Politics without Violence?

Towards a Post-Weberian Enlightenment

Jenny Pearce

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030260811
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030260828
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores the potential for imagining a politics without violence and evidence that this need not be a utopian project. The book demonstrates that in theory and in practice, we now have the intellectual and scientific knowledge to make this possible. In addition, new sensibilities towards violence have generated social action on violence, turning this knowledge into practical impact. Scientifically, the first step is to recognize that only through interdisciplinary conversations can we fully realize this knowledge. Conversations between natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities, impossible in the twentieth century, are today possible and essential for understanding the phenomenon of violence, its multiple expressions and the factors that reproduce it. We can distinguish aggression from violence, the biological from the social body. In an echo of the rational Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, this book calls for an emotional Enlightenment in the twenty first and a post Weberian understanding of politics and the State.

© The Author(s) 2020

J. PearcePolitics without Violence?Rethinking Political Violencehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26082-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Imagining Politics without Violence

Jenny Pearce¹

(1)

Latin America and Caribbean Centre, London School of Economics, London, UK

Jenny Pearce

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The Selectivity of Violence and the Pervasiveness of Violences

In the course of writing this book, emblematic acts of individual, collective and state violence were a constant ‘backdrop’, reminding me to press on when the task seemed overwhelming. Many of these acts shook the world at the time and then disappeared from it. I kept a minimal record in scattered notes. There is no particular order to the violences I noted down 2015–2019, mostly from the press or NGO reports, and field diaries from field research in Latin America. Nor do they capture by any means the multiple violences that took place during the four years writing this book. They are ‘selected’ ‘violences’ that appeared at the time to exemplify the complexity of ‘violence’. However, selecting the violences that ‘matter’ and ignoring its multiple expressions emerged as a challenge to understanding violence as a phenomenon. The introduction to this book reminds us of some of the violences over this four years, in order to emotionally engage the reader in the phenomenon. It is not easy reading. The reason for its inclusion is that in order to connect the subject matter of this book to the reader, the book encourages us to ‘face up to’ (Balibar 2015: 24) the violences that remain part of our politics and which we often prefer not to register in order to continue life.

We will not begin to imagine a politics without violence unless we choose to face up to the violences that don’t necessarily touch our own bodies, as well as those which do. This is the pathway to ‘seeing’ violence as a phenomenon with its own distinctions. Rather than an alternative to violence, politics remains imbued by our failure to address it. This, in turn, means that politics not only often fails to deal with violence, but it also fails to deal with conflict effectively and productively. Conflicts in turn, endanger the political arena, rather than signal the problems to deal with before they escalate and possibly turn into violence. The dynamics vary greatly across space and time. Some forms of violence are managed better than others, while continuing to influence public participation and political life, even when they originate in the intimate sphere. Others more directly repress and exclude. And others mutate into collective violence and warfare.

The Violence ‘Backdrop’

In Syria, early on in the book drafting in 2015, there was the burning alive of the Jordanian pilot by ISIS, in the name of its avowedly state building political project. In the Mediterranean and the Aegean, over 8,000 Afghans, Syrians, Eritreans and others from Africa in particular, fleeing war and poverty, drowned between September 2015 and September 2017, and many more since. These were avoidable deaths, the outcome of exploitation by human traffickers of human misery and dreams. Many migrants had been previously tortured and sexually abused on arriving in Libya as a transit point for the Mediterranean journey. The reactions in Europe (fences, walls, camps) first alerted the author to the rapid erosion of some basic humanitarian principles that Stephen Pinker (2011) rightly highlighted as evidence of our enhanced sensibilities to violence. Such sensibilities ebb and flow, it became apparent. As climate change differentially impacts on the globe, will violence be the way the privileged protect themselves from the human struggle for survival that climate change will mean?

