Visions Of Political Violence 0367261030, 9780367261030, 0367261014, 9780367261016

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Half Title......Page 2
Title Page......Page 4
Copyright Page......Page 5
Contents......Page 6
1 Introduction......Page 10
2 Systemic violence......Page 20
Poverty, disability and death......Page 21
Organized power and political community......Page 26
A central bank of symbolic capital......Page 29
The crimes of the economy......Page 31
Omissions......Page 35
Consensual violence?......Page 36
3 Institutional violence......Page 38
Foxes and lions......Page 39
Power and crime......Page 43
Police violence......Page 48
Disposable bodies......Page 51
‘Democratic’ missions......Page 52
4 Crowds and group violence......Page 56
Masses, stupidity and mediocrity......Page 57
Profound honesty and plebian culture......Page 59
Hostile outbursts......Page 60
Whose violence?......Page 61
Looting and shopping......Page 67
Benign and malignant aggression......Page 70
Social movements......Page 72
Multitude......Page 74
5 Conspiracy and the contemplation of crime......Page 77
Conflict......Page 78
Conspiracy......Page 80
Active and passive nihilism......Page 84
Suicide......Page 87
Betrayal and desistance......Page 88
The impossible communist......Page 91
Conclusion......Page 92
6 Armed struggle and civil war......Page 94
Affect and dramaturgy......Page 96
Controversial outcomes......Page 100
Avoiding civil war......Page 104
Violence within national territories......Page 106
Civil war and chaos......Page 109
7 Random killing and martyrdom......Page 113
Poverty or wealth?......Page 114
A significance quest......Page 116
Deculturation and faith......Page 118
The radicalization of democracy......Page 122
In the name of freedom......Page 125
Organizations and networks......Page 127
Voluntary negation of the body......Page 131
8 Chaotic murder......Page 135
Deception......Page 137
The criminology of war......Page 140
Spiritualized rationalism......Page 143
Criminalizing war......Page 146
9 Belligerence as sexual violence......Page 150
The production of masculinities......Page 151
Male fantasies and abject bodies......Page 155
Gender-selective genocide......Page 157
Subjugated subjects......Page 159
Female warriors......Page 161
A pornographic gaze......Page 163
Nation building......Page 165
10 Numinous terror......Page 168
Divine violence......Page 170
A secular age?......Page 174
Low and high time......Page 176
Imitators of Jesus......Page 177
The evolution of martyrdom......Page 179
Religion as a resource......Page 181
The religion of the faithless......Page 183
11 Violence and social change......Page 186
From the arms of critique to the critique of arms......Page 188
Social wars......Page 190
Lycurgus and Solon......Page 191
Class warfare......Page 195
Violence, accidents, chance......Page 197
Old and new dilemmas......Page 200
12 Conclusion......Page 203
Aesthetics and vengeance in reverse......Page 204
Reducing political violence......Page 206
Restoring equality......Page 210
Deliberative democracy and transgression......Page 212
References......Page 216
Index......Page 242

Citation preview

Visions of Political Violence

In this book, Vincenzo Ruggiero offers a typology of different forms of political violence. From systemic and institutional violence, to the behaviour of crowds, to armed conflict and terrorism, Ruggiero draws on a range of perspectives from criminology, social theory, political science, critical legal studies and literary criticism to consider how these forms of violence are linked in an interdependent field of forces. Ruggiero argues that systemic violence encourages more institutional violence, which in turn weakens the ability of citizens to set up political agendas for change. He advocates for a reduction of all types of violence, which can be enacted through fairer distribution of resources and the provision of political space for contention and negotiation. This book will be of interest to all those engaged in research on violence, terrorism, armed conflict and the crimes of the powerful. It makes an important contribution to criminological and social theory. Vincenzo Ruggiero is Professor of Sociology at Middlesex University. He has worked on penal systems, fiction and crime, illegal markets, social movements and the crimes of the powerful. He has conducted research for the ESRC, the European Commission and the United Nations. Among his recent sole-authored books are Penal Abolitionism (2010), The Crimes of the Economy (2013), Power and Crime (2015) and Dirty Money (2017). In 2016 he was granted the Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Society of Criminology, Division on Critical Criminology.

Visions of Political Violence

Vincenzo Ruggiero

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Vincenzo Ruggiero The right of Vincenzo Ruggiero to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ruggiero, Vincenzo, author. Title: Visions of political violence / Vincenzo Ruggiero. Description: 1 Edition. | New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. |  Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019011043| ISBN 9780367261016 (hardback) |  ISBN 9780367261030 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780429291463 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Violence—Political aspects. Classification: LCC HM1116 .R84 2019 | DDC 303.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019011043 ISBN: 978-0-367-26101-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-26103-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-29146-3 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

Contents

1 Introduction 1 2 Systemic violence 11 Poverty, disability and death 12 Organized power and political community 17 A central bank of symbolic capital 20 The crimes of the economy 22 Omissions 26 Consensual violence? 27

3 Institutional violence 29 Foxes and lions 30 Power and crime 34 Police violence 39 Disposable bodies 42 ‘Democratic’ missions 43

4 Crowds and group violence 47 Masses, stupidity and mediocrity 48 Profound honesty and plebian culture 50 Hostile outbursts 51 Whose violence? 52 Looting and shopping 58 Benign and malignant aggression 61

vi Contents

Social movements 63 Multitude 65

5 Conspiracy and the contemplation of crime 68 Conflict 69 Conspiracy 71 Active and passive nihilism 75 Suicide 78 Betrayal and desistance 79 The impossible communist 82 Conclusion 83

6 Armed struggle and civil war 85 Affect and dramaturgy 87 Controversial outcomes 91 Avoiding civil war 95 Violence within national territories 97 Civil war and chaos 100

7 Random killing and martyrdom 104 Poverty or wealth? 105 A significance quest 107 Deculturation and faith 109 The radicalization of democracy 113 In the name of freedom 116 Organizations and networks 118 Voluntary negation of the body 122

8 Chaotic murder 126 Deception 128 The criminology of war 131 Spiritualized rationalism 134 Criminalizing war 137

9 Belligerence as sexual violence 141 The production of masculinities 142 Male fantasies and abject bodies 146

Contents  vii

Gender-selective genocide 148 Subjugated subjects 150 Female warriors 152 A pornographic gaze 154 Nation building 156

10 Numinous terror 159 Divine violence 161 A secular age? 165 Low and high time 167 Imitators of Jesus 168 The evolution of martyrdom 170 Religion as a resource 172 The religion of the faithless 174

11 Violence and social change 177 From the arms of critique to the critique of arms 179 Social wars 181 Lycurgus and Solon 182 Class warfare 186 Violence, accidents, chance 188 Old and new dilemmas 191

12 Conclusion 194 Aesthetics and vengeance in reverse 195 Reducing political violence 197 Restoring equality 201 Deliberative democracy and transgression 203

References 207 Index 233

1 Introduction

Violence is at the centre of theoretical elaborations around the ­creation of identities, the establishment of the law and the shaping of authority. Subjects are formed through violence, and the norms through which this formation is carried out ‘are by definition ­violent’: we are given genders, positions and status against our will (Butler, 2009: 167). ­Analyses of the state also focus on violence, describing it as a law-making force that establishes new systems and designates new authorities. Direct organized force, in sum, is deemed central to the process of state-making (Tilly, 1985). This type of v­ iolence, however, can also amount to law-conserving violence, when it protects the stability of systems and reinforces authority (Derrida, 1992a; Benjamin, 1996). The analysis of violence, from this perspective, can explain how power is formed and distributed within society and how such distribution can be altered. This is also the aim of this book. Ethology applied to humans would posit that aggressive behaviour is manifested in personal quarrels, crime, war and all kinds of destructive acts that derive from innate instinct (Lorenz, 1966). This instinct is expressed when proper occasions arise. Behaviourists, by contrast, have little interest in individual forces programmed to

2 Introduction

lead conduct, but rather in the social conditioning that shapes behaviour. We may not have to choose between the two because both approaches fail to explain domestic violence, police violence, ethnic cleansing, torture and war. Nor can we think that a general theory allows us to distinguish between ‘bad’ violence, enacted by criminalized agents, and ‘good’ violence, commonly perpetrated by authorized state agents. The suggestion that there are not violent individuals but violent situations is inspired by the attempt to formulate one such general theory. Fear, anger and excitement are intertwined human emotions that play a key explanatory role in micro-situational theories of violence. Wars or episodes of police violence are emotional events that follow a similar pattern, ‘circumventing the tension and fear that rises up whenever people come into antagonistic confrontation’ (Collins, 2008: 8). Crowd violence is said to resemble military violence, as it may start with gesture and aggressive posture to then reach a breaking point when the situation saturates with collective emotions that translate into open field attacks. Violence, in brief, is supposed to be a structural property of situational fields, not a property of individuals or groups. Factors outside the situation, like background conditions, may be predisposing but, from this perspective, they are not sufficient. ‘Conditions such as being subjected to poverty, racial discrimination, family disorganization, abuse and stress are far from determining whether violence will happen or not’ (ibid.: 20). This micro-situational theory encounters some difficulty when collective violence in the form of popular resistance is examined. Those involved may be a small number of violent specialists who get their energy from the support awarded to them by peers and audiences, but that energy, surely, is far from being merely situational. It derives from a culture, a repertoire of action, a vision of the world, a historical memory and, in general terms, an optimistic appreciation of human agency. What leads to action is less the situational context than the ‘wonder’ humans experience when they turn a secular or religious creed into practice. Collective action mobilizes principles and, in so doing, discovers and formulates ideas; it depicts images and imagines futures. The wonder experienced resembles the awe Aristotle ascribes to those who observe

Introduction  3

the world and pose questions for the mere pleasure they find in knowledge. Marvel, in sum, is not only at the origin of philosophy, but also of political commitment. There is more than a sheer micro-situational dynamic at play in episodes of resistance. There is a practical challenge of the notion of metapolitics, namely the use of metaphysics in political science; there is defiance of the idea that, once power is entrusted to the sovereign, ordinary citizens have to abandon the political field altogether. Resistance may be disorderly, but it responds to stifling situations that make social order what is left once everything else has been prohibited (Esposito, 2018). From a macro-sociological and historical viewpoint, violence has been described as the great leveller, as the only tool that may reduce inequality (Scheidel, 2015). For instance, the two world wars caused enormous destruction of accumulated wealth, but at the same time reduced inequality. Postwar peace, on the contrary, restored the distance between the wealthy and the needy (Scott, 2017). Effective levelling, we are told, requires violent shocks that at least temporarily curtail and reverse the iniquities brought by economic development. Such shocks or Big Reasons share one common root, being all the effect of massive and violent disruptions of the established order, of transformative revolutions, state failure or pandemics. It is assumed that all of these have always dwarfed any known instances of equalization produced by entirely peaceful means. It is the violence implicit in such events that is said to cause the levelling. The type of violence that concerns us in this book cannot be assimilated to pandemics, unless the word refers to the spreading of ideas and hope rather than viruses. The violence addressed here is characterized by political objectives and communicative content. Ideally, politics should consist of a project of autonomy involving subjects capable of self-understanding, self-consciousness and mutual recognition. It should, and sometimes does, lead to the achievement of agreement through communication. However, it often takes violent forms and is performed by a variety of actors to defend or consolidate their social position or to improve it. Political violence is at times hidden and at times unsettlingly manifest. It is situational only in that it takes different forms and modalities according to the context in which it occurs.

4 Introduction

In Weber’s formulation, violent action is politically oriented when it is organized and aims at exerting influence on governments over the appropriation, expropriation, redistribution and allocation of resources and power (Weber, 1978). Clearly, this formulation refers to groups vigorously defending what they possess as well as groups strenuously pursuing what they do not possess. As such, it includes powerful and state actors. Among contemporary formulations, instead, political violence is often defined as violence ‘outside state control’ (O’Neil, 2017: 210). The explanations provided are institutional, ideational and individual. The first revolves around the constraints, the norms and the general living conditions imposed on certain groups who feel the necessity to react. The second posits that violent action is enacted when institutional constraints are rejected through political or religious beliefs. Finally, individual explanations seek the germs of political violence in the socio-­psychological make-up of perpetrators. States, therefore, may create the conditions for political violence, but seem to be excluded from the range of agents who practise it. This book, on the contrary, embraces a range of violent political actors. It offers a typology of the different forms political violence takes, linking them in a continuum and in an interdependent field of forces. The forms identified are systemic violence, institutional violence, group violence, armed struggle, terrorism and war. The word ‘visions’ in the title of this book alludes to the diversity of the perspectives adopted and the sources utilized. These are not confined to the criminological field, but also derive from disciplines such as social theory, political science, critical legal studies, literary criticism and fiction. The different fictional ‘visions’ are presented and interspersed throughout the chapters, but will also form specific chapters in their own right. Fiction may temporarily assuage our dissatisfaction with life, and as a miraculous interval it may give us a provisional suspension from reality, immersing us in literary illusion. It may even transform us into citizens of a timeless world: we become ‘other’. According to Nobel Prize winner Vargas Llosa (2001: 10), when we close the book, abandoning the splendid territory we have just visited, we are disappointed because ‘life in fiction is better, and literature helps us see the servitude in which

Introduction  5

we live’. In this sense, fiction is often seditious, non-subjugated, rebellious, a challenge against what exists. According to other noteworthy classifications, political violence includes domination, marginalization and degradation, defined by Balibar (2015) as ultra-objective and by Tilly (2003) as nonviolent violence. This type of violence entails the treatment of masses of people as human remnants, useless residues, not as a result of subjective choice made by violent actors, but as the consequence of the rules governing the distribution of power and resources. In Chapter 2, this will be termed systemic violence and linked with the social, economic and political arrangements that cause it. Systemic violence reproduces inequality, immobility, injustice and misery and, as will be explained, is implicit in the ordinary functioning of economic and political systems. It is not the outcome of individually or collectively planned cruelty, although its impact affects life and causes cruel death. Systemic violence is encapsulated in the notion that sovereignty resides in the power to decide who may live and who must die (Mbembe, 2003). Chapter 3 moves on to consider institutional violence, which incorporates distinctive subjective elements. In its extreme forms, this type of political violence preaches the elimination of groups of ­people who are regarded as dangerous or infective for a national, ethnic or religious community. Institutional violence can also be directed against internal enemies who contest unfair distribution of wealth. This is why economic analyses of this type of violence have been attempted, for example, focused on harsh competition for land, ­labour, capital and, in general, access to wellbeing (Gilpin, 2015). Among the concepts and variables utilized are scarcity, opportunity cost, comparative advantage and rational choice (­Anderton and Brauer, 2016). Rational and strategic behaviour is said to pervade mass atrocities and these, it is suggested, can be prevented through macroeconomic incentives. In this chapter, by contrast, institutional violence will cover examples of violations perpetrated by individuals and groups who, as representatives of the elite or of established institutions, infringe their own rules and reject their own philosophies. Rational choice will not feature prominently among the theories explaining this type of violence, as it will be assumed

