Laura Downham
Thursday, 24 October 2019
States are the only actors that can
commit acts of violence
legitimately.
It is crucial to address before the subsequent essay that this author has a bias against
legitimising states. Foundational to the formation of states is violently enforced lateral
hierarchies of top-down power (Parise, 2013). These hierarchies form self-enforcing methods
of oppression, directly (e.g. the threat of police violence upon failure to follow the law
(Jacobs and O’Brien (1998)) or indirectly (e.g. alienation of workers through capitalistic
wage-theft (Marx, 1844). Due to this assumption, this essay will lean heavily in favour of the
populist exercise of legitimacy over the more liberal notion of the self-enforcing social
contract(Hobbes (1651), Locke (1764). The author holds that states actors have at their
discretion near-unlimited economic resources due to their ability to aggregate debt
(Rotherham, 2013; Smith, 1775, book II) and the faculty to exercise violence with impunity
as a result of these economic resources (Green and Ward, 2004 and Weber 1921/74: 54 in
Hay, Lister and Marsh 2014)). Contrastingly, the lack of these resources gives moral
dispensation to “the people” to act in the determination of their interests (Parise, 2013).
Only mass movements of collective resistance may legitimately commit acts of violence to
state action. The defence/pursuit of a group’s social interest upon the perception of injustice/
oppression against that group is collective resistance(). As, in liberal democracies, the
majority has the voice of most electoral weight (Berlin, 1969 in Held, 1992), mass
movements are the most effective means of making discontentment felt by political elites.
Also known as direct democracy, as the groups which feel disenfranchised by institutional
representation bypass this official position to make their interest more directly heard, if
through symbolic means (Shirky 2011, Pg. 28-32 ). These actions are given legitimacy
through sheer numbers and weight of presence made by the mass of resisters, for example,
the (time of writing) ongoing Chilean protests against growing national inequality (Barlette,
2019 and Kaltwasser, 2019). If a movement appears to have the majority support of the
population of a state, its grievances can be taken more seriously and thus have greater
legitimacy, than otherwise. However, as movements move digital, the physical presence of
activists can be less accurate to the actual support a movement has (e.g. Arab spring
movement(Carvin, 2013)). Either way, as a physical threat to the ruling body of the state or as
a momentous movement whose continued grievance and mobilisation is going to be
inconvenient for the stabilisation of society (Locke, 1764, pg. 302). This assumption applies
best to a democratic model of legitimacy by Haywood (“transformation of power into
authority” through the aggregation of consent hence the “moral criteria” of legitimacy).
Additionally, Weber’s rational authority theory (Weber, 1919) maps onto this assumption, as
the consent of the governed within these models is critical to a state maintaining legitimacy:
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“the power of a president, prime minister or government official is determined …by formal,
constitutional rules which constrain or limit what the officeholder can”. In the case of
Weber’s demand for a constitution, to guarantee restrictions on governmental power, such
documents often assure the freedoms of people to “peaceful assembly and association”; as
well as “freedom of opinion and expression,” both stated in 18th and 19th articles of the UN
Declaration on Human Rights (Roosevelt, 1948). Collective resistance in the 20th century has
come in two varieties: violent and non-violent. Generally, (for the sake of maintaining the
impression of moral purity by the resistors and the optics of injustice of the persecutors’
actions) non-violent resistance is preferred and more effective in garnering institutional
support (Flintoff, 2013). However, violent resistance is often more effective in terms of
sending a political message, illuminating injustice and receiving attention from the political
establishment (The Red Pheonix, 2009).
For example, the Soweto Uprising, organised by the Action Committee of the Soweto
Students Representative Council (SSRC), the planned march on the Orland stadium met with
tear-gas and live-ammunition shot into the crowd of unarmed students by the white
police( Christie, 1991 and Cross, 1992). Clearly shown as unjust state violence against
children and teenagers, leaving nearly 200 dead, the black community reciprocated.
Solidarity marches, arson and the destruction of government property filled the subsequent
days, as the movement spread to Thembisa and Kagiso (The Soweto Uprising, no date).