In 2017, news began to emerge of how mafias had infiltrated the refugee and migrant camps in Southern Italy, for purposes of human trafficking and sexual violence. The Calais border became a site of wasted lives, as young men in particular, desperately sought to cross the English Channel. There is no accurate account of their deaths, but one website has tried to record some of them. Between 16 October and 30 September 2016, there was the death of a 16 year old from Afghanistan, run over by a train in the Eurotunnel, his body ‘torn to shreds over 400 meters’. On 28 September, Omar, an Iraqi man was found crushed to death by falling pallets in the back of a lorry. And on 30 September, Berihu, a 23 year old young man from Eritrea was also run over by a train in the tunnel. These are ‘accidental’ deaths, it could be argued, rather than violence. However, young men continued to die in numbers, such as on 30 January 2018, Aderio from Oromia, on the E40 near Jabbeke in Belgium. He had been chased into the road by the police and hit by a car. A report in 2017 found evidence of a ‘disproportionate, indeed unjustified, use of force’ against migrants and humanitarian organizations in Calais (The Guardian 2017b, October 29). In April 2017, a 17 year old Kurdish Iranian asylum seeker was attacked by 30 people at a bus stop in Croydon and left for dead with a fractured spine, fractured eye socket and a bleed on his brain. On 8 June 2019, a 17 year old German exchange student, originally from Lebanon, was attacked by a group of teenagers in Canterbury, leaving him with severe head injuries, requiring emergency surgery (The Guardian 2019a, June 9).

Were the 71 deaths and more than 70 injuries, in the fire in Grenfell Tower London in June 2017, accidental? Or did the fact that its mostly poor and immigrant residents had warned repeatedly about fears for their building and been ignored, make this ‘violence;’? This book does not think there are easy answers to such questions. It will argue, that our failure to be moved to humanitarian action tells us a lot about the meanings that are invested in some violent deaths over others. Some lives matter more than others. The body of three year old Syrian refugee, Alan Kurdi, washed up on a beach in Turkey in September 2015 did move the world. The emotion constructing meaning of his death was probably his ‘innocence’ as a small child, who no-one could blame in any way for anything that might have precipitated his death. However, children and adults continued to die in the sea in the following years.

In Paris, in November 2015, 130 were left dead and hundreds wounded when gunmen and suicide bombers attacked a concert hall. This was clearly violence and the lives mattered. In Egypt, in the years following the military takeover of 2013, thousands were imprisoned and the government was reported to be ‘addicted to torture’; Human Rights Watch called it an ‘assembly line of abuse’ (HRW 2017). In the United States, in the wake of a police shooting of 18 year old African American, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014, the Guardian started a project ‘The Counted’ to build an accurate data base of police killings, which even the FBI did not have at the time. It discovered that nearly 2,000 people were killed by the police 2015–2016, with black and native Americans killed disproportionately compared with other Americans. In June 2016 a lone gunman with a legally acquired automatic weapon killed 50 people in a gay bar in Orlando Florida. In the UK, the killing of Jo Cox on 16 June 2016 brought violence into the heart of British politics. It was reported that MPs faced unprecedented levels of abuse online in the six months following her murder (The Guardian 2017a, March 25). The June 2017 election was marked by racist abuse, anti-semitic comments and death threats to UK politicians. 2017 saw a rise in violent crime in England and Wales, a 27% rise in gun crime and a 26% rise in knife crime, a 19% rise in sexual offences and a 36% rise in stalking and harassment, and double digit increases in domestic violence and public order offences (Office for National Statistics 2017). A senior Kenyan election official was murdered and tortured just prior to the July 2017 elections in that country.

In May 2017, a Muslim convert drove into pedestrians across Westminster Bridge. Khalid Masood had a history of violence in the home; his former wife had fled him in terror after three months of marriage. Commentators debated whether this was extremist terrorism or a lone wolf, pathological killer. In May 2017, 22 people were killed and hundreds were injured, attending a concert in Manchester Arena in a suicide bomb attack. The bomber, Salman Abedi, was born in 1994 to refugees from the Libyan war. Abedi was known as a ‘fun guy’ at school, who loved Manchester United. He was also a victim of bullying and struggled to control his aggression. His family in Manchester continued to have ties with Libyan militia. His father was reportedly a security officer under Gaddafi, but fled Libya as a dissident. In South Manchester, Abedi came in touch with criminal gangs. On 1 October 2017, 64 year old Stephen Paddock of Mesquite, Nevada, fired more than 1,100 rounds from his hotel suite into the crowd of 22,000 attending the Route 91 Harvest music festival on the Las Vegas Strip. He killed 58 people, using bump fire stock to allow his semi-automatic rifles to fire at a rate similar to that of a fully automatic weapon. Paddock was a retired auditor and real estate businessman as well as gambler and heavy drinker. His father had been a bankrobber, on the run from police between 1969 and 1977.

