Violence & Security: Paradigms and Debates | University of Amsterdam 2021
Violence & Security: Literature notes
Summary made for open book exam on the 27 th of May 2021
- Best way to use when referencing: CTRL+F searches in the texts themselves, since most of the
terminology/language is similar.
- Some texts seemed to technical or detailed for it to matter for the exam (mainly some of the
later lectures, which is why these summaries are somewhat shortened and occasionally the
words ‘read through’ may be added.
Literature of lecture 1: Introducing Political Violence and Trends in Political Violence
1. Amoore, Louise and Marieke de Goede (2014) 'What Counts as Violence?' in Jenny Edkins and
Maja Zehfuss (eds) Global Politics, second edition, 496-518.
Pg. 1- 9: Describing the cases of drone warfare and financial regulation against terrorism financing
- Showcase two important points for the study of violence:
1. Shows the difficulty to distinguish between war and non-war, combatant and non-
combatant
2. Shows that it is not always easy to recognize to violence
a. Rules, negotiations and political relations may have violent effects
How different authors understand the question of violence:
(1) Carl von Clausewitz: “On War” (1832)
- War is ‘the mere continuation of politics by other means’
o Political instrument involving the military engagement of strategic aims
o The form of war needs to be tailored to the specific political aims
- Critiqued for offering a rationalization of violence
o Mainly focused on inter-state conflict & thus less applicable to geographically
dispersed and instar-state conflicts (21 st century)
(2) Charles Tilly: “The Politics of Collective Violence” (2003)
- Seeks to understand the nature of collective violence: three common characteristics
1. They inflict physical damage on persons/objects
2. They involve at least two perpetrators
3. They result at least to some extent from coordination among persons who perform
damaging acts
Typology of interpersonal violence (extent of coordination among perpetrators/salience of
damage)
- Suggests there is a specific logic of violence that is clearly recognizable
(3) Paul Richards: objects to the notion that violence is a distinct and different form of social
interaction that can be clearly demarcated from other kinds
- Argues that war/peace, violence/non-violence are intertwined and not clearly recognizable
as distinct social states
(4) Campbell: violence is not defined only through physical force of injury, but through the
power that renders othering possible and that creates the conditions of possibility for war or
torture
(5) Hannah Arendt:
- Power is a completely different phenomenon than force and violence
- Violence is not the continuation of politics but the opposite of politics
o Violence occurs when political regimes lose their legitimacy and credibility
o Violence as an expression of powerlessness, rather than power
- Two key aspects:
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,Violence & Security: Paradigms and Debates | University of Amsterdam 2021
o Only a weak power needs to use violence to enforce its will
o Such a turn to violence can ultimately do nothing other than destroy the very regime
that uses it, because it exposes that the power behind the violence has crumbled
Concerning the issue of visible and overt violence:
1) Michel Foucault: Politics is the continuation of war by other means
- The appearance of the institutions, codes and rules of peace and security do not mean that
war has been averted draws attention to the everyday forms of violence that become the
preconditions for bombing and killing
2) Judith Butler: concerned with the forms of violence that are intrinsic to the way human
subjects are dehumanized, such that multiple other violences can be acted upon them with
impunity
3) Nigel Thrift extends that act of violence beyond the identification of a clear agent,
perpetrator and victim, to consider violence as a set of relations that multiply, change and
transform
4) Slavoj Zizek: distinction between subjective and objective violence
- Subjective violence: the violent perturbation of the normal state of things (terrorist attacks,
loss of life)
- Objective violence: the less visible systemic violence inherent to the normal state of things
(Representing a population as risky or dangerous is violent in itself)
2. Arendt, Hannah (1970) 'On Violence,' in Crisis of the Republic, Section II (pp. 134-155)
Consensus among political theorists that ‘the ultimate kind of power is violence’
- Based on the idea that ‘the essence of power is the effectiveness of command, and that
there is no greater power than that which grows out of the barrel of a gun’
Arendt disagrees: Power and violence are opposites
- Power is dependent on the people’s support (consent) and is always in need of numbers
Violence can manage without numbers (up to a certain point) because it relies on
implements
- They are opposites, because where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent
o When power rules (strong states), violence is absent
o When violence rules, power is absent (weak states)
- Where commands are no longer obeyed, the means of violence are of no use Everything
depends on the power behind the violence
o No government has existed exclusively based on violence
o Power is inherent to the very existence of political communities and needs
legitimacy (people’s support) rather than justification
- This implies that it’s incorrect to think of the opposite of nonviolence as nonviolence
‘Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it’
- The extreme form of power is All against One, and the extreme form of violence is One
against All
Arendt’s definitions of power, strength, force, authority & violence (pg. 143-145)
- Power: ‘The human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property
of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group
keeps together.’
- Strength: ‘It is the property inherent in an object or person and belongs to its character,
which may prove itself in relation to other things or persons, but is essentially independent
of them.’