6 Introduction

that decisions are affected by social and psychological influences rather than pure calculation of costs and benefits (Baddeley, 2017). Powerful offenders express a form of bounded rationality, which is practical, but also limited and selective, and at times conservative, when rather than seek novel sources of social power they choose to maintain established ones. They make mistakes, misjudge risk, face cognitive restrictions, access insufficient information, give in to emotions. They may be more concerned about loss than gain. The themes discussed in this chapter pertain to work, consensus, coercion and legitimacy, but also police violence and ‘democratic’ missions. The fictional vision of the Marquis de Sade will provide a concluding commentary to institutional violence, suggesting that sovereignty implies the capacity to violate prohibitions. In response to both systemic and institutional violence, p­ eople can give rise to ‘contentious gatherings’, which are public and collective, express grievance, make claims and attempt to produce change (Tilly, 2003). Collective responses take shape when specific social ensembles emerge. Think of the three types of such ensembles identified by Sartre (2004): series, groups and organizations. The first are inert gatherings in which each constituent is alone and interchangeable, like a queue at a bus stop, where everyone shares the reason for being there but is indifferent to everyone else. Sartre extends his definition of series to a number of collective activities – working on an assembly line or listening to the radio: ‘in all these cases, the object produces an undifferentiated unity or a unity based on separation’ (Badiou, 2010: 22). Series, in brief, are characterized by inertia and impotence. Groups react against inertia and impotence when they begin to find some common interest among their constituents: those waiting for the bus share the feeling that the wait is intolerable. The members of a group, in other words, share a condition and a purpose, and their fusion leads to action. Organizations, finally, are deeply politicized entities and are kept united by an oath that avoids dispersion of members. ‘It is the oath that allows everyone to commit themselves to remaining the same’ (ibid.: 25). Chapter 4 focuses on crowds, namely those forms of social ensemble fuelled by resentment which may turn violent. Often disorganized, the forms of political contention enacted by crowds (groups in Sartre’s terminology) can develop into strategic attempts

Introduction  7

to attack political enemies with a view to modifying the system and its rules. Processes of radicalization preside over this development, although their outcome is not always immediate violent action. This chapter travels through the analyses of masses as mediocre and stupid, crowds and their profound honesty, hostile outbursts, looting and benign aggression. It concludes with some reflections on social movements and their relationships with crowds and the multitude. Chapter 5 tells the story of a conspiracy that remains within the limits of fantasy. It suggests that radicalization does not necessarily lead to immediate violent action, but can be expressed through feelings of revenge and homicidal ideation. The novel presented here sees a revolutionary cell planning illegal political action. Conflict, nihilism, suicide and betrayal are among the topics stemming from the novel, which will be examined from a criminological perspective. The analysis will primarily address ‘cultural’ aspects of crime and refer to notions such as ‘thrill’ and ‘seduction of crime’. These notions, it will be argued, along with the concept of ‘desistence’, require some revision in the face of the imagined or actual criminality described in the novel. Sartre’s organizations come under scrutiny in Chapter 6, when homicidal ideation and murderous imagination turn into armed struggle and civil war. The oath, here, aims at avoiding the dispersion of members and, at the same time, at granting continuity to the annihilation of the enemy. This chapter finds a useful starting point in Schmitt’s work, particularly his observations on irregular fighters, their political commitment, mobility and tellurian character. It then looks at the links armed organizations try to establish with nonviolent contentious groups. Some emotional aspects of joining armed struggle are examined, while the main case study presented pertains to the African National Congress. Armed struggle may be successful or not, and under certain circumstances, can even turn into open civil war. The chapter traces the origin of this particular form of political violence, starting with the sharp distinction made in ancient Greece between violent conflict against external enemies and among or within cities. Ancient Rome also provides examples, which are deemed starting points in the study of contemporary civil wars. The horrors and chaos associated

8 Introduction

with this type of political violence are examined with reference to ­Thucydides’ work and Foucault’s notion of civil war as exercise of power. Master and local cleavages are found that often turn collective political violence into private conflict: confusion, enmity and revenge preside over a process that leads to the privatization of violence. The literary ‘vision’ concluding this chapter refers to the Mexican Revolution, where chaos, ignorance and horror intermingle in what history, afterwards, will designate as a revolution. After proposing a definition of what we should understand for terrorism, Chapter 7 analyses random killing and martyrdom, ­attempting to capture the causes and the logic of this extreme form of political violence. The chapter notes the limits of explanations of terrorism as a result of social exclusion. It discusses the findings of psychological studies and of research centred on ideological aspects. Recruitment in terror networks is another area of interest, and it is linked here with international aggression and illegitimate invasions. Young immigrants, it will be contended, may be motivated by marginalization and forged by the existential vacuum, but can also be led to violent action by the resentment and humiliation suffered by people to whom they feel close. The emergence of the Caliphate has caused heated debate among experts of sacred texts, a debate that this chapter critically summarizes while proposing a parallel reading of the growth of radical Islam and the growing radicalization of democracy causing it. An analysis of suicide completes this chapter, noting the precedents found in history for self-inflicted death, analysing its rationale, including the refusal of the power over life and death retained by the sovereign. The other extreme form of destruction, war, is addressed in Chapter 8, where the notion of chaotic murder is delineated, based on the intuition and prescience of two classical novelists, ­Stendhal and Tolstoy. The chapter distances itself from classical ­contributions that align variables such as time, space and scale to the practice of warfare. Sun Tzu’s (1963) treatise, for instance, weighs these ­variables in order to establish whether and when the circumstances are favourable to victorious battle. Von Clausewitz (1968), in turn, argues that excitable heads will never win wars (Lewis Gaddis, 2018). This chapter, instead, conveys a notion of war far removed from the prescriptions of grand strategy: wars may well be won by

Introduction  9

excitable heads such as Stendhal’s antiheroes or by confused combatants who ignore what they are doing and why. Deception is key, as is delusion, both causing an ocean of barbarity. Tolstoy, too, depicts belligerents as devoid of strategy and sensible reasoning, showing little respect for the elite, let alone warmongering elites. In his view, history is not the creation of great conquerors, but the outcome of acts performed by masses of individuals engaged in a common effort and aided by chains of circumstances. The ­chapter weaves in the novels presented the arguments put forward by the ­contemporary criminology of war. Wars have always victimized some individuals more than others, as they confirm, celebrate and exacerbate social and gender divisions. War and sexual violence, the subject of Chapter 9, are examined as specific forms of crime against women, as bellicose productions of masculinities. Rape associated with war is found in the Old Testament, in the injunctions of Moses, as well as in the history of ancient Rome. Among the examples provided in this chapter, are the rapes perpetrated during World War II in Germany by the ‘glorious’ anti-Nazi allies, those committed by US soldiers in Vietnam and the genocidal rapes that spread during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Some space in this chapter is devoted to the gender-selective genocide perpetrated in Rwanda, where, however, women too played a role in the planning of the mass killing. The chapter, therefore, moves on to analyse female warriors, their self-perception and their attempt, through violent missions, to achieve an improbable autonomy. Men are raped too, as shown in examples reported from Libya. In general, sexual violence in war is said to resemble a form of patriotism, a heroic conduct that binds men together while strengthening their national or group identity. In Chapter 10 the relationship between religion and violence is discussed, while a tentative answer is provided to the dilemma whether belief in a divinity necessarily spawns incendiary human feelings. The chapter sets off with the sacrifice of Iphigenia, the mythological self-destruction compensated by the divinities with victory and prosperity. Every tradition, as will be clarified, is inspired by a notion of numinous terror, although explanations of the use of violence cannot be narrowly theological. Religious violence, however, acts out as performance, and is promotional. It dramatizes

10 Introduction

grievances, but can also be inspired by what appears to be a viable strategy for change. The debate about our ‘secular age’, which took us from pre-modern societies to modern states, may lead to the assumption that religious violence has by now become redundant. We shall see, instead, that state violence can contain a powerful religious core, expressed through sacred killings which survive and reinvent themselves, becoming modern virtue guided by clean, clinical and technological murder. After some brief observations around the evolution of martyrdom, the chapter addresses the issue of how faithless individuals, groups and states can in reality adhere to their principles in a very religious fashion. This issue is given prominence in Chapter 11, which examines the violent passions triggered by political doctrines, particularly those that link the possibility of social change exclusively with the exercise of collective force. Twentieth-century political movements, for instance, adopted an eschatological perspective, if in secularized form, positing that only a massive, regenerative avalanche of violence could put an end to the invisible and manifest violence characterizing unjust systems. Can negative violence, as Hegel argued, be turned into positive violence? Can cruelty eliminate cruelty (Balibar, 2015)? This chapter interrogates Vico, Marx, Engels, Lenin, but also Burke and Schiller. It reads Shakespeare’s Henry VI and the poetry of Auden, to then move on to Musil and his idea of social change brought by ‘men without qualities’. Like Hamlet, do those who fight for radical social change have to be cruel only to be kind? The concluding Chapter 12, after highlighting the links that connect the different types of violence presented throughout the book, optimistically advocates a reduction of all of them. Surely, such reduction would require recognizing what might be broadly called the humanity of others: their distinct lives with their distinct dreams and hopes. Those involved in political violence, however, may find this recognition problematic and opt for clashes. But in the course of history, clashes have often been accompanied by collective emancipation, liberation and democratization, particularly when politics has abandoned cruelty and embraced civility. In our turbulent times, it would be worth acting likewise.

2 Systemic violence

Systemic violence refers to the harm people suffer from the social structure and the institutions sustaining and reproducing it. This type of violence prevents its victims from satisfying their basic needs, and is an avoidable impairment of the fundamental means necessary for human existence. This chapter explores how social, economic and political arrangements cause systemic violence, how such arrangements are presented as ineluctable outcomes of human interactions and historical processes, and how they are supported by justificatory ideologies. In the analysis of Johan Galtung (1969), this type of violence includes institutionalized ageism, classism, elitism, ethnocentrism, nationalism, anthropocentrism and sexism. Although it does not convey an image of direct physical aggression, systemic violence is the cause of suffering, disability and premature death. Engrained in social injustice, it affects people and groups differently and can be closely interdependent with domestic violence, hate crime, police violence, state violence, terrorism and war. Systemic violence, however, is found in the smooth functioning of economic and political systems, and can be termed ‘objective’,

12  Systemic violence

as it appears not to require specific deliberations by individuals exerting it. On the other hand, ‘subjective’ violence is performed by a clearly identifiable actor and is likely to be perceived as such when it appears to be an anomalous, visible deviation from a social context characterized by non-violence (Žižek, 2008). Systemic violence is non-behavioural in the sense that cannot normally be ascribed to decisions made by individuals or groups. Arrangements are systemic or structural because they are embedded in the specific organization of a certain socio-economic and political order, and are violent because, through autonomous processes and forces, they determine personal and collective injury. These processes and forces can exclude people from the benefits of civil, social and scientific progress, and present themselves as the outcome of choices made by those who are excluded. In fact, systemic violence is found among the pathologies of power that emerge in several spheres of life (Farmer, 2004). From a specific perspective, systemic violence manifests itself in higher rates of disability and death suffered by certain social groups, and in the constraints imposed on them that limit their ability to change their condition (Gilligan, 1997). But limitations also hamper, in a general sense, the achievement of the quality of life that should be guaranteed to everyone, and pertain to the spheres of politics, the economy, culture or the law. These are avoidable limitations that not only describe a condition of injustice and oppression, but also contain a violent core because they are determined by human decisions rather than by nature.

Poverty, disability and death Systemic violence manifests itself in the higher rates of disability and death suffered by disadvantaged people. These ‘excess deaths’ are non-natural and are the result of stress, lower status and discrimination. Only when referred to the terrain of dignity can these excesses be called ‘hidden injuries’ (Sennett and Cobb, 1996), while when seen through the lens of health they manifest themselves as very visible indeed (Kidder and French, 2013).

Systemic violence  13

Almost half the world – over 3 billion people – lives on less that £2.50 a day. At least 80 per cent of humanity lives on less than £10 a day. According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die each day due to poverty, while 28 per cent of all children are underweight. The online publication Global Issues (2017) notes that the two ­regions particularly affected are South Asia and the sub-­Sahara. About 72 million children of primary school age are not attending school, 57 per cent of whom are girls. A billion people entered the twenty-­fi rst century unable to read a book or sign their name. Less than 1 per cent of what the world spends every year on weapons would be sufficient to put every child into school. Global Issues also stresses that infectious diseases continue to blight the lives of the poor across the world: every year there are 350–500 million cases of malaria, with 1 million fatalities. Africa accounts for 90 per cent of malarial deaths and African children account for over 80 per cent of malaria victims worldwide. Water problems affect half of humanity: some 1.1 billion people have inadequate access to water, and 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation. Half of these suffer at any given time from a health problem caused by water and sanitation deficits. More than 10 million children die before reaching the age of five, 2.2 million die each year because they are not immunized and 15 million are orphaned due to HIV/AIDS. Some 2.5 billion people are forced to rely on biomass fuelwood, charcoal and animal dung to meet their energy needs for cooking. In sub-Saharan Africa, over 80 per cent of the population depends on traditional biomass for cooking, as do over half of the populations of India and China. Indoor air pollution from the use of solid fuels is a major killer, claiming the lives of 1.5 million people each year, more than half of them below the age of five: that is 4,000 deaths a day. More than 1.5 billion people – a quarter of humanity – live without electricity. In advanced countries, every year, $8 billion are spent on cosmetics, $15 billion on ice-cream (in Europe), $12 billion on perfumes (in Europe and the US), $17 billion on pet foods (Europe and US), $35 billion on business entertainment in Japan, $50 billion on cigarettes in Europe, $105 billion on alcoholic drinks in Europe,

14  Systemic violence

$400 billion on illegal drugs in the world, $780 billion on military equipment. On the other hand, costs to achieve universal access to basic social services in all countries would be as follows: $6 billion for basic education for all, $9 billion for water and sanitation for all, $12 billion for reproductive health for all women, and $13 billion for basic health and nutrition (ibid.). A study conducted in the US in 2009 found that 60 million of its citizens died prematurely, that around 290,000 died due to poverty or low income, 100,000 of which were African Americans, and that black babies died at twice the rate of white babies. In brief, poverty, defined as a household earning an income of less than $10,000 per year, not only contributes to poor health, it also kills (Bakalar, 2011). More than 25 per cent of people who reported their race or ethnicity as non-Hispanic black were considered racially segregated. The study attributed 176,000 deaths to racial segregation and 133,000 to individual poverty. It has to be borne in mind that the direct causes of death in the US are accidents (119,000 each year) and lung cancer (156,000 each year). Links were established between poverty and heart disease, poor access to health screening, lack of care for those who actually have heart disease, greater vulnerability to stresses associated with heart disease and the greater likelihood of engaging in unhealthy behaviour (ibid.). In the UK a report by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH, 2017) warned of the widening of inequalities in child health in the previous five years. In the most deprived areas in England, 40 per cent of children are overweight or obese compared to 27 per cent in the most affluent areas. ‘What is particularly shocking is that although we’ve known these things for a long time, we are still in a situation where there is such wide health disparity between the most advantaged and the least advantaged’ (ibid.: 2). About 30 per cent of British children are classed as deprived, a third of which are from families currently in work. Household income data, published by the Department for Work and Pensions, indicate that over the course of 2015–16 around 100,000 more children fell into poverty (Boseley, 2017). Around 4 million are now categorized as deprived. The data also reveal a strong link between high mortality rates in England and lower

