities. Direct organized force, in sum, is deemed central to the process of state-making (Tilly, 1985). This type of violence, however, can also amount to law-conserving violence, when it protects the stability of systems and reinforces authority (Derrida, 1992a; Benjamin, 1996).

The analysis of violence, from this perspective, can explain how power is formed and distributed within society and how such distribution can be altered. This is also the aim of this book.

Ethology applied to humans would posit that aggressive behaviour is manifested in personal quarrels, crime, war and all kinds of destructive acts that derive from innate instinct (Lorenz, 1966). This instinct is expressed when proper occasions arise. Behaviourists, by contrast, have little interest in individual forces programmed to lead conduct, but rather in the social conditioning that shapes behaviour. We may not have to choose between the two because both approaches fail to explain domestic violence, police violence, ethnic cleansing, torture and war. Nor can we think that a general theory allows us to distinguish between ‘bad’ violence, enacted by criminalized agents, and ‘good’ violence, commonly perpetrated by authorized state agents. The suggestion that there are not violent individuals but violent situations is inspired by the attempt to formulate one such general theory.

Fear, anger and excitement are intertwined human emotions that play a key explanatory role in micro-situational theories of violence. Wars or episodes of police violence are emotional events that follow a similar pattern, ‘circumventing the tension and fear that rises up whenever people come into antagonistic confrontation’ (Collins, 2008: 8). Crowd violence is said to resemble military violence, as it may start with gesture and aggressive posture to then reach a breaking point when the situation saturates with collective emotions that translate into open field attacks. Violence, in brief, is supposed to be a structural property of situational fields, not a property of individuals or groups. Factors outside the situation, like background conditions, may be predisposing but, from this perspective, they are not sufficient. ‘Conditions such as being subjected to poverty, racial discrimination, family disorganization, abuse and stress are far from determining whether violence will happen or not’ (ibid.: 20).

This micro-situational theory encounters some difficulty when collective violence in the form of popular resistance is examined. Those involved may be a small number of violent specialists who get their energy from the support awarded to them by peers and audiences, but that energy, surely, is far from being merely situational. It derives from a culture, a repertoire of action, a vision of the world, a historical memory and, in general terms, an optimistic appreciation of human agency. What leads to action is less the situational context than the ‘wonder’ humans experience when they turn a secular or religious creed into practice. Collective action mobilizes principles and, in so doing, discovers and formulates ideas; it depicts images and imagines futures. The wonder experienced resembles the awe Aristotle ascribes to those who observe the world and pose questions for the mere pleasure they find in knowledge. Marvel, in sum, is not only at the origin of philosophy, but also of political commitment.

There is more than a sheer micro-situational dynamic at play in episodes of resistance. There is a practical challenge of the notion of metapolitics, namely the use of metaphysics in political science; there is defiance of the idea that, once power is entrusted to the sovereign, ordinary citizens have to abandon the political field altogether. Resistance may be disorderly, but it responds to stifling situations that make social order what is left once everything else has been prohibited (Esposito, 2018).

From a macro-sociological and historical viewpoint, violence has been described as the great leveller, as the only tool that may reduce inequality (Scheidel, 2015). For instance, the two world wars caused enormous destruction of accumulated wealth, but at the same time reduced inequality. Postwar peace, on the contrary, restored the distance between the wealthy and the needy (Scott, 2017). Effective levelling, we are told, requires violent shocks that at least temporarily curtail and reverse the iniquities brought by economic development. Such shocks or Big Reasons share one common root, being all the effect of massive and violent disruptions of the established order, of transformative revolutions, state failure or pandemics. It is assumed that all of these have always dwarfed any known instances of equalization produced by entirely peaceful means. It is the violence implicit in such events that is said to cause the levelling.

