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Vlasta Jalušić

Understanding Violence (and Power)1

Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it. (Hannah Arendt)

Violence, like most concepts connected to the realm of politics, is still an essentially
contested and also unclear concept that has been depicted and explained in the most various
ways.2 At the experiential level, we all “know” what violence is, and, yet, one cannot
simply make a checklist to objectify and quantify it. Violence is often grasped as an ever
present feature of human power over others, as a continuum of the “biological essence” of
the human (expression of aggressiveness), or as a physical or historical creative process
that supports the evolution of species. As pointed out by John Keane (1996: 65), the
meaning and use of the concept has changed and still varies through time and with location.
The perception of what is violent or even cruel has started to include acts that, centuries
ago or less, were seen as entirely non-problematical: for example, in the domain of the
relationship of humans towards animals. The term was decisively extended beyond the
domains of military and criminal law to include other spaces of life and relations: for
example, with the development of the categories of domestic, gender-based or family
violence. Reflections on violence thus span from those taking into account solely physical
violence to those that also consider acts of non-physical assault on personhood and dignity
(Scheper-Hughess & Burgois, 2004: 1) and, finally, to the accounts which simply see it as
an act “inscribing meaning to the material”, “like acts of speech and writing” (Norton,
1988: 140). The types of violence usually listed may include private and public, subjective
and objective, individual and collective, direct, interpersonal and structural, unofficial and
official, visible and invisible, physical, psychic, economic, social, peacetime and wartime
violence, genocidal violence, gender-based violence, self–inflicted violence, violence

1
Published in: KURELIĆ, Zoran (ed.). Violence, art, and politics (Politička misao, Sv. 71). Zagreb:
Faculty of political science University of Zagreb/Fakultet političkih znanosti sveučilišta u Zagrebu. 2015,
15-30.
2
For a discussion on the “essential contestedness” of political concepts, see Swanton 1985 and Gallie
1955–56. Contests over concepts are political in their nature, they are a matter of political struggle
(Connolly 1983: 30).

1
which conflates victims and perpetrators, and discrimination, rights abuse, deprivation or
inequality, which are all understood as types of violence, etc.

There are two common and general tendencies to be found in the way violence is
considered in everyday thought and in social sciences and contemporary political
philosophy. One is to stretch the old connotation of violence, which originally meant
physical force against someone, to include not only a range of inequalities, discrimination
and states of deprivation but also “anything avoidable that impedes human self-realization”
(Galtung 1988, cited by Keane, 1996: 66).3 Yet such an expansion seems to plunge the
term into a non-differentiated whole where it loses its specific features. Also, every
instrumental activity becomes violent by definition, and it seems as if all natural
phenomena that involve force belong to the realm of violence, including death (even if non-
violent). Faced with such a stretching of the concept, analysts like Keane propose using the
“old-fashioned connotations traceable to the earliest … usages of the term (from the Latin
violentia) to describe the physical force…” (ibid.).
The other tendency which seems to be connected with the described stretching of
the concept of violence is to equate it with power, authority, and politics, or at least to
connect and unite it with them to such an extent that they become almost indistinguishable.
Thus, some kind of a “power-and-violence” conglomerate comes into existence. True,
violence and power have important commonalities – above all, they both figure in the range
of human capabilities and modes of action, and they extremely often loom large together –
yet they are neither one and the same nor derivatives from each other. There are numerous
consequences of conflating power and violence into some kind of “power-and-violence”
conglomerate.4 The most important of them is that one studies violence (and power) as part

3
Some theories, today especially those following the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques
Derrida, expand the notion of violence to include “any force or power that characterizes natural
phenomena, as well as forms of human interaction in which the self, the other, or all others are not treated
as free or as ends in themselves, but rather as objects subjected to an end outside themselves, to which they
have not consented” (De Vries & Weber, 1997: 16).
4
About this, see Arendt, On Violence 1970, 134ff. She lists a wide range of thinkers who make this
equation, from Marx to Wright Mills, from Weber to Sartre, from Trotsky to Sorel, and from Lenin to
Fanon. A similar attitude to the problem of violence (interpreting it as a power-violence couple) has also
appeared in some more recent considerations: we can find it, for example, in the texts of Étienne Balibar
(see chapter Violence, Ideality and Cruelty in Balibar 2002 and Balibar 2009), or Slavoj Žižek (2008). Both
of them make a similar equation whereby the whole structure of power is understood as violent –