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than average doctor numbers. Similarly, high levels of hospital bed occupancy appear to be an increasingly important factor in high mortality rates (Havering Witness, 2017). The European Union has long attempted to reduce the number of people at risk of poverty or social exclusion in member states. The distinction is suggested between monetary poverty, severe material deprivation and households with very low work intensity. The aim of including other components of social exclusion alongside relative poverty is ‘to highlight that other factors in addition to low income also lead to severe and chronic disadvantages and that these are closely intertwined’ (Eurostat, 2017: 13). Almost every fourth person in the EU still experiences at least one of the three forms of poverty or social exclusion. Monetary poverty is the most widespread form of poverty, affecting 17.3 per cent of EU residents in 2015. Severe material deprivation and very low work intensity follow, affecting 8.1 per cent of EU residents and 10.6 per cent of EU citizens aged 0 to 59, respectively. The share of women suffering from poverty or social exclusion is 1.4 percentage points higher than the corresponding share of men. More than 31 per cent of young people aged 18 to 24 and almost 30 per cent of those aged less than 18 are at risk of poverty or social exclusion. At 17.4 per cent, this rate is considerably lower among the elderly aged 65 or over. Poverty should be an urgent human concern because it constitutes a violation of human rights and, at the same time, may be a consequence of human rights violations. Moreover, it excludes those affected from the exercise of civil rights and from meaningful participation in the political process (UN, 2018). Epidemiologists have repeatedly warned that valuing growth above equality, in terms of health and life expectancy, leads to an increase in teenage pregnancies, violence, imprisonment, addiction and obesity (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010, 2018). There is nothing inevitable in untrammelled inequality and the systemic violence this conceals (Alvaredo et al., 2018). Finally, that minorities and migrants suffer from systemic violence more than majority citizens is associated by Toni Morrison (2017) to the oldest and most potent of identity politics in history, namely the identity politics of racism. In her

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view, there is an attempt to erase the crime of racism, which exists through the use of the concept of race. ‘When we say “race” as opposed to “racism”, we reify the idea that race is somehow a feature of the natural world and racism the predictable result of it’ (Coates, 2017: xi). Racism precedes race and affirms one’s humanity even when committing inhumane acts. It is a tool to establish a natural and divine difference from the other. When targeting migrants, it diverts the consideration that ‘much of this exodus can be described as the journey of the colonized to the seat of the colonizers (slaves, as it were, leaving the plantation for the planter’s home)’ (Morrison, 2017: 94).

The Calais Jungle The journey of the colonized attempting to reach the sites of the colonizers is always fraught with danger and violence. Such a journey may, for instance, lead to the creation of ‘dumping grounds’ for those who are excluded from the vertiginous changes occurring in the global economy. The Calais Jungle grew after the Sangatte refugee centre in the same town was shut down in 2002, and received international attention as a site whose existence hovered in a judicial limbo (Millner, 2011; Davies and Isakjee, 2015; Mould, 2017).Thousands of displaced refugees inhabited what was described as Europe’s largest slum, as its characteristics tallied with those associated by the UN (2003) to slum conditions: inadequate access to safe water, sanitation and infrastructures; poor structural quality of housing; overcrowding and insecure residential status. The Jungle was a product of systemic violence, the result of social, economic and political arrangements leading to extreme polarization of wealth and opportunities on a planetary level. The exodus provoked by wars, including those initiated by developed countries, is a corollary of the movements of masses determined by the exclusion of developing countries from the benefits of economic growth. Political and economic decisions made in the ‘centre’ mark the destiny of the ‘peripheries’, encouraging the need among large sectors of affected populations to relocate. The Jungle was, therefore, a receptacle of many elements found in

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global cities, where securitization, precarity and experimental forms of policing and control connote the condition of ample sections of labour. The Jungle acted as an excellent training ground for those whose dream was to make it by reaching a city like London, where the ‘super-rich financial elite’ is surrounded by ‘a chronically low-paid and precarious underclass of casual labourers’ (Mould, 2017: 394). The ‘bare life’ of its inhabitants was an effective reminder to all those who flee their country that they had better lower their expectations and regard themselves as fortunate if they somehow manage to join the ‘underclass’ of the city of their dreams. In that city, they will continue to be ‘unwanted bodies’. To add to Toni Morrison’s argument, certainly, the colonized attempt to reach the colonizers, the slaves leave the plantations for the planter’s home, but the Jungle is the response they receive: a warning that slavery can always take new and different forms.

Organized power and political community It should be reiterated that the type of systemic violence just described is far from being hidden and that, on the contrary, it must be obvious if it is to deploy its deterrent potency against specific groups of people. The Jungle, in this respect, may be regarded as an ordinary tool to exert control and inflict pain, but also as a periodic manifestation of an addendum, namely a supplementary quantum of injury that snaps when perceptions of injustice timidly spread and when acceptance of the status quo seems to weaken or dither. In ordinary conditions, however, spectacular inflictions of suffering are redundant, as the objective violence delivered by social, political and economic arrangements suffice for the purpose. However, the process making systemic violence hidden, invisible or acceptable occurs elsewhere, and can be detected when a brief journey through the formation of the state and of political communities is undertaken. Organized power could be regarded as a trade-off, whereby individuals obtain security in exchange for a degree of freedom (Mann, 2012). State formation, however, may be beneficial for certain social spheres while being detrimental for others (Malešević, 2016).

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In the Marxist tradition, states incorporate the organized power of one class oppressing another, while politics is a component of a superstructure, a corollary of the economic base which provides the core foundation to a social system (Marx, 1976a, 1976b). Political power, therefore, arises out of the social relationships prevailing in a specific productive system and reflects those relationships, which are characterized by antagonism and exploitation. Political power, from this perspective, coincides with systemic violence. To end this violence means to end politics as a tool of domination, but would also entail the appropriation of politics, which is necessary for that change to be enacted. Politics as ideology is a system of representation, with its own logic and rigor, offering images, myths, ideas, concepts, narratives and discourses which help social groups make sense of the context in which they live. Systemic violence, ultimately, is hidden behind a repertoire of symbolic and material devices enabling the disadvantaged to come to terms with the conditions of their existence (Althusser, 1969, 1971). Powerful groups, in this sense, are criminal by definition, in that they have a constant and growing interest in perpetuating systemic violence in the form of exploitation and social inequality. In a celebrated formulation, and from a different perspective, the term political community ‘applies to a community whose social action is aimed at subordinating to orderly domination a territory and the conduct of the persons within it, through readiness to resort to physical force, including force of arms’ (Weber, 1978: 901). Once a coercive apparatus is formed and a specific territory is demarcated, the political community as state can exercise authority and regulate intergroup relations. Rules become binding and divisions among groups, although inequitable, become mandatory. But the domination over a territory and its population, as Weber contends, is shared among various powers, including religious, legal and economic consociations. Coercion and violence, therefore, are not necessarily monopolized by one single power. We are approaching a notion of systemic violence discerned by Weber in political communities that impose ‘values towards which associational conduct might be oriented and the interrelations of the inhabitants of the territory regulated’ (ibid.: 902).

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This process entails the slow disappearance of primeval and tribal societies along with their specific type of regulatory violence (Finer, 1997), although spectacular forms of coercive force can intermittently re-emerge in response to real or imagined emergencies (see the example of the Calais Jungle). What Weber sees under normal circumstances is the acceptance of ‘jeopardy and destruction of life’ fostered by a political community, where ‘the renunciation of life is an essential part of the shared obligations’ (Weber, 1978: 903). Such obligations are consecrated by legitimacy and developed through the casuistic rules established in the form of a legal order. It is the constant arising of new interests that determines the shaping of such order, particularly when certain groups persuade others that their own interests require collective protection. ‘Consequently, a steadily widening sphere of interests, especially economic ones, could find adequate protection only in those nationally regulated guaranties which none but the political community was able to create’ (ibid.: 904). The Weberian notion that the state lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence remains central in many conceptualizations, although the way in which such monopoly was achieved remains controversial ( Jessop, 2016). What is also controversial is whether a drastic differentiation between a repressive state apparatus and an ideological state apparatus is possible (Althusser, 1971). In the former, it is suggested, the coercive element is paramount, while in the latter consensus prevails. In Gramsci’s (1971) interpretation, it is hard to differentiate between the two because both justify and maintain their rule while managing to secure the active consent of the ruled. The concept of ‘ideological state’, and also the very notion of ‘ideology’, can be questioned as they seem to postulate an opposition between phantasmal, abstract constructions and truth or science (Lloyd, 2014). Truth, in fact, may be produced through practices and discourses that in themselves are neither true nor false (Foucault, 1980). In brief, systems of power do not misrepresent truth, but create and reinforce it (Foucault, 1970, 1972). Such systems are not to be seen as accomplished assemblages, coherent and pure, but rather as hybrid, contradictory and relatively inchoate

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open systems. In short, the state has no inherent substantive unity qua institutional ensemble. Unity can be understood narrowly, as the capacity of state functionaries to use constitutionalized violence and other means to the purpose of reproducing the state apparatus as an institutional ensemble and of securing compliance with its policies in the face of resistance. (Jessop, 2016: 84–85) It is in periods of economic crisis, when sacrifice is not equitably shared, when generosity for the privileged and austerity for the underprivileged triumph, that systemic violence intensifies. Under such circumstances, a ‘two nations’ strategy takes shape which offers concessions to the favoured nation and repression to the unfavoured one. Instability and social conflict may follow, but institutional responses will generate new devices for the diffusion and concealment of systemic violence, mainly through the shift from government to governance, from hierarchical to networked authority. In brief, the authority link is apparently removed from the state as a coercive entity and incorporated in the societal relationships, and as the state becomes diffuse every actor becomes the state.

A central bank of symbolic capital The centralization of the use of force and of tax collection are equated by Elias (1990) to a form of protection racket, which is galvanized when all other entities, similarly capable of using force and collecting taxes, slowly abandon the field or are subordinated to centralized discipline. The state then incessantly seeks to expand consensus, thus displaying its core antinomy: the more it accumulates power the more it depends on those who depend on its power. In search for allies, the state will offer privileges through networks of interest where strong ties are built between certain groups and the central authority. Such networks will, in turn, expand to cover different fields, from the religious to the bureaucratic, the

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juridical and the economic, and at the same time will establish complex chains of interdependence among the members of the different networks. Those excluded, namely those unable to find common interests with the authority, will become the preferred target of systemic violence. The state as racket returns in Tilly (1993), who distinguishes between two relatively independent processes of centralization: one occurring in the realm of armed power, the other in the domain of capital. Only when both processes are complete can the modern state expect its subjects, as Weber argued, to be prepared to die. This is because the fetishes of the nation and the idea of borders are fully formed and through their symbolic power can request extreme sacrifice (Bourdieu, 1989, 2012). As central banks of symbolic capital, states affirm ‘the power of its creations (the language, the law), which is inscribed simultaneously in the social world and in our brains. We think about the state with state thought’ (Bourdieu, 2012: 196). This process of concentration leads to specific perceptions of the social world and its norms, a set of beliefs that appear as certainties. It is what Bourdieu terms ‘doxa’, a reading of social facts that presents itself as unquestionable. In this way, systemic violence is transmuted into misfortune, demerit, inadequacy or the ­propensity of those suffering it. Beliefs take shape while the different arenas of societies are increasingly separated from one another. ‘The state as meta-field contributes to the constitution of different fields’ ­( Bourdieu, 2012: 318). The constitution of an autonomous economic field, for instance, becomes a tautology: business is business. In this way, it appears that markets form themselves, motu proprio, but they are instead the outcome of subjective initiative, carried out with the support of concepts and words: these do not describe society or reality, they create it (Polanyi, 1954).

To have and have not A literary example in which systemic violence is concealed behind the assumption that market dynamics are ineluctable is provided by Ernest Hemingway (1994). His novel To Have and Have Not,

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originally published in 1937, tells the story of Harry Morgan, owner of a fishing boat that guarantees his survival. Economic forces beyond his control, compounded by a wealthy man who defrauds him, leave him suddenly destitute. He turns to illegal markets, such as the smuggling of alcohol and immigrants from Cuba to Florida. Surrounded by neighbours and acquaintances who are equally hit by the economic crisis, he witnesses and is complicit in a series of crimes, including hold-ups and interpersonal violence.The interesting aspect of this novel is the mechanism that leads to his fall, which seems unstoppable, objective, as if no one could be blamed (except for the wealthy fraudster). And this is what determined the ways in which the novel was received. Adapted to film in 1944, it became a romantic thriller starring ­Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, while further versions focused on alcoholism and charismatic villains. A review published in The New York Times (Adams, 1937) failed to mention the role played by the fraudster, namely the subjective acts that led to Harry ­Morgan’s collapse, while also denying the objective forces that caused it. ­Hemingway’s skill, the reviewer wrote, has strengthened, but his stature has shrunk.The novel was described as an empty book and its protagonist as someone whose choices, far from being encouraged by external social forces, were simply the result of his own will. What most disturbed the reviewer was the way in which Hemingway ­depicted those ‘specimens of the idle rich and their parasites, and the morally rotten whom he shows us in brief close-ups, in their ­anchored yachts on the night that Harry Morgan died’ (ibid.: 2).