The type of violence that concerns us in this book cannot be assimilated to pandemics, unless the word refers to the spreading of ideas and hope rather than viruses. The violence addressed here is characterized by political objectives and communicative content. Ideally, politics should consist of a project of autonomy involving subjects capable of self-understanding, self-consciousness and mutual recognition. It should, and sometimes does, lead to the achievement of agreement through communication. However, it often takes violent forms and is performed by a variety of actors to defend or consolidate their social position or to improve it. Political violence is at times hidden and at times unsettlingly manifest. It is situational only in that it takes different forms and modalities according to the context in which it occurs.

In Weber’s formulation, violent action is politically oriented when it is organized and aims at exerting influence on governments over the appropriation, expropriation, redistribution and allocation of resources and power (Weber, 1978). Clearly, this formulation refers to groups vigorously defending what they possess as well as groups strenuously pursuing what they do not possess. As such, it includes powerful and state actors. Among contemporary formulations, instead, political violence is often defined as violence ‘outside state control’ (O’Neil, 2017: 210). The explanations provided are institutional, ideational and individual. The first revolves around the constraints, the norms and the general living conditions imposed on certain groups who feel the necessity to react. The second posits that violent action is enacted when institutional constraints are rejected through political or religious beliefs. Finally, individual explanations seek the germs of political violence in the socio-psychological make-up of perpetrators. States, therefore, may create the conditions for political violence, but seem to be excluded from the range of agents who practise it.

This book, on the contrary, embraces a range of violent political actors. It offers a typology of the different forms political violence takes, linking them in a continuum and in an interdependent field of forces. The forms identified are systemic violence, institutional violence, group violence, armed struggle, terrorism and war. The word ‘visions’ in the title of this book alludes to the diversity of the perspectives adopted and the sources utilized. These are not confined to the criminological field, but also derive from disciplines such as social theory, political science, critical legal studies, literary criticism and fiction. The different fictional ‘visions’ are presented and interspersed throughout the chapters, but will also form specific chapters in their own right. Fiction may temporarily assuage our dissatisfaction with life, and as a miraculous interval it may give us a provisional suspension from reality, immersing us in literary illusion. It may even transform us into citizens of a timeless world: we become ‘other’. According to Nobel Prize winner Vargas Llosa (2001: 10), when we close the book, abandoning the splendid territory we have just visited, we are disappointed because ‘life in fiction is better, and literature helps us see the servitude in which we live’. In this sense, fiction is often seditious, non-subjugated, rebellious, a challenge against what exists.

According to other noteworthy classifications, political violence includes domination, marginalization and degradation, defined by Balibar (2015) as ultra-objective and by Tilly (2003) as nonviolent violence. This type of violence entails the treatment of masses of people as human remnants, useless residues, not as a result of subjective choice made by violent actors, but as the consequence of the rules governing the distribution of power and resources. In Chapter 2, this will be termed systemic violence and linked with the social, economic and political arrangements that cause it. Systemic violence reproduces inequality, immobility, injustice and misery and, as will be explained, is implicit in the ordinary functioning of economic and political systems. It is not the outcome of individually or collectively planned cruelty, although its impact affects life and causes cruel death. Systemic violence is encapsulated in the notion that sovereignty resides in the power to decide who may live and who must die (Mbembe, 2003).

Chapter 3 moves on to consider institutional violence, which incorporates distinctive subjective elements. In its extreme forms, this type of political violence preaches the elimination of groups of people who are regarded as dangerous or infective for a national, ethnic or religious community. Institutional violence can also be directed against internal enemies who contest unfair distribution of wealth. This is why economic analyses of this type of violence have been attempted, for example, focused on harsh competition for land, labour, capital and, in general, access to wellbeing (Gilpin, 2015). Among the concepts and variables utilized are scarcity, opportunity cost, comparative advantage and rational choice (Anderton and Brauer, 2016). Rational and strategic behaviour is said to pervade mass atrocities and these, it is suggested, can be prevented through macroeconomic incentives. In this chapter, by contrast, institutional violence will cover examples of violations perpetrated by individuals and groups who, as representatives of the elite or of established institutions, infringe their own rules and reject their own philosophies. Rational choice will not feature prominently among the theories explaining this type of violence, as it will be assumed that decisions are affected by social and psychological influences rather than pure calculation of costs and benefits (Baddeley, 2017). Powerful offenders express a form of bounded rationality, which is practical, but also limited and selective, and at times conservative, when rather than seek novel sources of social power they choose to maintain established ones. They make mistakes, misjudge risk, face cognitive restrictions, access insufficient information, give in to emotions. They may be more concerned about loss than gain. The themes discussed in this chapter pertain to work, consensus, coercion and legitimacy, but also police violence and ‘democratic’ missions. The fictional vision of the Marquis de Sade will provide a concluding commentary to institutional violence, suggesting that sovereignty implies the capacity to violate prohibitions.