2
of a unified un-discriminated and allegedly “double” or multifaceted phenomenon (power-
authority-domination-force-violence – all used as synonyms), with the most important task
being to categorize as many types or subspecies of the supposed genus of “violence-and-
power” as possible. Here, violence becomes a “degree” of power execution and loses any
distinction from power. One thus loses both the specific notion of power and the specific
notion of violence. This has consequences for our capability of thinking and conceptual
analysis, as well as for us as political actors – which I shall try to show in this chapter.
In fact, the modern state monopolized the means of violence and frightfully
accumulated them, so no wonder that this form of state power is seen as resting on the
means of violence. Moreover, it is perfectly understandable that, after centuries of violent
colonisation and imperialism, imperialist plunder, wars and genocides, after the Holocaust,
after the Rwandan and Bosnian tragedies, where mass killing was organized on a large
scale by the ruling state elites, many people tend to think of power, and particularly state
power, as an extremely violent phenomenon and structure, and try to explain collective,
mass violence in terms of (or consequence of) power abuse, violent authority, or violent
power, government, violent politics and the like. It makes sense, of course, to link violence
with power (and with particular government) if one takes a look at the regimes and trans-
national alliances which have brought about people’s immense misery and suffering (with
or without violent means), and especially so if one thinks of power exclusively in terms of
domination and oppression, in terms of exploitation and abuse, of holding or having
“power over” (thus, in terms of the “possession” of power).
In this chapter, however, I put such equations into question. 5 This said, I know I risk
being misunderstood. As Arendt maintained, violence and power seem to be so much
intertwined that their separation appears impossible. Nowadays, politics seems to be
experienced as violence to the extent that a conceptual differentiation between both seems
completely unrealistic and artificial. 6 On no account, do I want to deny that violence and

representing »objective« violence, which is similar to Galtung's structural or strategic violence. This is not
completely independent of the widespread theoretical convictions about the “nature” of power in post-
modern elaborations on violence. They were influenced to a large extent by the concept of “Gewalt” in
Walter Benjamin’s influential essay “The Critique of Violence” – “Die Kritik der Gewalt” (Benjamin
2007). See a short elaboration on Arendt and Benjamin below.
5
An exhaustive elaboration of this position, which this section of the text also draws upon, is presented in
Jalušič, 1996.
6
For this, see Duarte, 2005.

3
power repeatedly occur together, and that unchecked and independent power structures can
and do effect violations. Nor do I want to think of violence exclusively in terms of direct
physicality. I am simply hypothesising that the loss of the conceptual and phenomenal
difference between power and violence (and force, authority etc.) might lead to the loss of
important features of both and also to the loss of one of the most important windows of
explanation of collective, massive and other contemporary forms of violence. Such non-
differentiation might also result in a misrecognition of new forms of power and a
misreading of the main elements of collective violent events, such as the mass killings in
Rwanda and former Yugoslavia, for example. By blurring this difference, we might tend to
treat violence as an all-encompassing category, whereby the issue to be thought about is
only the “degree”, extent and type of violence brought into effect. Violence would thus be
understood as some kind of a “naturalized” phenomenon/or essence of human power or
human behaviour: as an “ever present” or universal human property that is simply
“expressed” through and with “power relations”, whatever this might mean, and manifests
itself in “irrational”, “sudden” and “unexpected” outbreaks from somewhere “deep down”. 7
If violence is held to be the source or constitutive element of power, its “ontological
ground” as it were, how are we going to find out in which ways the phenomena of power
and authority are related to (the alleged outbreaks) of violence, which is what is yet to be
explained? The phenomenon that is to be explained (violence) is already there as the “true”
basis, the explanans. If power is considered as violence and violence as power, we will not
be able to understand either, and can only fall into circular reasoning, or try to find a third
element outside this coupled dichotomy to resolve the “enigma”, such as Nietzschean
cruelty or Lacanian enjoyment on the side of those “in power”, or we can proclaim
violence as the “irrational” part (the other side of the Janus-faced phenomenon) of power.