The crimes of the economy Hemingway was not forgiven for linking human misery with the objective arrangements of markets. But in fact, in the economic sphere, doctrines claiming scientific validity or divine nature were and are responsible for colossal amounts of violence. For example, Locke’s idea of private property as a divine gift led colonialists to subjugate and destroy populations that were unaware of this gift. The victims of systemic violence, in this case, by ignoring the transcendental nature of private ownership, located themselves outside the human community (Stannard, 1992). Later, the US founders were especially keen on

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John Locke’s treatment of property ownership as a sacred right, hence Thomas Jefferson’s famous reference in the Declaration of Independence to the ‘unalienable rights’ to life, that is liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The last of these rights was understood as inseparable from the ownership of real property, which did not exclude property in humans, ‘in which the Virginian Jefferson generously indulged’ (Cartledge, 2016: 294–295). Mercantilist ideas justified the erasure of traditional economies, making the starvation caused in the name of progress acceptable. Physiocrats, through the notion that wealth derives exclusively from the exploitation of the land, caused the victimization of independent farmers, who were deprived of their means of subsistence as a result of the privatization and concentration of rural property. Malthus theorized the culling of redundant populations, those who had not been invited to the banquet of life. His ‘scientific’ doctrine was derided by Jonathan Swift’s proposal to solve the problem of malnutrition through the use of children as foodstuff. Adam Smith’s suggestion that unemployment caused by economic development was ‘in the long run’ destined to be neutralized by new ascending productive sectors neglected the lethal injuries caused by inactivity. A couple of centuries later, Keynes argued that the unemployed could not wait for the eventual emergence of new economic initiatives and that ‘in the long run’ we will all be dead. David Ricardo’s emphasis on risk and innovation in response to economic decline echoes Merton’s deviant adaptations, particularly those of the ‘innovative’ type, which pursue official goals through illegitimate means. Marshall’s theory of marginal utility, in which acceptable wages are said to correspond to the money that the last available worker is prepared to receive, borders with a justification of slavery. We could go on, focusing for instance on what is commonly described as neoliberalism and the social and environmental damage its theories encourage (Ruggiero, 2013a). However, one should resist the temptation to impute particular callousness to currently dominant economic doctrines: the systemic violence produced by the market itself, whatever the philosophy inspiring it, places economic initiative beyond the reach of democratic contestation, let alone ethical assessment. Many years ago Durkheim

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(1960) rightly argued that the stock exchange may be more murderous than any ruthless serial killer (Ruggiero, 2017a). The following is a recent example of systemic violence as the outcome of politico-economic arrangements.

The systemic attack on Greece The bailout programme (Memoranda of Understanding), imposed on Greece after the 2010 financial crisis erupted in the country, had calamitous effects on the population. Officially defined as ‘adjustments’, the measures determined a ‘rapid deterioration of living standards, and were incompatible with social justice, social cohesion, democratic and human rights’ (Georgoulas, 2017a: 530). The Greek public debt since the 1980s, attributed to the generosity of the state towards needy sectors of society, was in fact due to the extravagant rates of interest paid to creditors and investors in the country. It was also the result of needless purchases of military equipment, tax evasion by large entrepreneurs, embezzlement by politicians when dealing with foreign contractors, and state intervention in support of failing banks. None of those responsible for the crisis were touched by the bailout programme, whereas the areas of social vulnerability were enormously expanded, as shown in some detail below. The right to work was severely undermined through the suspension of the system of collective bargaining. Wage cuts were accompanied by increasing job insecurity, dismissal of workers and the reduction of the minimum wage to below the poverty line. Health expenditure was set at an abysmal 6 per cent of GDP, while funds for hospitals were cut by 8 per cent. The government was asked to reduce, between 2010 and 2014, the cost of prescribed pharmaceuticals by half. The right to education was seriously curtailed, as teachers were sacked and schools shut down. Among the schools remaining, several had no resources to provide central heating or student buses, with the result that pupils were unable to attend classes. Pensions were reduced by 40 per cent and as a consequence 45 per cent of pensioners entered deep poverty. Three or four years after the implementation of the austerity measures, over

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half a million people were made homeless or forced to live in substandard conditions. In 2017, around 23 per cent of the population lived below the poverty line and 63 per cent were substantially impoverished. Popular protest against the bailout programme was met with draconic laws which restricted the right of assembly and the freedom of expression. Public meetings and demonstrations were prohibited, harsher police tactics victimized peaceful demonstrators, perceived leaders were pre-emptively arrested, and an alliance of police forces and fascists (members of Golden Dawn) jointly perpetrated attacks on activists. Simultaneously, new legislation virtually decriminalized a variety of white-collar offences such as corruption and theft of public funds, and a general amnesty was called for to save those found guilty of such offences. Active and passive bribery were redefined as minor offences, and with the consequent shortening of the terms of statute limitation, corrupt politicians and business people were set free. Those who did squander public money, in brief, were pardoned, while their victims were made to pay. The systemic violence suffered by vulnerable people in Greece is an example of what is described as state-corporate crime – the outcome of the interaction between the economic and the political spheres involving international institutions of governance. The crimes perpetrated against Greek people may lack a precisely identifiable offender, but behind their complex organizational features individual action can be detected (Michalowski and Kramer, 2006). Crimes of globalization, on the other hand, are defined as those referring to the social harm affecting entire populations caused by political supranational institutions, such as the IMF and the World Bank (Friedrichs and Friedrichs, 2012). The imposition of top-down policies and economic programmes that are consistent with the interests of powerful countries and multinational companies regularly cause casualties in less powerful countries (Rothe, Mullins and Muzzatti, 2006). Greece is an example, where the situation was characterized by repression, death, suicide and genocide (Georgoulas, 2017b), but still no official norm was violated. On the

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contrary, norms were created in order to decriminalize the practices being implemented.

Omissions The violence produced in the economic sphere, in turn, is accompanied by that arising from the political apparatus, which may also cause harm through strategies of omission. Political systems, in this way, while officially displaying confidence in, or even boasting of, their morality, contribute to the denial of life and justice (Honderich, 1989: xix). Advanced political systems, for instance, may be unlikely to send poisoned food parcels to starving populations, nevertheless they do little to relieve their starvation. They pollute developing countries with their waste and, although they do not intentionally infect them with serious diseases, omit to guarantee minimum medical care for them. At the domestic level, they do not remove books from poor schools, but cut the budget for primary education. They do not force people to become homeless, but omit to stop private profits being made out of people needy of accommodation. Such systems omit to remedy a situation they themselves have created, in which the economically worst-off tenth of their own population have a considerably shorter life expectancy than the average. They may or may not contribute funds to dictatorships, but certainly do not contribute funds to movements fighting dictators. Omissions entail choice, but political choice is denied or blocked because it would be inconsistent with the injunctions of the economic sphere, which as a ‘perfect science’ only requires obedience. At the same time, for political power, decisions are important but just as important are the decisions that are not made, the proposals that are never considered, the innovative ideas that are somehow always out of the question. ‘Ruling a country means controlling the political agenda, defining what is thinkable and unthinkable, and this work is always done behind the façade of democratic politics’ (Walzer, 2004: 24). This is a form of symbolic violence embodied in language, which reproduces relations of domination while imposing a certain universe of meaning (Žižek, 2008).

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Consensual violence? The debate on systemic violence may benefit from the analysis of symbolic violence provided by Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992: 167), who define it as ‘the violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity’. The failure to perceive this type of violence as such, we are told, derives from the mere fact that social agents take the world for granted, accepting it as a natural entity, ‘because their mind is constructed according to cognitive structures that are issued out of the very structures of the world’ (ibid.: 272).This process is not led by effective or deft persuaders, but is promoted by values, axioms and postulates whose acceptance requires no forceful authority, let alone vigorous instillation. ‘Of all forms of hidden persuasion, the most implacable is the one exerted, quite simply, by the order of things … an un-thought schemata of thought’ (ibid.: 272–273). This analysis sets its proponents beyond Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, which requires purposive action by hegemonic agents: here, on the contrary, social actors internalize a picture of the world as evident by absorbing its ‘undeniable’ obviousness. But is this new? Think of Spinoza (2007: 47), particularly his notion of ‘capture’, whereby individuals live according to the minds of those who govern them and ‘judge what is true of false, or good or bad, in accordance with their decree alone’. Capture entails setting bodies in motion in the service of the capturer, and is based on obsequium, namely the acquired servility that makes individuals conform to the sovereign’s rule (Lordon, 2014). Systemic violence, then, becomes the ‘violence of its very telos, the violence of the alignment with the master-desire’ (ibid.: 97). However, this telos is cast on a backdrop of threat, which may be intermittent and only visible in critical moments, but which accompanies the formation of consent (see the case studies above). What is produced is a double imaginary: ‘an imaginary of fulfillment, which makes the humble joys to which the dominated are assigned appear sufficient, and the imaginary of powerlessness, which convinces them to renounce any greater ones to which they might aspire’ (ibid.: 110). Again, we are in Spinoza’s territory, where people imagine what they can do

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and are ‘so disposed by their imagination that they really cannot do what they imagine they cannot do’ (Spinoza, 1994: 28). Power does not limit its function to making the energies of others work in its service; it also inflicts a form of sacrificial violence (Girard, 1988), described in this chapter as systemic violence, whereby vulnerable victims suffer a variety of injuries so that those protected by power can thrive. We shall see whether this mechanism also applies to the second type of political violence examined in the next chapter.

3 Institutional violence

Systemic violence, as we have seen in the previous chapter, is lawful, although its outcomes are harmful and at times lethal. Institutional violence, instead, contains an insatiable core leading to harmful and lethal activity that transcends what is allowed by the laws. Economic and political institutions are major sources of harm, injury and violence which exceed the systemic damage caused by the routine running of states and markets. Institutional violence, therefore, is the outcome of violations perpetrated by individuals and groups against their own official principles and philosophies, those principles and philosophies which allow them to hold positions of privilege. State agents violating their own written norms who engage in abuse, torture and killing are cases in point. Organizations that violate their officially stated principles include enterprises standing up for market freedom while in practice showing little credence in such freedom. Price-fixing and other forms of unfair competition are examples, which are commonly enacted through corruption or intimidation, but may also be supported by violence. Firms causing death and lethal diseases, in their turn, violate health and safety regulations or infringe norms for the protection of the environment (Tombs, 2018).

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Institutional violence may trigger a lawmaking mechanism: torture, military invasion, kidnapping of suspects, and the use of prohibited weapons create important precedents and, undetected, tolerated and unprosecuted, rewrite the international law and refound the principles of justice. This violence is, we may suggest, foundational, as it is capable of transforming the previous jurisprudence and of establishing new laws and new types of legitimacy. Institutional violence is the result of the ‘blunted moral sensitivity’ (Wright Mills, 1956) adopted in response to contrived crises and emergencies. For instance, violence can be triggered by imagined threats, followed by a shifting of the balance between security and human and civil rights, leading the authorities to violate their own laws. It is not always easy to separate institutional violence perpetrated by economic actors from that inflicted by state actors, as the notion of state-corporate crime may well illustrate (see previous chapter). However, an initial distinction between the two may be useful exactly for this reason, as it allows us to identify their respective specific traits and then to observe how they blur and merge.

Foxes and lions The illegality of firms and corporations can be viewed as an attempt to neutralize or temper the decline they experience (or simply fear) in respect of their profits.Violence, in the economic sphere, can be a means available to foxes as well as to lions, two categories of entrepreneur described by Pareto (1935, 1966), respectively, as the short-term opportunists who combine diverse interests and adopt cunning strategies, and those who are bound in persistent aggregations and pursue long-term goals (Harrington, 2005).

When work kills The International Labour Organization estimated that in 2004 some 6,000 people a day were killed by work (2.1 million per year). Almost 270 million accidents were recorded that year, of which 350,000 were fatal. Twenty years after one of the worst industrial accidents on

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r­ ecord – the Bhopal disaster – the situation had scarcely improved. Occupational deaths occurred during work accidents but were also due to work-related illnesses. Exposure to chemicals was one of the major causes, as it was responsible for 35 million of the 160 million cases of work-related diseases recorded worldwide. Every year, it was also mentioned, an estimated 22,000 children of school age died at work. About 80 per cent of these occupational deaths could have been prevented if the strategies and practices legally available had been put in place – in other words, if the official norms regulating health and safety at work had been respected (ILO, 2004). A decade on, firms and corporations with poor health and safety records not only survived, but acted as bad examples for other companies to relax or ignore their own safety efforts. A 2014 report revealed that an estimated 2.3 million workers were dying every year from occupational accidents and work-related diseases. It was also noted that the grey area of unreported or ignored fatalities was constantly growing, and that cutting back on occupational health and safety was particularly tempting during periods of economic downturn (ILO, 2014). A similar report released in 2018 recorded around 2.7 million deaths for the previous year and 374 million non-fatal injuries and illnesses (ILO, 2018). Deaths caused by this form of institutional violence are five times the number of recorded homicides across the world (Whyte, 2014). The norms being violated are not only those regulating specific work conditions, but also those concerning the emission of hazardous substances. Pollution, therefore, kills those at work as well as those out of work (Tombs and Whyte, 2015). Although no company director sets out in the morning to intentionally kill workers or consumers, company directors do very often set out in the morning to make decisions that cut margins, intensify production conditions, cut back on working conditions, or allow unsafe products to be sold. The violence that results directly from management decisions is more commonly ‘pre-meditated’ or ‘cold-blooded’ than many forms of inter-personal violence. (Whyte, 2014: 5)

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With regulatory controls shrinking on a global level, other forms of violence emerge, like the routine violence against women and men inflicted by supervisors and managers, which particularly affects the most marginalized workers. Women are disproportionately affected where unequal power relations, low pay, non-standard working conditions and other workplace abuses expose them to violence and harassment (Pillinger, 2017). Lack of regulatory controls or violations of work legislation can also produce other types of death, as shown in the following case.

Karoshi and Karojisatsu In Japan, the term karoshi designates death from overwork, and has been used since the 1970s. It is a socio-medical term that refers to fatalities or disabilities provoked by cardiovascular attacks and associated with heavy workloads. The phenomenon is now identified internationally (Weller, 2017). Some case studies selected from research conducted in Japan provide the following details. •

•

•

•

Mr A worked at a major snack food processing company for as long as 110 hours a week and died from a heart attack at the age of 34. His death was described as work-related by the Labour Standards Office. Mr B, a bus driver, whose death was also described as work-­ related, worked more than 3,000 hours a year. He did not have a day off in the 15 days before he had stroke at the age of 37. Mr C worked in a large printing company in Tokyo for 4,320 hours a year including night work, and died from stroke at the age of 58. His widow received workers’ compensation 14 years after her husband’s death. Ms D, a 22-year-old nurse, died from a heart attack after 34 hours’ continuous duty five times a month.

Karojisatsu designates suicide from overwork and stressful working conditions and has also become a social issue in Japan since the latter half of the 1980s. Long work hours, heavy workloads, lack of job control, routine and repetitive tasks, interpersonal conflicts, inadequate

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rewards, employment insecurity and organizational problems become psychosocial hazards at work. Some causes of overwork or occupational stress include the following. •

•

•

•

All-night, late-night or holiday work, both long and excessive hours. During the long-term economic recession after the collapse of the bubble economy in 1980s and 1990s, many companies reduced the number of employees. The total amount of work, however, did not decrease, forcing each employee to work harder. Stress accumulated due to frustration at inability to achieve the goals set by the company. Even in economic recession, companies tend to demand excessive sales efforts from their employees and require them to achieve better results.This increases the psychological burden placed on the employees at work. Forced resignation, dismissal and bullying. For example, employees who have worked for a company for many years and believe that they are loyal to the company, were suddenly asked to resign because of the need for staff cutbacks. Suffering of middle management. Managers were often in a position to lay off workers and struggled with the dilemma between the corporate restructuring policy and protecting their staff. These middle managers responsible for persuading workers to resign had to bear fierce protests from the targeted workers, suffered from emotional pain, and finally committed suicide.

