It seems obvious that violence is intimately related to, but can also be sharply distinguished from, politics. The immanence of violence in politics is apparent from states’ monopolisations (or attempted monopolisations) of armed force, police authority, legal punishment and social coercion, as well as from the ever present option of violence for revolutionary purposes. The distinction between violence and politics is apparent in the difference between waging armed conflict and articulating political values, persuading others of those values, or forming, legislating and implementing policies in social movement, party, parliamentary or bureaucratic contexts. If we probe this commonsense view, however, we find that the story is more complicated than it appears.

Within political theory, there is a variety of ways in which violence and politics are identified with, and distinguished from, each other. Each of these ways has different implications for the meanings of violence and politics as well as for the justificatory discourses that surround those concepts. This book analyses and evaluates how political theorists produce, negotiate and settle the conceptual relationship between violence and politics. It argues that such settlements are inherently unstable and full of tensions, and that we should abandon the political theorists’ quest for a determinate definition, explanation or legitimation of political violence. Instead, a genuinely political theory of violence needs to start from the politics inherent in practices and conditions of violence.

The concept of violence and the concept of politics are vague and contested (Bufacchi, 2005; Finlay, 2006, 2017; Žižek, 2008). As we will see ‘violence’, ‘politics’ and their counterparts have diverse reference and scope across the languages in which the authors we study think and write. Our aim, though, is to follow the concepts through the arguments in which they are embedded. We analyse how diverse distinctions between what is political and what is violent are produced – showing that justification is always much more difficult than production. Both concepts, violence and politics, are theory-laden. In the case of politics there are those for whom politics refers to a more or less venal or vicious mode of competing for, gaining, and holding on to the power to govern – a power centred on factions, persuasion, and securing control of governing forces and institutions. Alternatively, there are those for whom politics refers to the particular capacity that can be generated when people act in concert to set up or to challenge governing officers and institutions. In our view, the concept of politics incorporates both of the above – and more. It is not confined to competition for state rule. Changes in society or in culture, when pursued or argued about publicly, are political. So, too, are ideological positions that challenge or affirm power privilege, whether carried out by state or private actors.

In the case of violence, the phenomenon of physically injurious and unevadable force, visited by an agent on a recipient, is always challenged, to various degrees, as a sufficient account of violence (Finlay, 2017). Thinkers emphasise that the relation of violence is not always one in which an agent inflicts physical harm directly, by punching or shooting a victim. Indirect violence occurs when the true agent of violence is not the one who delivers the blow, but the one who intentionally manipulated the attacker or created the conditions in which the attack took place. In addition, however, thinkers argue that individual intentionality or agency is not a necessary condition for violence. For example, poverty injures people physically, it weakens them and shortens their lives, but the operation of a structure of provision and deprivation does not require any single or identifiable agent. This has led to the creation of the concept of structural violence (Galtung, 1975b). Moreover, physical attack and injury are not the only significant form of violence in human societies: psychological terror and emotional domination achieve the ends that violence achieves but without the physical expenditure (Morgan and Bjorket, 2006). Managing symbols and meanings in order to discount the voices and standpoints of some has injurious effects on the discounted, for example in sexism and racism. This has led to the construction of categories of symbolic violence and epistemic violence, which damage people through processes of denigration and exclusion that do not involve, though they may often provoke or be reinforced by, physical force (Bourdieu, 1982/1991, 1988/2001; Spivak, 1988).

We will examine thinkers who approach the topic of political violence using an ideal type, such as Clausewitz’s notion of ‘absolute war’ (Chapter 2), and those for whom violence is entirely identifiable with the intentional infliction of physical injury (Locke in Chapter 1, Arendt in Chapter 3). We will also examine thinkers who insist that violence is properly identified with economic and political structures that oppress and cause harm and injury to others, as well as enabling the direct violence of privileged groups (Marx and Engels in Chapter 1, Fanon in Chapter 6). And we will examine thinkers for whom the violence of symbolic and epistemic discourses and frameworks of meaning is as important as direct physical violence or structural violence (Derrida in Chapter 4). Our interest, though, is not in holding theorists to account in relation to any pre-established set of criteria as to what counts as either violence or politics, but rather in understanding and evaluating the analytical and normative implications of different constructions of the relation and of the distinction between the two relata, and in drawing out our own political theory of violence on this basis.