7
This assumption underlies many analyses of mass violence and also some of the studies of the mentioned
cases. All theses about “ancient ethnic hatreds” as origins of collective violence are based on similar
arguments. Such a limitless notion of violence also seems to be a commonality of many feminist analyses.
Authors such as Nira Yuval-Davis, for example, state: “Fighting, whether physical, verbal, or by other
means, seems to be an almost universal social behavior. Freud claimed that aggression and sex are two
universal human instincts that are controlled and regulated in one way or another in all human societies.
Ritualized fights to preserve or change social hierarchies or to secure access to territorial or water resources
have been part of routinized social repertoires throughout human history, together with other means of
negotiating settlement for various conflicts.” (Yuval-Davis 2004: 172).

4
 Instead of doing this, I would like to attempt to de-construct and denaturalize the
dominant concept of violence (as automatically a part of power), which – so I claim –
hinders our understanding of contemporary conflicts and other violent phenomena. My way
of coming to terms with violence is that it is neither an expression of power nor its
“extreme” degree. Hannah Arendt, on whose differentiation of power and violence I
strongly build here, takes up the position that power and violence are not only not the same
or necessarily closely linked with each other, but that they are opposites. They are of
different origin, they represent different principles and modes of human activity.

Power and violence in Arendt

What is the essential thing that Arendt says about power and violence? An apparent
paradox is that power and violence, which she claims are opposites, are predominantly to
be found in combination – they do not exist “in watertight compartments” and in “their
pure and therefore extreme form” (Arendt 1970, 46).8 Even the governments that
fundamentally rely on force, command and obedience cannot endure without collective
action and support for their existence. Resistance movements, too, need mass power to
overthrow an oppressive regime, yet they might also use violence to achieve their goals
(Young 2002: 268). This, however, is not proof that violence and power are one and the
same.
Power (while not existing as an individual characteristic) springs up from people
acting together in public – it emerges when people act “in concert” (Arendt ibid., 44) in a
political way, as equals. It is based on plurality. Acting together does not need instruments,
it takes place among people, and thus effects power as a web of relations among equals.
Equality relations here do not mean sameness or “identity”. They are based on plurality and
the uniqueness of each single individual. Power understood in this sense is the foundation
of government, its legitimacy, and potential stability and endurance, and is thus not the
same as each and every particular government. This is why Arendt can say that power (if
there is power and not relations of domination and violence) “does not need justification, it

8
As the German word Gewalt means both power/powers and violence, this is even more difficult. See
below on the translation of W. Benjamin's text “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”.

5
needs legitimacy” (Arendt 2006, 52). And this is crucial. Revolutionary violence is not
inherent to revolutions or even their essence. On the contrary, revolutions as the re-
emergence of politics (this is how Arendt understands revolutions) take place in a non-
violent way, and violence happens only later, in the course of events, if there is no self-
limitation on the side of the actors. Violence comes to the fore if and when there exists a
tendency in revolutionary action to carry out the new political foundation as the
demonstration of unity which replaces, so to say, the perfection of divine power. Yet
human power can never be perfect and almighty as it does not spring from one being ruling
the world, but from humans who act in the world together, but are marked by plurality.
Violence is always an attempt to abolish plurality and the plural political condition, and
introduce the domination of the “one” and unity. It jumps in at times of revolutions when it
has to demonstrate oneness and absoluteness. Human laws, which are the result of human
action, can never be as absolute as god’s commandments. Only when the task of political
foundation is articulated as the demand for a new absolute which is supposed to replace the
perfection of divine power, does the foundation of political community require “divine”
violence as it were.
It is this aspect of the power-violence relation that touches on the realm which was
discussed in the work of Walter Benjamin. 9 Yet it seems that there could not be a greater
difference between his theses in the “Critique of Violence” and Arendt’s elaborations.
Benjamin’s text has informed most of today’s post-structuralist, de-constructivist and
Lacanian interpretations of violence that straightforwardly equate violence with power and
politics. Following Benjamin’s critique of violence, one can conclude that every
(foundational) action is always already violent and that it includes some kind of basic pre-
political violence. Benjamin plays with the ambiguity of the German word Gewalt, which
contains the morpheme walt, walten (to rule, to reign, to control), and thus connects the
concept of “power” and “rule” with violence in one word. While considering whether there
exists a criterion for judging the legitimacy of violence within violence itself, or whether
there exists legitimate violence, Benjamin introduces the difference between “lawmaking”
and “law-preserving” violence/power (Gewalt) (see Haverkamp, 1994: 162ff). He

9
Although they were good friends and Arendt appraised Benjamin’s work, she never discussed his
“Critique of Violence” in her own work. Yet we can read her entire On Violence as an implicit critique of
Benjamin’s text.