There has been an increase in insurance compensation for death caused by overwork. Between 1997 and 2011, compensated cases of Karoshi and Karojisatsu have risen from 47 to 121 and from 2 to 66, respectively (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, 2011). Whether economic actors exerting this type of violence can be assimilated to foxes or to lions is not easy to establish, as in many cases the short-term opportunists who combine diverse interests and adopt cunning strategies may be rewarded with long-term attainments. In other words, economic initiative can turn foxes into lions, namely contingent, short-term, success into persistent and

34  Institutional violence

stable achievement. Once introduced, certain ‘innovative’ violations are often translated into routine practice, as will also be clear later, when the political sphere will be addressed. What is worthwhile now is drawing a tentative theoretical framework for the interpretation of such violations.

Power and crime Power entails the ability to act and overcome the obstacles erected by those who are subject to it. It also entails the capacity to make one’s crimes acceptable, while formulating criminal imputations against others. The examples of institutional violence offered above may find explanatory tools in a variety of socio-criminological contributions. For instance, against the background of anomie theory, violence can be deemed one of the numerous instruments available to the elites, who operate in already normless contexts and are, therefore, encouraged to experiment with conducts and arbitrarily expand on practices. Conflict theory would postulate that all violent manifestations in social systems are to be interpreted as the outcome of the polarization of power and resources, and that successful imputations of violent conduct are normally the prerogative of powerful groups who so label the conduct adopted by the powerless. Institutional violence, on the other hand, can be the object of analysis focusing on micro-sociological aspects, more particularly, on the observation of the dynamics that guide the behaviour of organizations and their members. As organizations become more complex, it is maintained, responsibilities are decentralized, while their human components find themselves inhabiting an increasingly opaque environment in which the goals to pursue, and the modalities through which one is expected to pursue them, become vague and negotiable. Violence perpetrated by organizations can be regarded as an outcome of such opacity and vagueness (Ruggiero, 2015a). Economic agents may be led to violence by their inherent nature as homo duplex, with which Durkheim (1960) designates the co-presence of violence and sociability in social actors, or simply

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because they inhabit contexts such as markets, seen by Weber as substantially irrational and inspirers of speculation, gambling and bullying. Merton’s (1969) notion of ‘winning’ rather than ‘winning according to the rules’ provides a supplementary viewpoint. What these explanations have in common is a sense that violence is a key intentional manifestation of power, echoing the formulation of Bertrand Russell (1975), for whom power is the production of intended effects. The element of intention or ‘will’ is also stressed by Max Weber (1978: 943), who defines power as ‘the probability that an actor in a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance’. We have here two key components of power: the capacity to perform purposive action, on the one hand, and the ability to overcome obstacles, on the other. The capacity to produce intended effects is what distinguishes powerful from powerless individuals and groups, with the former being granted a wide range of choices among the actions that can be carried out (Bauman, 1990). Power, in this sense, derives from the number and diversity of options available and the ability to predict their outcomes. In making choices and acting, however, the powerful may turn the actions performed by others into means for their own goals, and this can be realized through coercion or legitimacy. It is necessary, at this point, to address the Marxist analysis of ideology. As discussed in the previous chapter, the notion of politics in the Marxist tradition belongs to the realm of the superstructure. It is a corollary of the material world which provides the core foundation to a social system (Marx, 1976a, 1976b). Institutional violence, from this perspective, appears to be one of the outcomes of the constant and growing interest of powerful economic actors in perpetuating exploitation and social inequality. The ideology allowing them to do so is nothing more than an artefact that neutralizes all imputations of criminality, a set of beliefs which are transmitted to the sphere of the law and turned into impunity. The powerful, in this sense, strive to escape processes of stigmatization and labelling mechanisms, aiming to make their conduct formally acceptable and legitimate. For this reason, scholars with a Marxist background argue that an understanding of the crimes of

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the powerful can only be grasped if research is prepared to look at harmful conducts irrespective of whether or not they are formally criminalized. We have also seen in the previous chapter how the concept of ideology is questioned because those invoking and formulating it appear to oppose it to the idea of truth or science (Lloyd, 2014). The base-superstructure model posited by the Marxist vulgate, in other words, is critiqued for drawing too neat a line between a ‘true’ material world, scientifically observable, and an imaginary world replete with ‘falsity’. It could be argued, instead, that often truth is created and reinforced at the margin or periphery of society, where it is initially conceived before being appropriated or utilized by different institutions or organizations for different purposes (Foucault, 1970, 1972). The argument below may clarify this point. That the two components of power – coercion and legitimacy – are intimately connected is clear in Max Weber’s (1978) a­ rgument that domination may be established by virtue of ‘a constellation of interests’ and by virtue of ‘authority’. The former falls in the economic domain and derives from the possession of resources and marketable goods: this type of domination determines the conduct of those devoid of possessions, who nevertheless remain formally free and motivated simply by the pursuit of their reproduction. Monopolies, it is implied, are the extreme forms of this type of domination. The latter type is exemplified by patriarchal, ­magisterial or princely power, therefore, it ‘rests upon the alleged absolute duty to obey, regardless of personal merit or interests’ (Lukes, 1986: 30). Domination by virtue of constellation of interests, as Weber postulates, often turns into domination by authority, as material possessions are transformed into a duty to obey on the part of the dispossessed. Structures of dominancy are constituted through norms that ­acquire hegemony thanks to customary social practice. A dynamic of this process is clearly described by John Dewey (1909: 4) in his analysis of ‘how we think’. Thoughts, he argues, grow up unconsciously and ‘without reference to the attainment of correct belief ’. He states: ‘From obscure sources and by unnoticed channels they insinuate themselves into acceptance and become unconsciously a

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part of our mental furniture. Tradition, instruction, and imitation are responsible for them’ (ibid.). But such thoughts, Dewey specifies, are prejudices, that is, prejudgements, not judgements proper that rest upon a survey of evidence. In a Weberian sense, it is not only thoughts, but every sphere of social order that is profoundly influenced by structures of dominancy. These structures are taken for granted, although, at times unobtrusively, they privilege certain specific ideas and interests. We can also term these thoughts and structures as ‘meaning systems’, historically a priori, which help people make sense of their world. Powerful economic actors delivering institutional violence, though violating the law, must provide reasons for their conduct to be accepted. In order to do so, they have to stress the minimal formula whereby unlimited accumulation of wealth is an economic imperative. They have to claim that profits are under constant threat and that competition causes incessant anxiety. A moral relationship between human beings and their work must be established so that one’s paid activity turns into a ‘calling’, while the pursuit of profit has to be depicted as an innocuous passion that prevents other more destructive passions (Hirschman, 1977). Reasons for the acceptance of institutional violence may be of an individual nature or refer to the common good. However, in an effort to include both dimensions, the term justification has been used, which entails individuals finding grounds for engaging in the economic sphere, on the one hand, and groups appreciating that economic activity serves the common good, on the other (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2018). Deaths provoked by work, in this way, will not undermine the notion that the dominant economic system is the best possible and this notion will have to be supported by arguments that are sufficiently strong to be accepted as self-evident. Research has attempted to identify the factors that influence the perception of corporate violence, assessing the role of the following variables: support for the market philosophy, level of nationalistic feelings, socio-demographic characteristics and attitudes towards known violent cases. Findings show that individuals who support market philosophies and score highly on the nationalism scale are less

38  Institutional violence

likely to rate corporate violence as serious and more inclined to condone harmful business conduct (Michel, 2017). The denial of inconvenient truths that might damage business and adherence to myths around its social mission mirror the general, relative unwillingness to prosecute violent corporate crime. We have entered again the realm of consensus and hegemony. In Gramsci’s surprisingly enduring analysis, consensus and hegemony are closely related to the point of almost overlapping. Supremacy of a social group, as we have seen, manifests itself through coercion and consensus. Put differently, it springs from domination and from intellectual and moral leadership (Gramsci, 1971). Domination aims at subjugating, or even liquidating, rival groups. However, it is leadership that allows the exercise of power, as moral and intellectual values are widely spread, shared and ultimately internalized, even before power itself can be exercised. Conflicts between social groups result in the victory of the party which ‘captures’ the mind and political sensibility of the enemies, thus absorbing them in a hegemonic culture. Some groups, according to Gramsci, ‘for reasons of submission and intellectual subordination, adopt a conception of the world which is not their own but is borrowed from another group’ (ibid.: 327). In the domain of economic life, at issue is the idea of economic thought as non-ideological but irrefutably scientific, whose perpetuation must rely on support or, at least, on silent consensus. Let us examine how support and consensus may be built. ‘Freedom’ in labour markets consists of the encounter between those who use others as means to their ends and those who allow themselves to be used in that manner. ‘The superb meeting point of these two freedoms is called employment’ (Lordon, 2014: ix). This coerced freedom implies a form of capture, which consists of getting individuals to act on behalf of the capturer while closing down other avenues of their reproduction. In a formula indebted to Marxist analysis: ‘If the primary meaning of domination consists in one agent’s having to pass through another to access the object of desire, then evidently the employment relation is a relation of domination’ (ibid.: 12). Hegemony, in this realm, may be achieved through the dissociation of the figure of the consumer from that of the employee,

Institutional violence  39

with the former becoming predominant at the cost of life indebtedness. Domination through employment, moreover, tends to increase with the relocation of business, whereby the employees are forced to compete with colleagues scattered across the world who accept lower salaries and therefore a lower level of consumerism. Such competition generates uncertainty and fear, transforming the labour force into a fluid mass to be forged and governed as a component of a portfolio, as a mere asset at the disposal of investors. Consensus and hegemony thrive on threat, which incorporates violence and, at the same time, on forms of social control that seem to render violence unnecessary (Urry, 2014). Institutional violence inflicted by work is only one type of such violence, and does not require, unlike the type we now turn to examine, direct physical contact between the perpetrators and the victims.

Police violence Police brutality is ubiquitous and, limiting our focus on some ­European countries, mentioned below in alphabetical order, the ­following picture emerges. In Austria, brutality is mainly triggered by racism and prejudice against foreign nationals and ethnic minorities. Beatings and torture are perpetrated against African migrants, who are regarded as the source of the country’s drug problem. Hundreds of complaints by citizens and civic organizations are ignored every year. Institutional violence is also inflicted on prisoners and psychiatric patients (Amnesty International, 2016). In Belgium, an unprecedented escalation of assaults by police were recorded between 2005 and 2015. In 2013, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights convicted the country for human rights violations. An Observatory of Police Violence has operated since 2013, collecting testimonies and creating a safe space for victims of police brutality (ObsPol, 2016). The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance has accused the Croatian police of brutality against minority groups, particularly Roma people. The police have also been charged with ill treatment of refugees travelling from Serbia, including Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan nationals (ERRC, 2009). In France, there have

40  Institutional violence

been a number of high-profile cases of police brutality, as proven by recurrent reports by the European Court of Human Rights. Violence mainly targets minority groups, but also affects political protesters and activists. As a result of the increased number of cases of police brutality, the Collective of Stolen Lives has been created, which represents the families of those victimized (Meziane, 2013). In Germany, incidents of police brutality, like elsewhere, are caused by racism and xenophobic attitudes, and occur mainly during arrests and in custody. Political protesters are also targeted. Every year, some 2,000 complaints are filed (DW, 2015). Over the last few years, the level and severity of police brutality in Greece has been particularly alarming (Megaloudi, 2013). This appears to be the result of popular protest against the austerity measures introduced in response to the financial crisis. The police have been accused of making unjustified arrests, beating demonstrators and torturing suspects. In 2015, 15 anti-fascist protesters were arrested during clashes with members of the extreme-right party Golden Dawn. While in police custody, the anti-fascists were beaten up, burnt with cigarette lighters and kept awake by force. Two Greek journalists who reported the fact were fired. In Hungary, the Roma minority is constantly discriminated against and often victimized by police brutality. Political protesters are also hit, and during some demonstrations the police have raided restaurants and bars while looking for ‘radicals’, beaten innocent passers-by, news reporters and paramedics (Hungarian Spectrum, 2009). In the Republic of Ireland, the Garda acknowledged that tragedies resulting from police use of force will continue to devastate families and communities (Conway and Walshe, 2011). Over the last ten years, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture has on three different occasions expressed concern about police brutality and the Irish government has been forced to conduct a review of the police force, introduce complaints procedures and whistle-blowing protections. In Italy, excessive force is used by the police against migrants and political activists of the left, and in some cases officers have been found guilty of sexual violence. When such cases occur, an increase in the number of reported rapes is noted, as if police behaviour encouraged imitation

Institutional violence  41

(Pasha-Robinson, 2017). In the Netherlands, despite widespread support for enlightened values, the police force is not immune from brutal practices towards non-nationals. In a report published by Amnesty International in 2018, the police were found to be led by stereotypes regarding the relationships between criminal behaviour and specific ethnic characteristics (particularly those of Moroccan heritage). The report linked growing police violence with the spread of right-wing ideologies around the inferiority of certain human races (Amnesty International, 2018). In Poland, police brutality targets the Roma community and suspects with a view to gaining confessions. Police also use violence at sporting events (US Department of State, 2008; New Poland Express, 2015). Minorities are hit in Portugal, too, while in Russia due process is often denied to citizens, political opponents are treated brutally and human rights campaigners have denounced several cases of torture (The Economist, 2010). In Spain, police brutality is visually documented, pertaining particularly to political demonstrations. Images of violence against Catalan separatists circulated the world over in 2017, but the government made no effort to reform policing or establish complaint procedures. On the contrary, new legislation on public security introduced severe limitations to the right of assembly and expanded discretionary powers of enforcement. Latin American migrants are regularly targeted and the Committee for the Prevention of Torture found that, between 2004 and 2014, over 6,600 people reported to having suffered some form of torture at the hands of the police (Anonhq.com, 2015). In Sweden, the introduction of new rules dealing with illegal migration (Legally Certain and Efficient Enforcement) in 2013 led to the escalation of police brutality. Non-white Swedes, the poor and the homeless now see the country as a police state (Grobgeld, 2013). The UK Independent Police Complaints Committee has published statistics since 2004 and figures escalate every year: between 2004 and 2014 complaints against the police went up by 62 per cent. In the 2014–2015 period 17 deaths in custody or following police detention were reported and one fatal police shooting. Between 1990 and 2016, more than 140 people from black or other minority ethnic groups died under police custody (IPCC, 2016).

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A report published in 2018 showed an increase in complaints, in appeals and in independent investigations into serious cases (IPCC, 2018).

Disposable bodies Institutional violence, in the case of police brutality, expresses itself through the exercise of fear. This type of violence indicates the particular ‘conatus’ of power to grow indefinitely, unchallenged, through the violation of the laws that already considerably guarantee the perpetrators’ position of power. It could be argued that, with institutional violence, democracy is suspended, as contingent critical situations require the abandonment of constitutional niceties. In such situation, states are said to become ‘exceptional’, to ‘intensify physical repression and conduct an open war against the dominated classes or other subaltern or marginal forces’ (Jessop, 2016: 212). On the other hand, such intensification may well connote the permanent state of exception of democracies; the will to wage an open war on the dominated is an entrenched feature of the modern state. As stated at the beginning of this chapter, the institutional violence perpetrated by economic actors and that inflicted by state actors may blur and merge, as in the case below.