War violences throughout these years gained in shocking extremism. The seven year old war in Syria, had by 2018 cost half a million lives, with chlorine gas still being used against civilians and hospitals under bombardment. In March 2017, a Save the Children report warned that Syrian children were suffering staggering levels of trauma or ‘toxic stress’ (Save the Children 2017). On 16 May 2019, Save the Children marked its 100th anniversary with a report that was released the day heavy airstrikes in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a, killed at least four children and injured many others. Globally, 420 million children, 1 in 5 in the world, are living near conflict zones, they calculated (Save the Children 2019).

In 2017, Amnesty International reported that 13,000 Syrian opponents of Bashar al-Assad had been secretly hanged in Syrian jails:

There are two detention centres at Saydnaya Military Prison, which may hold between 10,000 and 20,000 people. In the “red building”, the majority of detainees are civilians who have been arrested since the beginning of the crisis in 2011. In the “white building”, the majority of detainees are officers and soldiers in the Syrian military who have also been arrested since 2011. Thousands of people detained in the red building have been killed in secret extrajudicial executions, after being held in conditions amounting to enforced disappearance. The killings have taken the form of mass hangings. Before they are hanged, the victims are condemned to death in “trials” at the Military Field Court located in the al-Qaboun neighbourhood of Damascus, which last between one and three minutes. On the day the prison authorities carry out the hangings, which they refer to as “the party”, they collect the victims from their cells in the afternoon. The listed detainees are told that they will be transferred to a civilian prison. Instead, they are brought to a cell in the basement of the red building, where they are severely beaten over the course of two or three hours. In the middle of the night, they are blindfolded and transferred in delivery trucks or minibuses to the white building. There, they are taken into a room in the basement and hanged. This takes place once or twice a week, and on each occasion between 20 and 50 people are hanged to death. Throughout this process, the victims remain blindfolded. They are only told that they have been sentenced to death minutes before the executions are carried out; they are never told when their execution will be carried out; and they do not know how they will die until the nooses are placed around their necks. (Amnesty International 2017a: 6)

In the Yemen, Saudi Arabia had launched a military intervention in March 2015, in which an estimated 10,000 civilians had died by the end of 2017. Amongst those targeted were fishermen, providing a vital lifeline of food. Some 152 had been killed. Two thirds of the population became unable to afford food and dependent on humanitarian assistance. In January 2018, an ‘ambulance bomb’ killed 103 and injured 235 people in Kabul. In Libya, reports emerged at the end of 2017 of the systematic use of male rape in the civil war there:

Imed travelled to Libya with this reporter this year to gather testimony. In southern Tripoli he met a colleague, Mouna, who has documented dozens of cases. In one case, a former soldier loyal to Muammar Gaddafi said he was raped repeatedly. “With a broom handle fixed to a wall?” Imed asked. Mouna nodded. “They were all raped like this.” Further evidence emerged from a group of associates based in a small building near Tripoli. They handed Imed 650 files arranged in alphabetical order. Many contained rape allegations made by people from the Tawergha, a black African tribe accused of once supporting Gaddafi, and of raping their enemies during the revolution. They faced a terrible revenge . Their city, Tawergha, was razed and 35,000 inhabitants were scattered to several camps for internally displaced people in Benghazi and Tripoli. In one camp, south of Tripoli, a man called Ali recounted his experience. He was 39 but looked 65 and walked with a cane. “Some of us were locked in a room, naked, for a whole night with groups of migrants,” he said. “The guards did not release them until they had all raped each other. Fortunately, I didn’t go through that, I only got the stick and the wheel.” The “wheel” involved being put naked and folded double, through a tyre suspended from the ceiling, making it easier for torturers to penetrate him with weaponry. (The Guardian 2017c, November 3)

And non war violences were equally shocking. Although the Burmese military claimed they were responding to the emergence of an armed group amongst the Rohinga, Muslim population, the scale of their violence against that population was extraordinary. Reports of mass rape emerged,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Imagining Politics without Violence
• 2. Violence within Politics: The Classical View
• 3. Violence within Politics: Critical Alternatives
• 4. The Distinctiveness of Violence: The Sense of Embodiment
• 5. The Distinctiveness of Violence: From the Biological to the Social Body
• 6. The Distinctiveness of Violence: From the Social Body to the Body Politic
• 7. The Monopoly of Violence: The Military Organization of Social Power
• 8. The Monopoly of Violence: From Affect Control to Biopower
• 9. The Legitimacy of Violence
• 10. The Legality and Justice of Violence
• 11. Conclusion: Emotional Enlightenment and a Politics without Violence
• Back Matter