6
concludes that neither is legitimate. The only legitimate violence/power is the one that has
no goal outside itself, and is thus self-fulfilling and non-instrumental. It is this
violence/power that Banjamin calls “divine”, “the politics of pure means”. This analysis
makes it clear that, due to its ambiguity, the term Gewalt cannot unequivocally be
translated as violence because it can also be understood as “power”. The English translation
was violence. Although one can reasonably argue that Benjamin, while maintaining the
ambiguity of the term Gewalt, actually relativizes the role of violence, the most influential
interpretations of Benjamin equate power with violence (objective violence) and see
(subjective) counter-violence as the only possible revolt against today’s injustices of such
power/violence in the world (see Žižek 2008). In this constellation, politics and political
action actually lose their importance and are reduced either to lawmaking (political
foundation) or to law-preserving activity (law enforcement), while revolutionary violence
seems to be the only form of action that remains possible.
Instead, Arendt makes a distinction between Macht as power and Gewalt as
violence (see Arendt 1987). Arendt insists on politics as a source of power and on common
human action as the primary and crucial activity capable of breaking the processes of the
accumulation of social necessity and injustice. Although she does not a priori reject
violence as the last or the only remaining warning against grave injustices, or as a means of
paying attention to them, she would never claim that violence can be “legitimate”. Only
politics (also the core of revolutions which holds the basis of legitimate power and needs
no additional justification) can be “a purpose in itself”.
In contrast to power, violence “can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate”
(ibid., 52). It needs instruments to be performed, and it depends on the means–end
relationship. 10 Violence is an instrumental, means–goal modus of action; it is not irrational,
as it is usually assumed. It is “rational to the extent that it is effective in reaching the end
which must justify it” (ibid., 72). Violence is thus most effective in terms of instrumentality
(achieving a certain goal): the most typical case of its “pure” realization is given when the
time frame between reaching a goal and the use of violence is as short as possible – for

10
“Since violence—as distinct from power, force, or strength—always needs implements (as Engels
pointed out long ago), the revolution in technology, a revolution in tool-making, was especially marked in
warfare. The very substance of violent action is ruled by the question of means and ends, whose chief
characteristic, if applied to human affairs, has always been that the end is in danger of being overwhelmed
by the means, which it both justifies and needs”. (Arendt 1970, 4)

7
example, in one’s simple striking back against an assaulter (ibid., 52.). Yet violence is the
most unpredictable modus of human action, and one never knows how it will end –
whether its instrumental character will be confirmed or it will become an end in itself. This
unpredictable character brings it closer to action. Just like (political) action, violence, too,
may interrupt the seemingly irresistible social processes, the bureaucratic logic of
administration and control, or cycles of seemingly non-changeable necessity and urge. It
can thus “dramatize grievances” or bring urgent problems to public attention.11 This is why,
in situations where there is little chance for action or there exist no experiences with
politically “acting in concert”, violence might be equated with action “as such”. However,
contrary to the belief of many, violence can never create power, but can only destroy it.12 It
comes in wherever power does not exist anymore, when power is absent, shaken,
undermined. This, of course, does not mean that no forms of power are connected with
violence or that governments cannot use violent means exceedingly.
No legitimate government can rest on violence, says Arendt.13 This consideration is
decisive: if we cannot speak of the “legitimate violence of the state” but only about
legitimate power, not only can any arbitrarily chosen violent procedure of the state (the so-
called official violence, police or military, for example) be questioned, and must be
justified case by case, but the so-called “raison d'état” as an exceptional case (allegedly
protecting power itself) also comes under question. Moreover, the claim that
institutionalized power always needs legitimacy (support, agreement etc. of the people)
means that the effects of the state’s acts performed by state institutions or by their