Defenders of the earth In 2016, at least 200 land and environmental defenders were murdered, the deadliest year on record. This trend is growing but also spreading: killings were dispersed across 24 countries, compared to 16 in 2015. With many killings unreported, and often uninvestigated, it is likely that the true number is far higher. ‘The tide of violence is driven by an intensifying fight for land and natural resources, as mining, logging, hydro-electric and agricultural companies trample on people and the environment in their pursuit of profit’ (Global Witness, 2017). The harsh competition for the Amazon’s natural wealth makes Brazil the world’s deadliest country in terms of the sheer numbers killed, though Honduras remains the most dangerous country per

Institutional violence  43

capita over the past decade. Soon, Nicaragua may rival that record, as an inter-oceanic canal is set to slice the country in two, threating mass displacement. Meanwhile, a voracious mining industry makes the Philippines stand out in Asia for killings of environmentalists. In Colombia, killings rose despite, or perhaps because, of the peace deal between the government and the guerrilla groups FARC. Areas previously under the control of the groups are drawing extracting companies, and returning residents are attacked for claiming the land stolen from them. Heavy-handed policing, repression of environmentalists’ protests and killings are on the rise in India, while in Africa defending national parks puts protesters’ lives at risk, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo. ‘It is increasingly clear that, globally, governments and companies are failing in their duty to protect activists at risk. They are permitting a level of impunity that allows the vast majority of perpetrators to walk free, emboldening would-be assassins’ (ibid.: 6). This type of institutional violence infringes international law ratified by the perpetrating countries. The law stipulates that all communities should be able to make free and informed choices about how their land and natural resources are used and developed. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights not only underscore the business and governmental duty to respect international human rights law, but also reiterate the importance of meaningful consultation with potentially affected groups.

‘Democratic’ missions Institutional violence perpetrated within the domain of international relations is accompanied by the celebration of democratic values. However, the invasions of, and wars against, undemocratic enemies require that the very democratic principles allegedly inspiring them be jettisoned. Such ‘democratic’ missions, launched in the name of universalistic values, in fact place some humans outside the universe of moral obligation. This notwithstanding, the word ‘war’ is prohibited; in its place we have ‘peacekeeping operations’ or ‘protecting civilian populations’. Soldiers are advised to present themselves as social workers.

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The suggestion that this kind of institutional violence is motivated by the mere pursuit of profit depicts only a partial picture. This violence transforms rules, experiments with new procedures and, ultimately, acts as a legislative tool. A new type of morality and legitimacy is established, precedents are created and illegal conducts are decriminalized. The invasion of ‘evil’ countries, torture, the use of prohibited weapons, extraordinary rendition and the like are examples of non-monetary crimes that transform the international law by violating it. Institutional violence demolishes the boundaries and channels of communication constituted by laws, destroying the political possibilities of those who are victimized. On the one hand, this violence encourages a ‘flight from the world’; it creates ‘absent persons’ who turn away from collective concerns (Sloterdijk, 2016). On the other hand, it produces particular subjects that can legitimately be victimized. When institutional violence hits, the fundamental capacity of the victims to be politically constituted is undermined: violating their body means incapacitating their ability to make independent judgements. Life is made precarious, human vulnerability is made evident and is compounded, while spreading physical and political incapability becomes the goal of sovereign power (Butler, 2004, 2009; Wilcox, 2015). This type of political violence does not prevent life from becoming ‘nasty, brutish and short’; it makes survival depend on the sovereign by denying its victims the minimum vitality to engage in primary political associations. Survival, here, is crucial, as institutional agents deploy their power to destroy life and, at the same time, to rescue it. In torture, medical expertise is used to minimize the death risk of those tortured: the victims have to remain healthy so that they can be tortured. ‘The limits of torture, precluding the death of inmates and their force-feeding, suggest that torture in this context operates under a logic that prisoners can be harmed, but that their lives must also be forcibly sustained by the state’ (Wilcox, 2015: 13). Institutional violence, through ‘democratic’ missions, aims to maintain and strengthen power relations, to produce human disability in a performative process that makes that violence acceptable,

Institutional violence  45

even necessary. In this case, institutional violence is not merely deterrent, but also constitutive because it forges a notion of enmity while marking increasingly drastic hierarchies. Torture, in brief, produces disposable individuals, hierarchically identifiable, subjects that can be tortured. Contemporary democracies may deny, or perhaps rejoice, that some primary sadistic elements characterizing them ensure their very survival. Can we detect democracies behind the following literary ‘vision’ of institutional violence?

The Marquis de Sade ‘Everything hinges upon the total annihilation of that absurd notion of fraternity. Between your self and some other self no connection whatever exists’ (Sade, 2012: 58). This is what we read in Justine, a novel that proposes an inverted version of Hobbes’ idea of the social contract. The world is divided into predatory heroes and passive victims, with the former allowed to choose the latter and, at the same time, to stipulate collaboration contracts among themselves. In 120 Days of Sodom, a utopian community is depicted, a full-blown social order made of authority, coercion and social stratification, and in Philosophy in the Bedroom that social order is energetically justified, as no universal value is said to exist, either in terms of social manners or in the sense of moral convictions (Sade, 1965). Sade would suggest that institutional violence, as discussed in this chapter, is a form of primitive perversion applied to social structures, implying the pleasure of ignoring socially imposed restraints and the thrill of law violation. ‘Whatever laws and moral values one may recognize, whatever decisions they prescribe, the greatest pleasure always results from the strict violation of the law’ (ibid.: 67). Were we born in a state of perpetual warfare? Excellent! ‘Is it not the only state to which we are really adapted? All men are born isolated, envious, cruel and despotic; wishing to have everything and surrender nothing’ (ibid.: 494). No Hobbesian social contract is necessary, therefore, because the vulnerable lose everything to the powerful, who think they deserve what they are able to grab. Sade believes that France approximates the social state of nature described by Hobbes, as the country is perpetually unjust and hides its violence behind fictional rules. The elite,

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as argued above, disregards the very norms that it creates and that determine its domination. The state of nature is, according to Sade, not a world located in distant times and places, but the hell we experience in our societies (Airaksinen, 2017). This hell, moreover, educates the powerful to perfect their savage skills and predatory plans. It is what happens in Silling, the isolated castle of 120 Days of Sodom (Sade, 2015) but also in Sodality, where the monks impart lessons and teach principles to Justine and other kidnapped girls, and as a result, one of them is named the General of the Benedictine Order of His Holiness. Simone de Beauvoir (1955) contends that Sade is shocked by homicide committed in the name of virtue and that he recoils in horror when universal laws authorize institutions to become criminals. When killing becomes constitutional, we are shown the disgusting effects that abstract principles can generate. Sade demolishes the notions of humanity and benevolence because he sees nobody practising them: ‘they are myths that aim at reconciling that which is not reconcilable, namely the unfulfilled appetites of the poor and the insatiable greed of the rich’ (ibid.: 48). Systemic violence, addressed in the previous chapter, feeds on and is fed by institutional violence, as the harm inflicted by the latter will result in novel social and political arrangements (and sharper inequality) which will, in turn, prove more harmful. The two types of violence augment each other’s lethal strength. Both, however, can be and often are challenged, as the following chapter will discuss.

4 Crowds and group violence

Reactions to systemic and institutional violence are the result of what Durkheim (1960, 1974) would describe as ‘a forced division of labour’, which causes resentment and triggers challenging collective initiative. A social force engaged in action for change emerges, a force that becomes aware of its ‘right of combat’. With this phrase Durkheim conveys a notion of vitality and at the same time of turbulence whose outcome is hard to anticipate. Collective action as persistent effervescence denotes magical moments and creative periods, when individuals transcend themselves and prefigure a higher (or simply different?) social order (Durkheim, 1965). Individuals integrate into a superior unit, as the experience of action results in moments of communion. As Durkheim contends, by acting above and beyond themselves, in concrete social practices, individuals achieve a form of solidarity based on new values: egoistical interests are provisionally set aside. The new social arrangements produced by collective effervescence may bring more stability but also more social disorder, a fear that constantly haunts sociology. We cannot clearly identify the ‘higher’ social order Durkheim expects from magical moments and creative periods, we can only detect his advocacy of a superior

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degree of moral regulation. Citizens’ active participation and the establishment of intermediary associations occupying the space between the state and individuals appear to be, in his view, the keys for more harmony and stability. ‘These heterogeneous community associations have been identified as an essential aspect of communal cohesiveness’ (Turner, 2006: 95). In this sense, what transpires from Durkheim’s project is a sense of optimism and a positive appreciation of collective effervescence. Awareness of a mounting ‘effervescent social force’, however, causes at the same time adverse feelings, concern and hostility. Commentators, intellectuals and the media can frame ideas and social action in a number of ways. They can select particular aspects or portray certain conducts in ways that elicit sympathy, suspicion or overt aversion. For example, the choice to label participants in collective action as protesters or as rioters leads to judgements about the motives of participants and the legitimacy of their claims. Also, framing events as episodic or as thematic may determine whether collective action is deemed a mere incident or a manifestation of wider social discontent (Gupta, 2017). The following are examples of both types of framing.

Masses, stupidity and mediocrity In the work of Gustave Le Bon (2008), something similar to effervescence seems to denote periods of transition and anarchy, when the power of crowds shapes events and the voice of the masses becomes preponderant. But in his work one mainly detects a form of dangerous turbulence, as the crowd, in Le Bon’s view, cannot accomplish anything requiring a high degree of intelligence; when the masses gather together it is not knowledge that they accumulate, but stupidity. Le Bon expresses fear towards mass participation in public affairs, in a sense anticipating similar, contemporary anxieties elicited by disorderly banlieus and threatening inner cities. The crowd furnishes individuals with a collective mind, which makes them feel and think in a manner quite different from that in which each individual would otherwise feel and think (Kornhauser, 1959). The crowd is inclined to destroy ‘those religious, political, and social beliefs in which all

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elements of our civilization are rooted’ (Le Bon, 2008: 34). It is incapable of reasoning, quick to act and adept at forging an ‘organized mental unity’. The crowd is, therefore, a psychological entity that unleashes instincts commonly kept under restraint; it triggers a mechanism of contagion and a hypnotic process leading to irresponsible action. Its constituents lose conscious personality and discernment and, as automatons, cease to be guided by their will, acquiring ‘the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, but also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings’ (ibid.: 39). Today the claims of the masses are becoming more and more sharply defined, and amount to nothing less than a determination to utterly destroy society as it now exists, with a view to making it hark back to that primitive communism which was the normal condition of human groups before the dawn of civilization. (Ibid.: 35) If for Le Bon the source of anxiety is the stupidity of the crowd, for Ortega y Gasset (1930) it is its mediocrity, vulgarity and lack of qualification. The accession of the masses to ‘complete social power’ is worrying in that the masses, by definition, ‘neither should nor can direct their own personal existence, and still less rule society in general’ (ibid.: 4).The multitude is said to undeservedly take possession of the sophisticated products of civilization, the refined creations of human culture, in the past reserved to the elite, such as theatres and art exhibitions. To be sure, the individuals who make up the multitude existed before, but not qua multitude, rather as individuals living in isolation, whereas now they install themselves in ‘the best places and in the preferential positions’, where ‘there are no longer protagonists, there is only the chorus’ (ibid.: 6). Ortega y Gasset is not referring specifically to the working class, but to ‘the people of the mass’ in general, the assemblage of persons who are devoid of qualifications and skills, who make no great demand on themselves, but feel entitled to make it on others. For instance, he notes the progressive triumph of ‘pseudo-intellectuals’, unqualified and ‘unqualifiable’, who do not feel the need to give

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reason or even to be right, but simply impose their opinions. This amounts not to the right to be right, he laments, but to the reason of unreason. Similar notions of the crowd were adopted in descriptions of group-organized violence throughout the nineteenth century, when for instance positivist criminologists saw the participants in the Commune of Paris (1871) as ‘atavistic criminals’, led to irrational violence by collective hypnosis. Conceding that agency played a part in rebellions, Lombroso (1894), however, detected in the insurgents several traits characterizing ‘complete criminal types and mad types’, arguing that most were ex-convicts, robbers, pimps or prostitutes. In the 1930s, when meditating on ‘a corpse’, namely the Popular Front that in France proved disastrous in fighting Nazism, Simone Weil (2018: 40) criticizes the Left for its dogma of progress and its ‘unswerving faith in history and the masses’. In her view, masses and crowds are ‘inattentive’: ‘If someone ever invents a method that would allow people to gather together without the extinction of thought in each mind, they will have produced a revolution in human history’ (ibid.: 37–38).

Profound honesty and plebian culture From a diametrically opposite standpoint, the Communards were seen as not criminal enough because they showed a sacred respect for the Bank of France (Marx, 1968), and Louise Michel (1979: 11), a leading participant in the Commune, wrote about the ‘terrible days when freedom touched us with its wing’. She recalled the greatness of the revolutionaries, but also the excessive hesitation resulting from their profound honesty. When groups come together in large numbers, they may elicit fear or hope and the fact that they come together in the first place alludes, for some, to a principle of popular sovereignty. Forms of assembly, in other words, are significant in themselves, whether or not they articulate demands (Butler, 2015). Analyses of crowds have focused on their role in history and on the material needs that cause uprisings, be these grain shortages

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or rapid processes of industrialization (Rudé, 1964). In the attempt to seek rational explanations, riots have been described not as ‘mindless, indiscriminate, or copycat incidents’, but as ‘purposive actions of impoverished labourers or minority groups seeking to better their lot’ ( Jones, 2000: 70). Popular protest, it is argued, rests on a mixture of traditional, inherent elements and derived elements. The former are based on direct experience, oral tradition and memory, while the latter are learned through participation and discussion of political, philosophical and religious ideas (Rudé, 1980). ‘Plebian culture’, according to Thompson (1971), could not advance if not supplemented by these ideas.