In our critical engagement with the theories, we find that they tend to evade any focus on the conditions under which violence is made possible or normative, and any focus on the standards and embodiments that are necessary if violence is to be practised. Our own view is that the idea of direct physical violence anchors conceptual and theoretical reasoning about violence, including our own, but not because this is the only violence that is ‘real’. For us, violence is a type of relation. Direct physical violence is a particularly powerful illustration of violence as a relation, but the relation of violence is not confined to the context of physical violence (see Chapter 8). We also insist that violence of any kind – direct or indirect, physical, psychological, structural, symbolic or epistemic – cannot be understood independently of, first, the conditions that permit or prescribe it and, second, the modes in which it is practised. This means that distinctions between different forms of violence blur, conceptually and empirically.

For many political thinkers, the crucial question is whether, and when, it can be justified to use violent means to wrest governing power from established rulers, classes or institutions; these thinkers are discussed in Chapters 1, 5 and 6. For others, the point is rather to justify the use of violence for the purpose of maintaining governing power (Chapter 2). Whichever viewpoint they adopt, theorists struggle with a variety of justificatory strategies. Consequentialist justifications, in which violence is treated as a tool (means) to bring about specific political objectives (ends), are a common starting point, but the profound uncertainty surrounding outcomes of violence sees theorists reaching for other ways of legitimating the use of violence in politics. For example, theorists invoke a language of necessity in which violence in politics is simply a given (Weber in Chapter 2, Fanon in Chapter 6). Some theorists have recourse to justification in terms of intention. What matters is whether the intended violent act accords with principles of justice or with the demands of historical progress (Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir in Chapter 1). For others, rights – for example the right to self-defence, or the agent’s prerogative to act in favour of justice in defence of the innocent or the needy, or to prevent crime – permit violence, or even make it a duty (Locke in Chapter 1, Elshtain in Chapter 7). Still others, rather than focusing on ends or intentions, draw the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ violence by reference to the manner in which violence is conducted. What matters, then, is the virtuous character (or vicious, of course) with which perpetrators and instigators of violence carry out their actions (Sorel in Chapter 1, Machiavelli in Chapter 2).

The concept of political violence is not equivalent to the category of war, and thinkers disagree about whether war is an instance of political violence or a phenomenon entirely distinct from what counts as political (see the contrast between Locke on the one hand and Marx and Engels on the other in Chapter 1). Nevertheless, arguments that invoke moral concepts such as justice, rights, duty or virtue to justify political violence often overlap with, or directly draw on, just war thinking. Just war thinking is specifically concerned with the circumstances under which going to war (usually referred to by the shorthand ad bellum) and conducting war (usually referred to by the shorthand in bello) can be just. One version of just war thinking emerged out of Christian thinking on war and peace, and was particularly concerned with questions of intention. For thinkers such as Augustine, war was justified to the extent that it protected the innocent and punished the guilty. Later, more secularised versions of just war thinking took for granted the right of sovereign states to go to war and put greater emphasis on governing the conduct of war (Bellamy, 2006). Contemporary just war theorists address questions of ad bellum and in bello justice, but are divided over the appropriate moral foundation of just war principles. Some continue to draw on the older Augustinian and Christian tradition (Elshtain, 2004; Lang et al., 2013); others (most influentially Walzer, 1977) on a mix of consequentialist, virtue- and right-based reasoning; and still others on a more consistently individualist neo-Kantian account of rights and duties (McMahan, 2009; Fabre, 2012). Although just war theory is not the primary focus of attention in this book, it has become increasingly important in contemporary arguments about the justification of political violence (see Chapter 7 and Finlay, 2015).

Our analysis shows that attempts in political theory to define the boundaries between politics and violence, or to justify political violence, run into all kinds of difficulty. Perhaps for this reason, we find that the production of different accounts of the relation and distinction between politics and violence is often heavily dependent on various kinds of analogical and metaphorical reasoning and on the affective work of aesthetic categories. We see the latter, for example, in Merleau-Ponty’s and Weber’s invocation of tragedy in their discussions of revolutionary and military violence respectively (Chapters 1 and 2). The metaphor of honest courage, as opposed to cowardice, is particularly significant for Machiavelli (Chapter 2), Sorel (Chapter 1) and the anarchist thinkers Bakunin, Kropotkin and Goldman (Chapter 5). This metaphor is gendered, cowardice being connected explicitly to effeminacy. Gandhi and Fanon both develop at length the ideal of warriorship that can use the right kind of violence (or non-violence) for the right kind of purposes (Chapter 6). For both of them, women can be warriors too, but in ways explicitly distinct from those of men.