Recruitment spurred forward by the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist
Congress (PAC) by the violence(Christie 1991). By the involvement of state enforcers, the
protest became legitimate, in terms of its ability to animate support, as the meeting of
violence to initial non-violence demonstrated the gratuitous subduing of black voices and the
need for black solidarity and uprising (Saunders and Southey 1998). Due to the
transcendence of hostility and aggression toward their oppressors, it was able to sustain
public imagination and command support even from white South Africans. Therefore mass
movements, such as the example given above, are the only actors who may legitimately use
violence in an assertion of their interest within society(Noam Chomsky debates with Hannah
Arendt, Susan Sontag, et al, 1967), as by definition, these violent acts are in the assertion of
the interests of a significant amount; if not the majority of those under state jurisdiction.
Some may argue, however, that a state’s use of violence as an assertion of the consent of the
governed is a legitimate use of violence( Nagel, 1987 Pg. 215-50 and Noam Chomsky
debates with Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, et al., 1967), along the same liberal paradigm.
The assertion comes through expressing ideals of state and people. For example, this was the
case of the removal of First Nation people from their land, promoting the enterprise and selfdetermination of the white settlers in North America as described by Dunbar-Ortriz (2014).
“Manifest destiny” rhetoric garnered near unilateral support by white American settlers. Here,
the genocidal violence was an expression by the United States government, of its
commitment to (white) American values: exceptionalism and expansionist policy.
Explemplared is the use of state militarism to defer to the representation of those whom
politicians most identify with, regardless of others. Admittedly, the colonial state has some
legitimacy issues exempt from its use of violence alone(Dewulf, 2011 and Gathii, 2000).
However, it offers a useful point of analysis for where we cannot necessarily purely derive
the passive consent of the majority to justify state violence against a marginalised indigenous
group. As G. Rockhill commented “there is no contradiction or supposed loss of democracy
because the United States simply never was one,” eluding the lack of legal voting equality in
the nation until the introduction of 19th amendment and 1964 Voting Rights Act-although the
democratic participation disparity arguably continues, with the implementation of the
electoral college and gerrymandering practice (Johnson,2018). For the majority of its history,
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Alexis de Tocqueville’s “tyranny of the majority” was inapplicable to the US, as the majority
of its citizens could not vote and provide their consent to a discriminatory policy. Therefore,
these colonial states have insufficient consent, inferred by a mandate, to use violence as an
assertion of said imaginary consent.
On the other hand, insurgencies may garner legitimacy, using violence as a body in its
arsenal to refute consent to be ruled by a government that it observes as illegitimate (Locke,
1764 Pg. 228-231, Green and ward, 2004 Pg. 46, Cockroft 1998)— for example, the black
panthers of Oakland, California. The use of community patrols, as well as open endorsement
and utilisation of their 2nd amendment rights, showed an unabashed confrontation of
racialised hypocrisy in American society-then and now (The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the
Revolution, 2015). The threat of violence and confrontations with the police (symbols of the
“tough on crime” era’s “law and order”(13th, 2018)) were a convincing refutation of the
“submissive negro [sic]” stereotype from civil-war propaganda (Sociology Group, 2018).
They were vital in encapsulating the anger of the era in a way that Dr King’s passivism may
not have. As said by Malcom X (1964), “You will get your freedom by letting our enemy
know you will do anything to get your freedom” (Zinn, 1980, Pg. 831-859). This zeitgeist
representation held greater legitimacy and relevance to the transition of the civil rights
movement from overturning Jim Crow to Black Power. The objective of the Black Panthers
was to refute the legitimacy of the white supremacist US government by constructing a dual
power structure and legitimised their use of and threats of violence through the preservation
and defence of their communities.
Political violence is a neutral tool like any other; the content of this essay demonstrates that
state actors too frequently use violence to sustain power at the expense of the welfare of their
own historically colonised, brutalised peoples. This essay maintains the following as
legitimate uses of violence, knowing that intention and outcome are not synonymous:
1) Actors with the intent to sustain or achieve their self-determination (i.e. first nation
Americans)
2) Actors with the intent of expanding declared universal human rights to themselves and
others (i.e. both this and the prior point is evident in the efforts of native Africans during the
Apartheid period)
3) Actors with the intent to make evident their displeasure with their current governance and
the removal of their consent to be governed (i.e. the black panthers)
This essay concluded that the only legitimate forms of violence are those which expand the
participation of individuals and groups in society and often the violence enacted by states
have been counterintuitive to this goal or downright exclusionary to the very people most in
need of the protection of so-called “law and order.”
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