Hostile outbursts Riots are indeed part of the repertoire of popular protest, whatever stigmatizing reaction they may elicit. They are included among those hostile outbursts discussed by Smelser (1963), who frames collective violence in a general set of concepts, including conduciveness and strain. Conduciveness is not only associated with inequality, injustice and, in general, social discontent, but also with the presence of channels for the expression of grievances, and the possibility for communication among the aggrieved (think of the use of social media in recent riots). These channels of expression and communication are better functioning when riots are linked with large-scale social movements.‘The prime differences among terms such as a riot, revolt, rebellion, insurrection and revolution – all of which involve hostile outburst – stem from the scope of their associated social movement’ (ibid.: 227). Strain may stem from established cleavages which amount to social differentiation and which inevitably produce identity and at times resentment. Religious, ethnic, national, tribal and regional divisions are examples of such cleavages, which include divisions based on unequal allocation of wealth and power. Besides these established cleavages, hostility can emerge from new cleavages created by growing sensitivity towards previously neglected issues (think of the environment). Established cleavages can be termed ‘institutionalized strains’ and may give rise to chronic conflict, as

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for example conflict caused by ethnic, political, class and religious divisions. Riots, in these areas, may become an endemic feature of social life. Collective outbursts occur with regularity. They cluster in time, space and among certain social groupings. They emanate from norm-oriented or value-oriented movements, which respectively attempt to restore, protect, modify or create norms or values. Hostility, however, can emerge from divisions created by social movements themselves, which split society into opposing camps, each defining the other as responsible for a variety of evils. As beliefs spread, social movements develop, particularly when available channels of communication prepare participants for action through informal exchange of views or through organized propaganda and agitation. The power of the images and beliefs being exchanged is crucial, as is the effectiveness of the communication machinery utilized. Leadership may be important, although factions of well-organized networks acting as informal or decentralized reference points tend to replace traditional individual leadership.

Whose violence? Crowds express their anger through marches, rallies and the occupation of public space. At times violence erupts, resulting in skirmishes with hostile bystanders or police, destruction of inimical symbols, devastation or looting of shops.This is when collective action is given the label of riot. Studies conducted by criminologists in the 1960s and 1970s attempted to explain the logic of riots starting from the premise that every crime incorporates a political element. Often, crime is seen as the only possibility for bringing about social change, as all channels of the political process are inappropriate for, or insensitive to, the grievances of sections of the population. In Quinney’s (1971) analysis, crime is political in two senses: first, because it is statutorily defined as criminal while expressing political needs; second, because it elicits responses of a clear political nature. However, it is political resistance that overtly attracts the criminal label, as conducts of opposition give rise to a variety of legislative initiatives which evolve alongside the evolution of the forms taken by resistance. In the opinion of Quinney, collective action turns violent as a result of police intimidation and

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brutality, forcing demonstrators to self-defence. In this sense, riots are ‘police riots’, characterized by unlawful arrests, officers going on the rampage and hitting bystanders indiscriminately. With the ascent of critical criminology, riots return in the debate as ‘pre-political’ acts caused by a social system based on egoism and class domination. Their pre-political nature is also detected in the consumerist culture displayed through looting and the lack of strategy for the pursuit of social change (Taylor et al., 1973; Taylor, 1981; Walton and Young, 1988). Riots, in brief, though triggered by police harassment and racism, are seen as mere expressions of despair and nihilism. A popular philosopher, contemporaneous with critical criminologists, would be even harsher. Rioters, but particularly looters, in his view, are socially integrated, showing how opposing forces can find reconciliation. They do not contribute to the forward march towards justice, they are not dissenters. On the contrary, they express noisy consensus, celebrate their own unhappiness and recognize themselves through their commodities; ‘they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, kitchen equipment’ (Marcuse, 1966: 12). From another perspective, the street is seen as the place where the substance of political change is to be found because it is there that those who have no fighting repertoire, except for direct action, can express themselves. These are people whose concerns are not clearly represented in the electoral system, therefore, it is in the streets that they: harangue, heckle, march, chant, brawl and sometimes murder in the name of a cause or in pursuit of an injustice that needs to be corrected. Here too are to be found the riot police, magistrates, army, secret services and the whole panoply of the state’s authority. (Bloom, 2003: x) In this formulation, contentious politics emerges as a by-product of normal political struggles for power, and the relationship between policing and crowds is included among the defining features of the context (Mansley, 2013). Collective action is, therefore, described as

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situational, whereby violent choice is dependent on individual values, self-control, but also interactional dynamics between the actors involved. Let us see whether the examination of some recent examples validates this formulation.

Paris, 2005 The riots that erupted in France in October and November 2005 involved the burning of cars and buildings. The precipitating event was a police raid on a building site (which had allegedly been broken into) that caused a group of youths to flee and scatter in order to avoid interrogation. Three of the youths hid in an electric substation and two of them died from electrocution.Tension rose in the area and elsewhere and riots followed, triggered by what was deemed a serious episode of police harassment normally exercised against young minority members. Crowd violence erupted for three weeks and a state of emergency was declared. A young man who was injured and hospitalized stated that he was playing football with ten or so of his friends on a nearby field when they saw the police.They fled, he said, to escape the usual lengthy questioning and hostile attitude of the officers. The riots ignited pre-existing tensions generated by routine police brutality, particularly in suburbs inhabited by large groups of North African immigrants. Initially confined to the Paris area, riots spread to other localities, including rural areas. Thousands of vehicles were burned and one person was killed by the crowd while attempting to extinguish a fire near his home. On 16 November, the French parliament approved a three-month extension of the state of emergency, imposing curfews, allowing house-to-house searches and banning public gatherings. Mr Sarkozy, then Interior Minister, opted for a zero-tolerance strategy, mobilizing seven mobile police squadrons and seventeen companies of riot police, who were stationed in key areas, and whose inhabitants were described as racaille (scum). The term contains an implicit racist undertone, and after the arrest of some 120 people, Prefects were asked to deport them, including those in possession of a residence visa. Far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen

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applauded the proposal and called for naturalized French suspects to be deprived of their citizenship. Subsequently, the government announced harsher immigration laws and stricter control of ‘fraudulent marriages’. After ten years, the police officers who were more closely involved in the operation leading to the death of the two young men were acquitted (Haddad and Balz, 2006; Murray, 2006; Schneider, 2008; Jobard, 2009; Mucchielli, 2009; Hussey, 2014).

London, 2011 Crowds started gathering in Tottenham, London, after Mark Duggan, a local man, was shot dead by the police on 6 November. Clashes ensued, with patrol vehicles and a bus being destroyed and shops and homes attacked. Looting started at night and spread to many other London boroughs. After a couple of days, riots erupted in other ­English towns and cities, including Birmingham, Leicester, ­Manchester, Nottingham, Northampton and Coventry. Social media were instrumental in coordinating the movement and action of protesters, guiding groups of people where clashes were taking place. They were, however, also purveyors of discrediting ‘fake news’, such as the rumours that hospitals were being targeted. By 10 August, more than 3,000 arrests had been made across England, and more than 1,000 people had been charged of a criminal offence. One protester was charged with the theft of a bottle of water. Five people died and several more were injured. An estimated £200 million of damage was caused (BBC, 2011; Berman, 2014). An intense debate accompanied and followed the riots, and issues around race relations, institutional racism, unemployment, marginalization and economic decline were raised. ‘Breakdown theorists’ followed Le Bon in citing crowd dynamics or collective moral decay. In a selection of news headlines compiled by Clement (2016: 183) we find the following: ‘Flaming Morons’, ‘The Anarchy Spreads’, ‘Rule of the Mob’, ‘Yob Rule’. Terms such as ‘urban outcasts’ and ‘advanced marginality’ were used to emphasize the condition of disadvantaged groups in terms of ‘ghettoization, levels of precarious employment, criminalization and incarceration’ (ibid.: 184). Looting attracted the analytical efforts of philosophers and

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sociologists, with some detecting little political meaning in ‘shoplifting’ (Žižek, 2011; Winlow et al., 2015) and others relaunching, between the lines, the old slogan of a Dario Fo comedy, Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay (Bauman, 2011). Consumerism was indicted, but too much emphasis on ‘shopping for free’ was said to obscure the political and expressive character of the violence (Newburn et al., 2015).

Ferguson, 2014 The ‘battle’ of Ferguson (St Louis, Missouri) started after Michael Brown was shot dead by a white police officer on 9 August 2014. Crowd violence exploded as details of the shooting emerged, while curfews were established and riot squads deployed. St Louis and its suburbs were put under military control, with a display of tear gas, stun grenades, rubber bullets, camouflage uniforms, armoured cars, assault rifles, shotguns and automatic weapons (Newburn, 2014). Despite the militarization of the suburb, unrest continued in November, when the officer responsible for the killing was not indicted, and again on the first anniversary of Michael Brown’s death. Police violence against black people had been routine for a very long time, but now each act of brutality was given public resonance. The movement ‘reframed the way Americans think about police treatment of people of colour’ (Alexander, 2017: 28). The movement turned an endemic enforcement practice into an emergency: the swiftness with which this was achieved, along with the number of people it managed to mobilize, made every police killing a collective occasion to ponder on the value of black lives in the US. In Ferguson, the last words pronounced by Michael Brown were ‘I don’t have a gun, stop shooting!’ and demonstrators adopted these words as a chant. The last words of another victim, ‘I can’t breathe’, were printed on T-shirts and sported during the Freedom Rides organized by Black Lives Matter (Butler, 2017;Taibbi, 2017).The Rides echoed the spirit and history of similar marches organized in the 1960s aimed at ending racial segregation. One of the organizers said: The Black Lives Matter Ride [in Ferguson] is a call to action for black people across the country to come together and

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re-articulate our destiny. We believe that in order to move this country out of a cycle of destruction and trauma, we have to rise up. Ferguson represents both the repression that exists in black communities and our immense resilience. (Alexander, 2017: 31) The network structure of the movement was based on diffuse rather than dense ties among participants, with hubs connected to media organizations and individual reporters. Looting took place along with peaceful and violent protest. One wishes that protest always had the luminous characteristics displayed in the following short story written by Richard Wright.

Fire and Cloud In a collection of novellas titled Uncle Tom’s Children, we find Fire and Cloud, the story of Reverend Taylor, who muses about his earlier life when he was called by God to become a preacher (Wright, 1938). Like Moses, he was asked to lead his people out of the wilderness into the Promised Land. Now, there is despair and hunger in his black congregation, and after being denied food by the white authorities, he begins to doubt the direction of God’s leading. ‘Everything is scrambling in his hands, and each time he tries to think of some way out, of some way to stop it, he sees grey eyes behind icily white spectacles’ (ibid.: 245). It is the racism of those grey eyes that cause him to question his role as a biblically passive agent. Perhaps a demonstration would scare white folks into doing something. However, he refuses to lend his name to protesters who are organizing a march, but also refuses to dissuade them from action. This is why he is kidnapped and beaten up, and the whipping he receives is like fire, convincing him of the importance of mobilization: the crowd will be the cloud used by God to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. Normally, black people crossing a white neighbourhood are well conscious that they have to avoid running: they would be labelled immediately as burglars or street robbers. Now, as the black marchers move closer to the town, they meet groups of poor whites who join in.

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Looting and shopping Recent riots could be framed as the result of a process that, at the first stage, entails a form of ‘brutalization’, namely the experience of individuals as witnesses of violent acts suffered by others with whom they identify. The second stage of the process is termed ‘defiance’, and is characterized by the resolve of actors to put an end to the violence they have witnessed. With the third stage, ‘dominance engagement’, individuals and groups exert their violent responses as a way of deterring the violence by which they have been victimized (Athens, 1992, 1997; O’Donnell, 2003). In general, the violence deployed in riots appears to be ‘non-teleological’ in nature, in that it is not precisely linked to specific demands, but constitutes a request for recognition based on resentment (Žižek, 2008). Crowd violence, however, can be viewed from several other perspectives. It can appear as impotent rage hidden behind the spectacle of force. It can be judged as the expression of active agents of social change, rather than of passive victims of social injustice. Some commentators, in line with the tradition of critical criminology, may assimilate rioters to pre-political actors in need of official representatives and precise strategic guidelines. Appreciative viewpoints, on the other hand, see in the action of the crowd a collective statement, an example of direct democracy, a form of self-defence, an attempt to fight the injustice and barbarism of the existing order (Clement, 2016). Looting, when it occurs, can be regarded as a sarcastic response to pressure to buy as many goods as possible when resources to do so are lacking. Whether accompanied by looting or not, crowds are feared for other subliminal reasons, particularly when those composing them are mainly young excluded people. We need, therefore, to explore who is perceived as a potential rioter and what signs are deemed premonitions of crowd violence to come. Social disorder is commonly associated with the behaviour of potentially threatening strangers, such as verbal harassment on the street, open solicitation for prostitution, public intoxication and rowdy groups of young males. Physical disorder, in turn, is typically referred to markers such as graffiti, abandoned cars, garbage

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and the proverbial ‘broken window’. Social disorder, however, is a contested concept as its definition depends on a variety of concerns. The very notion of disorder, for instance, reflects the blurring of the boundaries between what is considered criminal and what is regarded as tolerable difference. Virtually any activity can be anti-social, depending on a range of background factors, such as the context in which it occurs, the location, people’s tolerance levels and expectations about the quality of life in a certain area. The presence of groups of youths, therefore, can often be associated with intimidation, rudeness and general unpleasantness, be it the language of fashion, mannerism or the way young people talk – irrespective of actual threat. The perception of behaviour as problematic, on the other hand, can be influenced by cues, or aesthetics, so that some people whose style is judged unpleasant are stigmatized for just being there. These people are easily seen as ‘pre-rioters’ and ‘pre-looters’. In brief, what is feared is less the criminal capacity of these groups than their apparent indolence, their absence from markets, their relative deprivation and, last but not least, their potential ability to rebel. Shopping is becoming not merely a political, but also a metaphysical issue in that it helps map identities, while the space claimed by consumers needs to be protected and gated: it requires the eviction of other human beings ( Jameson, 2008). Among the evicted are those who pose a threat to the ‘aesthetics of authority’, such as the young, the homeless, street drinkers and street sex workers. These groups constitute a threat to the consuming majority, and it is not by chance that the regeneration of urban centres (in the UK, for instance) has been implemented through the selling of public space to private chain retailers. Simultaneously, urban renaissance and projects revolving around cleaner and safer cities have been accompanied by the invention of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs). The process entails the cleansing of difference and the removal of untidiness and dirt. According to Walter Benjamin (1997), market economies display a pure cult of the useful. It is inevitable, therefore, that uselessness is associated with disorder. Markets enact a constant, dreamless celebration involving consumers as relentless adorers: they take on

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the traits of a religion. The opening hours of shops remind one of liturgical calendars in a cult which is more concrete and imperative than its religious counterpart. The circus-like and theatrical elements of commerce become part of a collective performance, while those excluded stand out as bearers of an inexplicable difference. The visibility of their scarcity (poverty) is threatening. Cities and their streets, on the other hand, can also provide a stage for rebellions, and they have always allowed groups to take shape, to appear on the scene and appropriate space (Lefebvre, 1996). Generally, revolutionary events take place in the street, showing that what appears to be disorder, in fact, may engender new types of order. The urban space of the street is a place for talk, where the exchange of words and signs is simultaneous with the exchange of things and ideas. With streets becoming corridors flanked by stores of various kinds, people are only tolerated if they limit themselves to brushing shoulders with others, if they do not interact. If not devoted to consumption and the celebration of the powerful, conquerors and death (what are monuments, after all?), then streets have to be stripped of their political potential, turned into blind fields, areas we resist, turn away from and struggle against: areas of disorder. Excluded groups are expected to populate the other place, the place of the other, the place of anomie. This is Lefebvre’s concept of heterotopy, which should be equated to a notion of chaos, formlessness, a menacing site that can explode, whether or not such a possibility is realistic. We are faced with a paradox: excluded from the market and its religion, materially denied the opportunities to develop a form of loyalty for ‘controlled consumption’, banned from collective formulations of political uses of the street, marginalized groups are expected to express a social sensibility that has been taken away from them. In sum, perceptions and accounts of crowds and their violence are deeply influenced by these subconscious judgements: of course, what is feared is the human and material loss they can cause, but more so is that their action may prepare or accelerate a process of radical social change.