It seems that the framing of violence in political theory necessarily involves slippage between violence and something else. Philosophers present violence, analogically or metaphorically, as punishment, as self-defence, as revenge, as revolt, as justice, as sovereignty, as domination. Particularly prominent in discourses and philosophical theories of violence are the tropes of war and gender. On the one hand, there is the tendency to all political violence – the use of state power for purposes of establishing social order, whether through policing of disorder or through exploitation of political resources to, for instance, put political opponents in detention; demonstrations, direct actions or violent protest; or conflictual encounters between political rivals – to be articulated as ‘war’. On the other hand, ‘war’ already reduces violence to something else: to discipline, to defence, to strategy – or, in the case of just war thinking, to the requirements of justice or legality. Most notably, discourses of war confirm the identification of violence with the familiar, value-laden categories of masculinity and femininity. The latter are very significant in our reading of these texts and in our own understanding of how justificatory conceptual relationships between violence and politics work. We argue that not only do slippages between accounts of political violence and discourses of war and gender do a great deal of legitimating work, they are also key to political theorists’ failure to engage fully with conditions and practices of violence.

It is noticeable that political thinkers do not engage with the question of what needs to be in place for violence to be possible. It is as though, despite all the labour of conceptualisation, framing, theorisation and justification they have expended, thinkers ultimately take violence for granted, as a human proclivity. Yet their arguments also disclose the extent to which violence is not a natural tendency that reveals an aspect of human capacities, even of male humans’ capacities. It is certainly not simply a tool to be picked up and put down at will. The question of gender, in particular, but also the questions of militarism and state domination of societies, actually emphasise the degree to which, for violence to be possible, a whole raft of other practices, commitments and distinctions have to be established. We argue, therefore, that an adequate political theory of violence needs to be grounded, analytically and normatively, in an understanding of the politics inherent in the conditions and practices of violence rather than rooted in an account of its definition, causes and purposes.

Our method in this book is that of critical readings of texts from the history of political thought. This is not a historical narrative; nor is it a contextual analysis that focuses on history. Instead, we treat these ideas about violence and politics as a theoretical body of work. Within this body of work, although thinkers are not discussing exactly the same thing for the same purposes, in the same context, or necessarily in the same language, there are many direct and indirect connections between their concerns and arguments. Our deliberately selective reading means that we will not always do justice to the broader political theory, of which the considerations of politics and violence in focus here form only one dimension. Neither is our coverage of thinkers comprehensive. Our selection is based on two main principles: first, thinkers were selected to exemplify certain positions on the question of violence and politics in the history of political thought; second, all our theorists continue to provide resources for thinking about the relation between violence and politics in the contemporary world. In this respect, our approach is similar to that of other recent works that have addressed questions about the place of violence in politics (e.g. Bernstein, 2013; Balibar, 2015). We have focused mainly on thinkers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the exception only of Machiavelli, Hobbes and Locke, who continue to be key interlocutors in contemporary political theory. Some of the thinkers are explicitly in interpretive conversation with each other. We read the texts, sympathetically to be sure, looking to understand why violence is treated as it is in relation to political power, and how both are constructed as concepts, as phenomena for understanding. We recognise and note issues of context and translation and some of the disputes over interpretation in the texts we consider. However, we also interpret the theoretical arguments from the point of view of our own concerns and of our engagement with the puzzle of whether and how politics and violence are related.

The argument of the book proceeds as follows. In the first two chapters we consider a range of thinkers who address questions of revolutionary and statist violence respectively. The thinkers discussed in these chapters come from different temporal and geographical contexts and have diverse and specific concerns, but there are many overlaps and connections between the ways they produce the always unstable distinction and relation between violence and politics. In Chapters 3 and 4 we trace how political theorists address the relation of politics and violence at a more philosophical and reflexive level, and how this shifts our understanding of the conceptual scope of both categories, as well as the possibilities of justifying violence. Chapters 5 and 6 explore the highly reflexive, but also politically engaged work of anarchist and anticolonial thinkers, for whom the difficulty of resolving conundrums about the place of violence in politics is particularly pressing in actual practice, but who find themselves returning to tropes of war and gender to articulate their positions. In Chapter 7 we examine arguments from another strand of political theory embedded in an activist movement: feminism. In many ways, feminism echoes anarchist and anticolonial debates about politics and violence. For feminists, however, it is much more difficult to use discourses of gender and war to reinforce either pro- or anti-violence positions, and this renders the conundrum of politics and violence even less amenable to theoretical and practical resolution than it is for other political thinkers and in other political traditions. In Chapter 8 we draw out the implications of all the previous discussion, taking our prompt from the puzzling context of feminists defining, explaining, condemning or justifying violence in politics. We argue that the analytical and normative failures embedded in the feminist discussion require us to approach the political theory of violence differently. We use Scarry’s discussion of torture and war to reorient political thinking to a focus on conditions and practices of violence. On this basis, we argue for a political theory of violence that puts the politics of violence at the core of its analytical and normative claims. As we shall see, this points us towards an analytically capacious conceptualisation of political violence and to a normative default position in which political violence is inherently unjustifiable.