11
“Violence does not promote causes, it promotes neither history nor revolution, but it can indeed serve to
dramatize grievances and to bring them to public attention.” (ibid., 79) Arendt strongly criticises the
contemporaneous leftist theories (actually the new left notions) of violence as a creative force which can
bring about power or counter power. She especially points to the link between the European leftist ideas about
violence-and-power and colonial writers (such as Sartre and Fanon) who often claim that violence is the only
way of establishing the subjectivity of colonial subjects. This critique is interesting in view of the recent
analyses of the Rwandan genocide, such as Mamdani (2001), who shows that Fanon’s predictions about anti-
colonial violence have been acted out in a twisted way.
12
“To sum up: politically speaking, it is insufficient to say that power and violence are not the same.
Power and violence are opposites; where one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where
power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance. This implies that it is not
correct to think of the opposite of violence as nonviolence; to speak of nonviolent power is actually
redundant. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.” (Arendt 1970, 56) This has
another consequence: the opposite of violence is NOT non-violence but power, or better, the constitutive
element of power is political action. (ibid.)
13
“Power does not need justification, it needs legitimacy, while violence can never be legitimate, and it
thus always needs justification.” (Arendt 2006, 52)

8
representatives, who are not necessarily immediately violent (or are even non-violent) but
can cause other consequences for one’s rights or justice, also always need justification.
In a similar manner as between violence and power, Arendt also differentiates
between violence and force, strength, coercion and authority: force is seen as a physical
phenomenon resisting inertia, while strength (as different from power) is an individual
ability residing in someone’s body – it is able to carry out or resist force. Violence is based
on the force and strength of bodies: they can be mobilized and used to exercise force and
their strength can be increased by instruments. She also differentiates between force
induced by violence and the force of necessity, or urgency, the compulsion of need or even
death itself, which, as a natural phenomenon, is not to be understood as “violence”. It is
important to underline that the origins of suffering, humiliation or disadvantage do not
necessarily lie in violence – they can be a result of non-violent, economically, culturally or
socially justified and induced rules or policies.
Violence is – like other categories that represent (inter)human phenomena – an
experience category, on the one hand, and a political and analytical category, on the other
hand. At the normative level, violence is nowadays an extremely problematic phenomenon
– and as such the subject of ethical-political debates. This is why this category is also
applicable strategically, and occurs in political struggles to raise ethical-political
considerations. It has become a widespread habit, in line with the equation of power and
violence, to automatically label necessity, the urgency of need caused by poverty or
deficiency, violence. This in fact shows the need to dramatize urgency, which does not stir
up enough attention in the face of massive violence taking place all over the globe. Such a
dramatization is sometimes also a strategic consideration of political actors who want to
show the extent and the possible disastrous consequences of deficiency, which might end in
numerous deaths, or to demand intervention. 14
These phenomena are mostly considered in terms of structural, indirect or
“objective” violence (carried out or effected by structures or institutions) as differentiated
from the so-called “subjective” violence (among persons or direct violence). These

14
This dramatization has to take place when violence in general is seen as the worst that can happen, as
evil itself, and when “everything” becomes violence, when all differences are generally subsumed under
the “one” of power-and-violence. In such a situation, various types or cases of violence have to be ranged
and compared so that the urgency of the situation is evoked and gains as dramatic a label as possible.

9
structures and institutions (which sometimes possess the means of violence and sometimes
not) are then usually seen as violent due to the effects of their actions which produce
inequality, poverty, exclusions etc. Such violence is referred to either as “official”,
“structural” (Galtung 1988) or “objective”, “subjectless” violence (Balibar 2002,
Gersteberger 1990).
On the other hand, the coercion of state institutions is also often equated with
violence. However, the issue of coercion is also linked to the question of how much
unquestioned authority is left to the state institutions and to the lawful order at all. Or, as I.
M. Young (2002) put it, “coercion is an inevitable and proper aspect of legal regulation”.
Coercion does not necessarily rely upon force or on a threat of violence in order to control
the respect for law, but is rather based on authority – which is not about violence but, just
the opposite, about obedience without force.
These differentiations do not mean, of course, that one should reduce violence only
to “direct”, “intersubjective” manifestations. We might think of the effects of structural
conditions as connected to violence, yet we do not have to straightforwardly or
automatically understand structures as such (or “strategic” manifestations of power,
meaning structures, institutions, discourses – to say it with Habermas and Foucault, for
they converge on this point) as violence. Even if structures or institutions ultimately do
effect violence, it might be tricky to automatically equate the coercion of state institutions
with violence.

