Elizabeth Frazer - Can Political Violence Ever Be Justified? (Political Theory Today)

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Elizabeth Frazer & Kimberly Hutchings, Can Political Violence Ever Be Justified?

Elizabeth Frazer

Kimberly Hutchings

polity

Copyright Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings 2019

The right of Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2019 by Polity Press

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Consider the following scenarios:

1. X has knowledge of terrorist networks that have been involved in violent attacks on civilian populations. The government approves the torture of X in order to gain information that will prevent such attacks.
2. X is a member of an oppressed majority population that has failed to gain its independence from colonial rule through non-violent methods. X takes up arms against the colonial power.
3. X knows that the current economic structure sustains massive exploitation, violence and oppression. X becomes committed to the overthrow of capitalism by all means necessary, including violence.

These decisions are simplified versions of actual events. All are also the subject of critical scrutiny by activists and scholars. Political violence is never a taken-for-granted political event; it always raises questions. Who has the right to authorize, or to use, violence? Against whom is it right to use it? What is the right way to use it? What limits should be placed on violence? All these questions are about what makes violence in politics justifiable. In this book, we address and respond to that issue in relation to different types and contexts of political violence, and draw on a range of cases and examples, including instances of these three scenarios: violence by states for the defence of populations and the maintenance of order; violence by non-state actors against colonial states, for liberation; and revolutionary violence by those seeking to transform the global political and economic order. We argue that the ways in which political violence has been justified now and in the past fail, and that political violence can never be justified.

In , we look more closely at our two key concepts: political violence and justification. We examine how political violence can be understood in narrower or broader terms, and what this implies for what counts as political violence, and therefore needs justification. We then analyse what justification means. We suggest that it means making an action right, prospectively. A level of confidence is needed, in advance, that the harms involved in political violence may be somehow compensated for or cancelled out by other considerations, such as good outcomes, laudable goals or some characteristic of the violence itself, perhaps the courage or unselfishness of the violent actor.

In we analyse justificatory arguments based on the idea that violence is one means to certain ends, using the examples of the campaigns of the Red Brigades in Italy and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Ireland in the 1970s, and of historic and contemporary anti-state, revolutionary violence. Consequentialists argue that certain ends (freedom, equality etc.) can justify the use of violent means. But pure consequentialist reasoning runs into difficulties; so some thinkers focus, in addition, on our rights, and what is permitted in defence of them; or on our duties, and whether violent action is either permissible or required in doing our duty. The thinkers we discuss tend to the view that whereas the violence of the state is to be taken for granted and needs no justification, the violence of people against established governments does need special justification. These thinkers also treat political violence in instrumental terms. Justifiable political violence is used to do something good.

examines arguments that start from scepticism about the calculative tenor of that reasoning, drawing on perspectives influenced by marxism and existentialism, in the contexts of the stalinist purges of the 1930s, the nazi occupation of France in World War II and the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s. From these perspectives, politics is not a realm in which means stand in stable relation to ends or in which violence is one option for political action amongst others. We examine analyses which emphasize the necessity, but also the unpredictable effects, of violence in politics, and go on to explore a range of alternative justifications of political violence, drawing on virtue and aesthetic categories.

about justifying political violence rest on a misconception about the nature of politics. This, she argues, is antithetical to means-and-ends reasoning and cannot possibly provide justifications for the use of violence as a political means. In the final section, we consider how thinking about violence itself as a set of practices, for example the practice of torture or the practice of war, further complicates the idea that violence is a straightforward political tool, and draws attention to the kinds of political relations and values that inhere in violent actions and their conditions of possibility.

In , drawing on material discussed in previous chapters, we return to arguments about particular instances of political violence state use of interrogational torture against suspected terrorists, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist violence and critique attempts to justify political violence. We argue that none of the justifications we have examined is persuasive, and moreover that these different justifications play a constitutive role in the practice of political violence. In our Conclusion we elaborate on our claim that political violence is never justified, and discuss its political implications.

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.