In response to both systemic and institutional violence, people can give rise to ‘contentious gatherings’, which are public and collective, express grievance, make claims and attempt to produce change (Tilly, 2003). Collective responses take shape when specific social ensembles emerge. Think of the three types of such ensembles identified by Sartre (2004): series, groups and organizations. The first are inert gatherings in which each constituent is alone and interchangeable, like a queue at a bus stop, where everyone shares the reason for being there but is indifferent to everyone else. Sartre extends his definition of series to a number of collective activities – working on an assembly line or listening to the radio: ‘in all these cases, the object produces an undifferentiated unity or a unity based on separation’ (Badiou, 2010: 22). Series, in brief, are characterized by inertia and impotence. Groups react against inertia and impotence when they begin to find some common interest among their constituents: those waiting for the bus share the feeling that the wait is intolerable. The members of a group, in other words, share a condition and a purpose, and their fusion leads to action. Organizations, finally, are deeply politicized entities and are kept united by an oath that avoids dispersion of members. ‘It is the oath that allows everyone to commit themselves to remaining the same’ (ibid.: 25).

Chapter 4 focuses on crowds, namely those forms of social ensemble fuelled by resentment which may turn violent. Often disorganized, the forms of political contention enacted by crowds (groups in Sartre’s terminology) can develop into strategic attempts to attack political enemies with a view to modifying the system and its rules. Processes of radicalization preside over this development, although their outcome is not always immediate violent action. This chapter travels through the analyses of masses as mediocre and stupid, crowds and their profound honesty, hostile outbursts, looting and benign aggression. It concludes with some reflections on social movements and their relationships with crowds and the multitude.

Chapter 5 tells the story of a conspiracy that remains within the limits of fantasy. It suggests that radicalization does not necessarily lead to immediate violent action, but can be expressed through feelings of revenge and homicidal ideation. The novel presented here sees a revolutionary cell planning illegal political action. Conflict, nihilism, suicide and betrayal are among the topics stemming from the novel, which will be examined from a criminological perspective. The analysis will primarily address ‘cultural’ aspects of crime and refer to notions such as ‘thrill’ and ‘seduction of crime’. These notions, it will be argued, along with the concept of ‘desistence’, require some revision in the face of the imagined or actual criminality described in the novel.

Sartre’s organizations come under scrutiny in Chapter 6, when homicidal ideation and murderous imagination turn into armed struggle and civil war. The oath, here, aims at avoiding the dispersion of members and, at the same time, at granting continuity to the annihilation of the enemy. This chapter finds a useful starting point in Schmitt’s work, particularly his observations on irregular fighters, their political commitment, mobility and tellurian character. It then looks at the links armed organizations try to establish with nonviolent contentious groups. Some emotional aspects of joining armed struggle are examined, while the main case study presented pertains to the African National Congress. Armed struggle may be successful or not, and under certain circumstances, can even turn into open civil war. The chapter traces the origin of this particular form of political violence, starting with the sharp distinction made in ancient Greece between violent conflict against external enemies and among or within cities. Ancient Rome also provides examples, which are deemed starting points in the study of contemporary civil wars. The horrors and chaos associated with this type of political violence are examined with reference to Thucydides’ work and Foucault’s notion of civil war as exercise of power. Master and local cleavages are found that often turn collective political violence into private conflict: confusion, enmity and revenge preside over a process that leads to the privatization of violence. The literary ‘vision’ concluding this chapter refers to the Mexican Revolution, where chaos, ignorance and horror intermingle in what history, afterwards, will designate as a revolution.