Structural power

It seems that one should speak of structural “violence” only after a careful
examination of the related institutions and categories that “function” as violence or have
violent effects. The “functioning” of institutions and “structures” is always backed by and
related to the performance of human actors who are part of these institutions. They plan
and supervise them, form policies and make decisions, which they then carry out or
“implement”. And since violence is linked to the issue of victimization, one needs to
establish a dividing line between the victims and the perpetrators of violence while
rethinking the issue violence itself. This line of differentiation as well as the question of

10
responsibility is often blurred in the accounts of structural violence, as it seems that the
structure itself is accountable for “its” effects. The “structural” perpetrators often label
themselves as “victims” of the (bureaucratic) apparatus and the system, time and again
feeling no responsibility or guilt for their actions and consequently assuming no personal
accountability. Their position is simply that anyone in their place would have done the
same.
On no account does this mean that the issues of the so-called “structural” or
“objective violence” are to be left out of our considerations. They should just be
approached in a different way: we should first always try to determine the human actors
behind the structures and the “functioning” of apparatuses. Structures do not “function”
without human deeds, even though, in the most technologically advanced modern
bureaucratic form of government, they look “as if” they function automatically, as if
“power” is “produced” by itself, without human action and responsibility being involved.
The consequence of such an understanding of power relations is the syndrome of
“organized innocence” (Jalušič 2009), that is, when entire collectives no longer consider
themselves as a responsible “people” in the political sense of this word. The danger with
the theory of “objective” violence is first and foremost the possible loss of the human
dimension involved in the power structure and consequently the loss of responsibility. If
one sees violence-and-power in this way, then “it seems that one can determine neither its
origin nor anyone who can be held accountable for it” (Komel 2013, 7). I would rather call
this seemingly “automatic” functioning of anonymous mechanisms, which is often called
violence, “structural power”, and address them as systems of power that (re)produce
inequality, discrimination and all sorts of exclusions and deprivations of statuses. Their
procedures might not necessarily be violent, but the effects can be equally or even more
devastating. The new forms of domination do not necessarily use violence to preserve
themselves and to expand, but increasingly resort to “peaceful” concepts, like non-
violence, freedom, choice etc.
To repeat once more: power originating from “action in concert” represents an
original legitimacy and this power should not be mistaken for each and every particular
form of government. Violence and power become blended together especially in the forms
of state/government in which power appears and is understood as domination concentrated

11
on ruling, on the relationships of command, control and obedience. Such a form and notion
of “political” power exists in the historically established modern form of the state, which is
in possession of the majority of the means of violence, with an enormous potential to
exercise violence. It is this sovereign state power that gives us the experience of the power-
and-violence conglomerate, especially in cases where its use of force and violence is not
controlled, and the government does not have to justify it to its citizens (or it is not
justifiable at all). Here, the accumulated violent means are seen as “legitimate” instruments
to be used in case of emergency (Staatsraison, rule of exception). This form of power
makes one believe that power and violence are the same: this belief is not devoid of the
influence of a specific politico-philosophical interpretation of power, politics and violence
which emerged parallel to the establishment of the sovereign nation-state as its proper
“theory”. Conceiving power almost exclusively in terms of the apparatuses of domination
and the possession of instruments of violence and management has accelerated the
accumulation of specific “power” structures and facilitated its worldwide expansion,
bringing about the establishment of a novel, (global) bureaucratic form of governance,
which is so important for the imperialist endeavour. This aspect of the worldwide power-
and-violence phenomenon (what I call a novel, post-totalitarian form of government, see
Jalušič, 2009) is especially important for contextualizing power and violence in colonial
and postcolonial situations, which, as pointed out by Mahmood Mamdani (1996), represent
a specific and novel case of the state, by no means a repetition, a déjà-vu of past European
forms of power and government.

Violence and beyond

So far, I have tried to indicate and summarise some of the arguments supporting my
claim that in order to understand contemporary power structures, it is important to
differentiate between power and violence and to disentangle the power-and-violence
couple. Yet, there is one final point which I would like to underline. The main reason for
disentangling the power-and-violence couple, which goes beyond the differentiation
between power and violence, is to preserve and re-vision the understanding of the
specificity (Eigenschaft) of each mode of activity by itself. Conceptually gluing them