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,Violence & Security: Paradigms and Debates | University of Amsterdam 2021
- Force: ‘is used in daily speech as a synonym of violence, but should be reversed for the
“forces of nature” or the “force of circumstances”, to indicate the energy released by
physical or social movements.’
- Authority: ‘can be vested in persons or it can be vested in offices. Its hallmark is
unquestioning recognition by those who are asked to obey; neither coercion nor persuasion
is needed.’
- Violence: ‘is distinguished by its instrumental character. Phenomenologically, it is close to
strength’
3. Krause, Keith (2016) 'From Armed Conflict to Political Violence: Mapping & Explaining Conflict
Trends,' Daedalus 145 (4): 113-126.
Main claim by author (in abstract): ‘Adopting a broad understanding of political violence is
essential to gain insight into war and violence in the 21 st century’
- Most of the war and violence in this century is so called ‘nonwar violence’
a three-dimensional understanding of political violence
4 reasons to move ‘beyond war’ to study political violence:
a. A narrow empirical focus on war obscures the scope and scale of intentional harm
associated with “nonwar” forms of violence
b. It understates the human costs and consequences of war-related violence
i. Different thresholds of amount of death present different pictures (e.g., conflict
with 25 or more battle deaths in comparison to a threshold of 1000 or more
battle deaths)
ii. Undercounting of direct victim as a result of methodological choices and data
limitations
iii. Lack of attention to the large-scale indirect consequences
c. It limits the scope of debate on moral and legal responsibility to forms of violence
covered by just war principles and international humanitarian law, while obscuring the
equivalent responsibility governments should face for other forms of violence and harm
committed in their name
i. Just war principles were developed to deal with state parties in a formally
declared war, and do not take the contemporary violence into account
d. It hinders understanding of the way different forms of violence may be linked through
processes that escalate and exacerbate conflicts, and that may have broader impacts on
state formation, state disintegration and regional order
i. Traditionally the focus was on the consequences of large-scale
interstate/internal conflict between formally organized actors & lower-level
violent interactions were regarded to be separate
ii. 4 ways violent may be linked:
1. microlevel violence can feed upward into large-scale conflict
2. different forms of violence may be linked over time
3. violent actors pursuing political and private goals interact and support
each other
4. Seemingly disconnected forms of violence can be linked in complex ways
(sexual violence and ungendered violence)
Definition of political violence: “violence (1) used for explicitly stated political ends, or (2) that
undermines and challenges the state’s legal monopoly over the legitimate use of force, or (3) that
implicates the state and its repressive apparatus”
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, Violence & Security: Paradigms and Debates | University of Amsterdam 2021
4 facts about contemporary violence:
1) Most lethal violence does not occur in conflict zones
2) The majority of states most affected by lethal violence are not at war
3) The levels of lethal violence in some nonconflict settings are higher than in war zones
4) Much of this violence is organized, nonrandom and in some sense political
a. Unknown how much exactly
Most scholars assume that political violence can be identified & categorized by focusing on the
degree and scale of organization of the violent actors, the meaning and motivation/purpose of the
acts, or the nature of the act itself
- Dominant focus on the physical nature of the act of violence causing death or injury
(minimalist conception)
- Attempts to move beyond this understanding of violence have included:
o Psychological violence
o Sexual & gender-based violence
o Violence by deprivation, neglect or omission
o Systemic, structural or symbolic violence
according to the author probably not desirable to take all these different potentials on
board
Krause argues that at least two kinds of violence should be taken into account:
I. Violence that has been ‘made legal’: the most widespread forms of legal violence being the
use of force by authorized agents of the state, especially when this goes beyond what would
be considered the legitimate use of force by such agents (extrajudicial killings, torture & rape
by agents)
o Two consequences:
When perpetrated in nonconflict contexts, it undermines respect for state
security institutions, creating a vacuum in which other violent actors can
operate with relative impunity and even some rough legitimacy
It is often wrapped up in pre-conflict dynamics, as the weakening legitimacy
or efficiency of state institutions facilitates the resort to violence by diverse
actors to resolve conflict or express discontent and opposition
II. ‘Violence as violation’ (Bufacchi): forms of violence that implicate the state, but which do not
involve brute physical force to wreak harm
a. Includes the entire apparatus of repression and the range of ‘personal integrity
rights concerned with individual survival and security (freedom from torture,
imprisonment & mass killing)’
Literature of lecture 2: Paradigms in Historical Context
4. Demmers, Jolle (2012) "Rational Choice Theory: the Costs and Benefits of War" in Theories of
Violent Conflict, 107-123.
From start 21st century: trend to explain violent conflicts in terms of greed and calculation, with
strong emphasis on material profitability
- Stemming from neo-classical economic theories
Rational choice theories of conflict:
- Starting proposition: individual will conduct civil war if the perceived benefits outweigh the
costs of rebellion
o War will be sustained as long as it is profitable
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