Henry Jones is Associate Professor in International Law, Durham Law School. In this blog, he considers different forms and justifications for violence, ultimately supporting non-violence. He participated in workshop 3 in 2024.

What is violence? Is it ever justified? Is it inevitable? Who does violence to whom? The question of violence is a major theme of 20^th century political theory. Rosa Luxemborg described violent struggle as the place where the proletariat become human beings.[1]   In the 21^st century, the place of violence is much more ambiguous. Partly because the violence of the state has become so much more total and all pervasive and partly because the balance of arms is so unequal. This blog considers different forms and justifications for violence, ultimately agreeing with proposals for a radical non-violence.

On violence

For Engels, we live in violence, we are already born into the violence of capitalism, forced to sell ourselves.[2] The violent expropriation of the means of production or of self-preservation has already happened before we are born. We have no choice but to be in a violent world. The process of accumulation has already started before us, and it is ongoing. The need for continuous growth always demands the expropriation of new resources, the forceable creation of new markets and new commodities.

Lenin would take this further in his analysis of imperialism as the necessary culmination of capitalism.[3] As a country becomes capitalist and the domestic markets become unified into one, the state looks overseas for more to accumulate. David Harvey develops the idea into accumulation by dispossession.[4] Dispossession is again violent, the taking away of something which previously belonged to everyone: the need to colonise, to bring more resources and more people in to this market. Imperialism transcends the specific colonies to make the world one market, global trade. States no longer compete against each other; capital transcends the state and the struggle is revealed as only the struggle of the global proletariat to be free.

Out of the violence of decolonisation came perhaps the best-known theorist of violence: Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist and philosopher of the Algerian war for independence in his book The Wretched of the Earth.[5] Fanon argues that violence is a cleansing force, through which the subjugated person frees themselves and gains self-respect.

Most recently, Andreas Malm asks how to blow up a pipeline?[6] He asks whether the history of non-violent climate activism has run its course, and if the scale of the crisis does not require something more. In refusing to succumb to fatalism he asks if what we need is new tactics. Remember the school strikes of 2019? Stopped in their tracks by Covid. All those young people and all that energy going nowhere. The Paris Agreement’s much heralded 1.5°? 2024’s average temperature was 1.5° higher than pre-industrial temperatures. For Malm we need something different, now. Something like the direct targeting of climate destroying infrastructure. How else to respond to the crisis?

On non-violence

There is of course just as strong a history of non-violence. Judith Butler in her book The Force of non-violence seeks to argue for non-violence as a necessary tool in political action today.[7] Her first task is how do we transcend the technical means/ends question and consider violence itself. Can we get beyond non-violence as an individual ethical stance and think of it as a social, communal way of being? If we want to live in a non-violent world then we must adopt non-violence, once you have become violent you can’t go back.

Non-violence isn’t passive, we don’t do nothing, we actively and committedly need to do everything non-violent we can. Butler does not simply support non-violence as a tactic, she sets it out as the only way to live an activist life.

Nonviolence is a claim to life, that life matters, the value of life, and a refusal to enter the violent struggle and to do violence to oneself. Violence against the other is violence against the self in that it assaults the social world, the act of living together.

In this sense it connects to a politics of abolition, of refusing the necessity of violence and the violence of the state. The law may still call you violent. It may be the ultimate violence to overcome.

On law and violence

In his lecture on the force of law Derrida seeks to draw a distinction between law and justice.[8] Law is force, it is enforced, it is made to be felt. Law, he says, wears justice like make up, barely concealing the violence of law. To engage with law is to engage with its force. Do we want to engage with law? Do we want the violence of the law to be brought to bare on our opponents?

This is where Foucault might come in and ask if we welcome the force of law. To see our enemies crushed by the same machine which has crushed our friends, is that not what we desire? Do we justify different forms of violence, individual or structural, depending on who is being violent to whom? In Society Must be Defended Foucault suggests that ‘in order to live, the other must die’.[9] In the climate catastrophe, in order to have my renewable energy and my batteries, an awful lot of others must do, or at least suffer intolerably. It is here that Butler asks us which lives are grieveable? A commitment to non-violence is a commitment to equality of grief, a commitment to the value of all life. If we are going to reject violence we need a politics of abolition of violence.

Towards abolition?

I wonder if the politics that lead us out of this are those of abolition. Abolition of slavery, of prisons, of the carceral state, but also abolition of the conditions which require this violence. Can we model a way of living non-violently, as Butler says, of refusing violence? This requires us to oppose forcefully, with will, the violence of the world around us. As part of this, we must forcefully reject the state’s monopoly on labelling violence.

The actions of climate protesters are already remade as violent by the State. This summer in the UK we saw the sentencing of Just Stop Oil protestors. Two women who threw a tin of soup at the glass covering Van Gough’s Sunflowers were each given 2 year prison sentences, with the judge commenting in sentencing: ‘I reject any suggestion that your offending can properly be described as peaceful or non-violent. Throwing the contents of a tin of soup in somebody’s face would not be a peaceful act, and there is nothing peaceful about throwing the contents of tins of soup at a painting in an art gallery, with members of the public, including children, present.’   

So what is abolition today? Ruth Wilson Gilmore:

Abolition has to be green. It has to take seriously the problem of environmental harm, environmental racism, and environmental degradation. To be green it has to be red. It has to figure out a way to generalize the resources needed for well-being for the most vulnerable people, which will then extend to all people, and to be green and red it has to be international.[10]

Our human rights will only work if we remember them as social rights, community rights, and refuse the individuation of the neo-liberal rights project.

To finish I come back to Derrida. The lecture Force of Law was delivered at an academic conference of critical lawyers. He opens with some thoughts on what academic lawyers and academics in general can do in the world. He gives the academics in the room a task, particularly if they are lawyers. The task is to contribute to ‘the maximum intensification of a transformation already in progress’. That sounds like a great place to apply the force of non-violence.

[1] Luxembourg, The Mass Strike (1906)

[2] Engels, Anti-Dühring (1877)

[3] Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917)

[4] Harvey, (2004) "The 'new' imperialism: accumulation by dispossession" Socialist Register 40: 63–87.

[5] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

[6] Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021)

[7] Butler, The Force of Non-violence (2020)

[8] Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The Mystical Foundations of Authority’ (1989).

[9] Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (1976)

[10] Ruth Wilson Gilmore Abolition Geography (2022)