12
together takes away both any possibility of the justification of violence and any political
potential of power.
If we conflate power (and political action) with violence, not only does the
specificity of political action get lost, that is to say, becomes entirely instrumental, but the
possibility of the justification of violence as an instrumental activity also vanishes, as
violence becomes a-priori unjustifiable. It loses its instrumentality and its eventual
instrumental role in breaking the cycles of non-violent, but therefore perhaps no less
disastrous processes of domination accumulating in the globalised world – the role that
violence (besides politics) can have. Arendt calls these processes of domination the “rule of
Nobody”, which is the most tyrannical of all. This rule that makes it “impossible to localize
responsibility and to identify the enemy, (…) is among the most potent causes of the
current worldwide rebellious unrest, its chaotic nature, and its dangerous tendency to get
out of control and run amok” (Arendt 1970, 39). Such “interruptive” events should teach
us the lesson that our attention should be directed not only to violence itself but also to the
(sometimes purely bureaucratic-administrative) processes, and today’s “complex systems”
and actions lying in their background.
Unless we claim that violence has its own trans-historical and universal existence,
which is socio-biologically conditioned, we can hardly speak of violence as a “matter” or a
“thing” that exists somewhere out there and is capable of “adopting” all kinds of
imaginable forms (physical, legal, linguistic etc.). Acts of violence are always concrete,
circumstance-related processes and phenomena of violations. They are usually
discoursively supported and acted out in connection with certain discourses. In extreme
circumstances, however, when speech fails to function, violence itself represents a
discoursive act.15 Hence, any “universal” conception of violence appears as the ideal type,
and always selectively underlines some aspects and disregards others. In one way or
another, this is also the case with the present outline.
If I nevertheless tried to make the most general conceptualization of violence, I
would frame it as a concrete modus of human action which – contrary to (political) action
in concert in which people act amongst themselves in a political way as equals or in which

15
For example, the horrible acts of collective violence against individuals, members of certain groups,
where violence functioned as a sign, such as rape and other sexually violent acts in the recent cases of
Bosnia and Herzegovina and Rwanda.

13
acts of legitimate ruling take place – is an instrumental mode of handling and unwanted
interference whereby direct force is used against other humans and/or nonhuman animals. 16
Violations and unjustifiable violence can also take place via instruments of institutionalized
means of force (of the state or other official bodies which aspire to be considered
“legitimate”). Violence remains above all something that human beings do and are capable
of doing, and it usually “takes place” directly among humans (or between humans and
animals) or is launched against them by means of human devices or instruments. As
violence always “exists” (in) the event of violation itself, it is therefore something that
appears “in the eyes of the beholder” (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois: 2), in the eyes of
those who witness violence.
This is why bearing witness to violent events and the concept of witnessing are
so important for studying violence: witnessing gives an account of it, it tells the story of the
violent event which, when told from different perspectives, might facilitate the
understanding of the event/s. Violent acts and violations are always embedded in the
existing social relations and are culturally-symbolically framed and interpreted – as an
instrumental activity, violence always involves technē in its widest meaning. It is within
cultural and symbolic frames that violent acts can find both their justification, “meaning”,
and their possible concealment or disclosure. This is also why it is so important to research
local and global cultural, ethical and symbolic frames in which violence occurred, and their
background.
To conclude, without the differentiations discussed above, it is impossible to
grasp the specificity of violence in a globalised world where it is predominantly conflated
with power. Nor is it possible to understand the background and the origins of the alleged
“outbreaks” of uncontrollable violence, like the cases of collective violence in the recent
past – for example, the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia and Herzegovina, terrorist attacks
etc. Violence is not evil in itself, nor is non-violence good in itself. Arendt underlines that

16
I thus exclude what is today called “self-inflicted violence”. The issue of violence against animals,
however, can by no means be excluded, as it is important with regard to the Western humanistic concept of
the difference between the human (animal) and other animals, and with regard to the consequences of such
a differentiation for the subject of violence. Namely, the strategies of mass killings include policies of
dehumanization which lead to those who are excluded from humanity to be treated “like animals”, giving
them names of particular stigmatized animals in order to make killings more acceptable. On the other hand,
the perpetrators of mass violence are often seen as “beasts” or animal-like “monsters”, devoid of human
characteristics.

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the opposite of violence is not non-violence, but politics. If we do not differentiate between
power and violence, we might overlook this fact which is immensely important for the
post-totalitarian situation, and will either despise violence as extreme evil or glorify it as an
outstanding means for “action”, overlooking its anti-political feature of being capable not
of creating new power, but only of destroying it.

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