After proposing a definition of what we should understand for terrorism, Chapter 7 analyses random killing and martyrdom, attempting to capture the causes and the logic of this extreme form of political violence. The chapter notes the limits of explanations of terrorism as a result of social exclusion. It discusses the findings of psychological studies and of research centred on ideological aspects. Recruitment in terror networks is another area of interest, and it is linked here with international aggression and illegitimate invasions. Young immigrants, it will be contended, may be motivated by marginalization and forged by the existential vacuum, but can also be led to violent action by the resentment and humiliation suffered by people to whom they feel close. The emergence of the Caliphate has caused heated debate among experts of sacred texts, a debate that this chapter critically summarizes while proposing a parallel reading of the growth of radical Islam and the growing radicalization of democracy causing it. An analysis of suicide completes this chapter, noting the precedents found in history for self-inflicted death, analysing its rationale, including the refusal of the power over life and death retained by the sovereign.

The other extreme form of destruction, war, is addressed in Chapter 8, where the notion of chaotic murder is delineated, based on the intuition and prescience of two classical novelists, Stendhal and Tolstoy. The chapter distances itself from classical contributions that align variables such as time, space and scale to the practice of warfare. Sun Tzu’s (1963) treatise, for instance, weighs these variables in order to establish whether and when the circumstances are favourable to victorious battle. Von Clausewitz (1968), in turn, argues that excitable heads will never win wars (Lewis Gaddis, 2018). This chapter, instead, conveys a notion of war far removed from the prescriptions of grand strategy: wars may well be won by excitable heads such as Stendhal’s antiheroes or by confused combatants who ignore what they are doing and why. Deception is key, as is delusion, both causing an ocean of barbarity. Tolstoy, too, depicts belligerents as devoid of strategy and sensible reasoning, showing little respect for the elite, let alone warmongering elites. In his view, history is not the creation of great conquerors, but the outcome of acts performed by masses of individuals engaged in a common effort and aided by chains of circumstances. The chapter weaves in the novels presented the arguments put forward by the contemporary criminology of war.

Wars have always victimized some individuals more than others, as they confirm, celebrate and exacerbate social and gender divisions. War and sexual violence, the subject of Chapter 9, are examined as specific forms of crime against women, as bellicose productions of masculinities. Rape associated with war is found in the Old Testament, in the injunctions of Moses, as well as in the history of ancient Rome. Among the examples provided in this chapter, are the rapes perpetrated during World War II in Germany by the ‘glorious’ anti-Nazi allies, those committed by US soldiers in Vietnam and the genocidal rapes that spread during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Some space in this chapter is devoted to the gender-selective genocide perpetrated in Rwanda, where, however, women too played a role in the planning of the mass killing. The chapter, therefore, moves on to analyse female warriors, their self-perception and their attempt, through violent missions, to achieve an improbable autonomy. Men are raped too, as shown in examples reported from Libya. In general, sexual violence in war is said to resemble a form of patriotism, a heroic conduct that binds men together while strengthening their national or group identity.

In Chapter 10 the relationship between religion and violence is discussed, while a tentative answer is provided to the dilemma whether belief in a divinity necessarily spawns incendiary human feelings. The chapter sets off with the sacrifice of Iphigenia, the mythological self-destruction compensated by the divinities with victory and prosperity. Every tradition, as will be clarified, is inspired by a notion of numinous terror, although explanations of the use of violence cannot be narrowly theological. Religious violence, however, acts out as performance, and is promotional. It dramatizes grievances, but can also be inspired by what appears to be a viable strategy for change. The debate about our ‘secul...