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Benign and malignant aggression Crowds may be aggressive, but this is something that all humans share with animals, namely an impulse to attack (or flee) when vital interests are threatened.This type of defensive or benign aggression is enacted by crowds responding to racism, brutality and, in general terms, to discrimination, humiliation and injustice. Moreover, crowds respond to the threat to freedom, whose appreciation is not only the product of culture and learning, but also a biological necessity. Humans, in other words, fight for freedom because it provides them with the condition for their full growth, mental health and general wellbeing. The lack of freedom is unhealthy, it cripples (Fromm, 1977). In this respect, it is surprising that defensive or benign aggression, namely a very human impulse, is not more widespread, given the absence of freedom in all types of countries. And do indignant reactions to such aggression not signal that those enacting it are viewed as non-human? In defending their vital interests, crowds display self-­assertiveness, moving towards their goal ‘without undue hesitation, doubt or fear’ (ibid.: 256). Fear may arise when threats by the police are perceived, and such threats may provoke aggression or flight. The latter is often the case when a person still has a way out that saves a modicum of ‘face’, but if he or she is driven into a corner and no possibility of evasion is left, an aggressive reaction is more likely to occur. Fright, like pain, is a most an uncomfortable feeling, and man will do almost everything to get rid of it. One of the most effective ways of getting rid of anxiety is to become aggressive. When a person can get out of the passive state of fright and begin to attack, the painful nature of fright disappears. (Ibid.: 268) But whether initiated by the police or by demonstrators, this form of violence is defensive, as is looting, where those enacting it feel that their interests have been attacked and denied. And the way they are dealt with is both a reaction to their acts and the result of the way in which they are perceived, as argued above, well before looting.

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Erich Fromm also defines ‘malignant’ aggression, such as cruelty and destructiveness, which he sees as specific to the human species and virtually absent in most mammals. This kind of aggression is deemed phylogenetically programmed and not biologically adaptive: ‘it has no purpose, and its satisfaction is lustful’ (ibid.: 24). The author then anatomizes the different malignant aggressions meted out by Hitler, Himmler and Stalin. It can be contended, however, that powerful individuals and groups, too, may feel that their interests are threatened by crowds, although such interests amount to privileges. In this sense, what they enact can also be regarded as a variety of defensive aggression. On the other hand, nothing can stop crowds from turning malignant, particularly if their interactions with the authorities and sectors of the public lead to increasing mutual hostility. It is these two aspects that now deserve a brief observation. The social power and risk-taking attitude of materially privileged classes are a crucial variable contributing to their crime and delinquency. Such classes, moreover, inhabit specific generative worlds guided by key cultural elements facilitating criminality: unbridled competition, a pervasive sense of arrogance and an ethic of entitlement (Shover, 2007). With the variable ‘competition’ we indicate the ordinary climate prevailing in the economic and political arenas, where defeating the other opens the path to one’s success. The variable ‘arrogance’, in turn, alludes to the confidence accumulated through experiences of domination and the insolence gained through the lack of defiant responses. Finally, ‘entitlement’ implies offenders believing that external forces must not interfere with their just desert, namely their right to pursue power without external restraint. Politicians who believe in the ontological superiority of the system they represent may be persuaded that the defence of that system requires the deployment of any imaginable malignity. Powerful actors, in brief, may practise malignant aggression against enemies who threaten their interests and what they perceive as their freedom to dominate. Turning to crowds, the degree of malignity these deploy is determined by the relationships they establish with other organized social forces.

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Social movements Crowds may act with a political purpose but not be linked to a political project, and their action may or may not be the emanation of a social movement. Social movements, in their turn, need crowds more than crowds need social movements. Whether informally or institutionally organized, social movements are bound to connect with crowds and their contentious claims. They may find such claims uneasy, or on the contrary decide to inscribe them into their social and political agenda. At times social movements offer solidarity or services in the form of infrastructures while, at other times, an intelligentsia will attempt to lead crowds, although many would reject the very notion of leadership (William, 1958; Walzer, 2002). After all, the only aim of the intelligentsia, Lenin (1951) wrote, is to make special leaders unnecessary. In brief, when social movements link with crowds, they have a number of options. First, they may present themselves as the vanguard of the beliefs expressed in the street action and incorporate such beliefs into an organic, if provisional, programme. Crowds often already include members of social movements who will make attempts to proselytize and recruit those who, while participating in direct action, are deemed more politically conscious than others. If the social movement operates in the institutional sphere, possesses channels of communication with official agencies and links with decision-making agents, the new recruits will be involved in the routine negotiation practices of the social movement they join. In this way, violent actors within crowds, becoming participants in an institutional social movement, undergo a learning process leading them to clarify their needs, shape demands and engage in peaceful disputes. In this case, the political violence enacted by crowds constitutes a form of socialization, in that violence eventually subsides and evolves into bargaining skills and capacity to negotiate access to the public sphere and thus to resources. Social movements devoid of institutional status and official links with decision-making nodes will attempt to recruit those more prone to radical action and less concerned about negotiation opportunities. The vanguard of such movements will also perceive the

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determination of crowds and their radicalism as a justification for adopting increasingly radical forms of contention. The spontaneous and disorganized radicalism of the crowd, in other words, will be regarded as needy of structure, rational planning and, particularly, of further radicalization. Violent crowds, from this viewpoint, will be seen as in need of being ‘rescued’ by external forces capable of guiding and representing them. Violent groups within the area of social movements will then feel that they have a collective mandate to use force, confer continuity to it and ultimately lead the crowd through a strategic programme. Their violence will be an extension of the violence expressed by the crowd, and will aim at the same goals that triggered crowd violence in the first place. Crowd violence, however, can perform another function, namely the reinforcement of feelings of unity and conformity among those condemning it. This occurs when pressure mounts for the criminalization of violent crowds as well as violent groups and social movements allied to them. Subsequently, the space for collective action will be reduced and those who suffer defeat will be pushed into the search for new procedures for the achievement of their goals. Groups may conform to official norms when their ‘sacrifices’ are compensated by some sort of reward but, if adherence to official obligations only generates defeat and frustration, other avenues will be probed. Criminalization, in this way, will select members of crowds and of social movements, discouraging some from participating and encouraging others into more radical action. The latter, previously involved in situational violence, will now acquire skills in the exercise of planned strategic violence. This escalation is not determined by lack of institutional responses to political violence in general, but by the type of interaction between the authorities and protesters. Generalized repression of dissent will convince groups of dissenters that peaceful means are and will always be ineffective. In sum, the behaviour of agencies of social control in the face of hostile outbursts may encourage or discourage crowd violence. However, were it only a matter of force, it is probable that most expressions of hostility could be put down easily because of the massive disparity between the power of legitimate and illegitimate uses of force. When such disparity is fully displayed and, as a consequence, crowd violence fails to achieve its

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goals, aggrieved groups may just turn or return to other methods. On the other hand, vacillation on the part of institutional agencies in deciding to utilize force may discourage the spread of disorder, but may also generate an escalation in violent outbursts, either on the part of the specific violent groups or among aggrieved groups in general. Armed struggle is the definition adopted in this book to describe the activity of individuals and groups who become promoters or participants in that escalation, and is examined further in Chapter 6. What follows, meanwhile, hypothesizes another possible evolution of crowd violence.

Multitude The mass is amorphous and often inactive, while crowds, as we have seen, have a bad name. Did the use of the term multitude spread due to the lacklustre reputation of both? The multitude is not a mass nor a crowd; it is also distinct from the concept of people. People and multitude emerged as entities, taking shape during the state formation processes that occurred throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. People are defined by their unitary character, specifically by their location in a national context and their obligations towards a common authority. A multitude, by contrast, is characterized by plurality, by its permanent presence in the public sphere, ‘in collective action, in the handling of public affairs, without converging into a One, without evaporating within a centripetal form of motion’ (Virno, 2004: 22). People exist thanks to the state, which delimits their liberty, while the multitude generates civil liberties. People have one will, while the multitude possesses a plurality of wills and desires, a distinction that, for some, indicates the proximity of the latter to the state of nature. Hobbes (1984) was horrified by the existence of the multitude, which he associated with the amorphous traits that precede the formation of the body politic. The multitude, according to Hobbes, shuns political unity, resists authority, does not enter into lasting agreements, never attains the status of juridical person because it never transfers its

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own natural rights to the sovereign. The multitude inhibits this transfer by its very mode of being (through its plural character) and by its mode of behaving. (Virno, 2004: 23) From this viewpoint, the multitude epitomizes the notion of ‘anti-­ state’, as it is composed of individuals who are unable to become citizens and who constitute a threat to the monopoly of political decision making. As such, the multitude has no voice, should be confined to the private rather than the public sphere and excluded from common affairs. Contemporary appreciations of the multitude find their strength exactly in the aspects that Hobbes abhors, that is the multitude’s ability to challenge decisions made by authority, but also its being constituted by a large variety of cultures, identities and lifestyles. ‘The challenge posed by the concept of multitude is for a social multiplicity to manage to communicate and act in common while remaining internally different’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: xiv). The structure of the multitude is said to reflect the contemporary mode of production, its networked organization and the very ‘immaterial’ nature of its production. Multitudes produce communication, relationships, forms of life, images, ideas and affects. We will call this newly dominant model bio-political production to highlight that it not only involves the production of material goods in a strictly economic sense, but also touches on and produces all facets of social life, economic, cultural and political. (Ibid.: xvi) The multitude marks a shift from centralized forms of political contention as its networked structure is adaptable to a diversity of struggles. These include the fight against poverty as well as the fight for democracy, freedom and equality. The fight for peace, it is contended, is central and coincides with the fight for democracy because war has become a foundational element of politics and the state of exception has become permanent. The organizational layout of the

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contemporary multitude, in its turn, announces the end of insurrection as a means for achieving radical change, as the multitude, rather, builds a new society through ‘resistance, exodus, the emptying out of the enemy’s power’ (ibid.: 69). In a less optimistic rendition, however, the multitude is ambivalent, as ‘it contains within itself both loss and salvation, acquiescence and conflict, servility and freedom’ (Virno, 2004: 26). What both the optimistic and pessimistic versions of the multitude overlook is how, rather than creating new forms of life, individuals and groups composing crowds, social movements or, for that matter, multitudes, may destroy life itself. The selective process briefly described above, in other words, may encourage the fight for peace, on the one hand, and the war on war, on the other. Armed struggle, examined in Chapter 6, is a form of political violence generated by this process of radicalization. But before addressing this process, the next chapter, in the form of a literary break, looks at another issue, namely, how radicalization can remain compressed in an intimate imaginary stance, giving rise to intentions and fantasies, but somehow refusing to translate into acts. Criminological analysis may be inspired by such form of desistance.

5 Conspiracy and the contemplation of crime

Radicalization does not necessarily lead to immediate violent action: at times, it entails taking a distance from official political contention, or even exiting the world rather than striving to change it. Radicalization can foster feelings of revenge, which is one of the motivating factors for human violence, as shown by gang retaliation enacted across the world for real or alleged wrongs suffered (Eisner, 2009). Actual revenge may deter attackers from attacking again, but in many cases it remains at the inchoate stage of murderous fantasy or homicidal ideation. Research conducted in one of the most peaceful societies in the world found that around 25 per cent of young men and 13 per cent of young women resident in Zurich had had frequent ruminations about killing a person they knew during the past 30 days. ‘Victimisation experiences cumulatively lead to more, and more intensive, thoughts of brutal revenge, especially among men’ (Eisner, 2017: 8). Murderous fantasies, however, may turn into desistance from political violence, as we shall see in this chapter, a process which begins well before a violent political career commences. The protagonists of Paul Nizan’s novel presented below model violent imaginaries, but what stops them acting is failure to join like-minded individuals, inability to develop practical techniques to engage in action and absence of an enabling community (Richardson, 2006).

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Paul Nizan (1905–1940) is known in France as the ‘impossible communist’ for his long-term allegiance to the Party and the abrupt cancellation of his membership in the late 1930s, following the Nazi–Soviet pact. This chapter discusses a number of his writings, focusing particularly on his best-known novel, The Conspiracy, in which a revolutionary cell plans illegal political action. Conflict, nihilism, suicide and betrayal are among the topics stemming from the novel, which will be examined from a criminological perspective. The analysis will primarily address ‘cultural’ aspects of crime and refer to notions such as ‘thrill’ and ‘the seduction of crime’ among others. These notions, it will be argued, require some revision in the face of the imagined or actual criminality described in the novel.

Conflict Paul Nizan, a friend and classmate of Jean-Paul Sartre, studied classics and philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure. At 22 he joined the Communist Party while starting his career as a novelist, essayist, polemicist, literary critic and political journalist (Rubin Suleiman, 2005). Sartre is often mistaken for Nizan and congratulated for the books written by the latter. The two share the view that teaching humanities is teaching the big mistakes of the past (Sartre, 1938). Initially fascinated by Calvinism, although not believing in God, Nizan is attracted to Protestant ‘morality’ and to communism in equal measure and reaches celebrity with his very first book (Aden, Arabie) at the age of 26. In this book, he describes relationships of domination in all their nakedness, and in the undisguised colonialist oppression he understands Europe better, its social evils well hidden beneath a veneer of cultural and personal freedom (Nizan, 1973; Benjamin, 2011). Driven by feelings of solidarity, his journey through the Arab countries reveals how ‘naked power’ renders humans just as naked, and this is what interests him: beyond the linguistic, ethnic or political differences, he seeks human nudity, bare humanity, the others as his brothers and sisters or as himself (Allam, 1999). He sees the essence of European capitalism stripped of the thick philosophical veneer justifying its existence and, after laying bare the spiritual and existential poverty of economic and political domination, he returns to France

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determined to fight. In the final image of the book, with violent surrealist intensity, he sees the defeat of the dominators taking the form of soldiers in black jackets lying motionless on the ground, their arms stretched out, in the middle of a funereal Place de la Concorde. This instinctive appreciation of social conflict is later sustained by theoretical considerations. Nizan criticizes Durkheim in a long endnote to his The Watchdogs, where functionalist sociology is described as an attempt to establish an artificial form of communion among people and pacify them, irrespective of the injustice they experience. Whether it be mathematics or collective representation, everything in Durkheim leads to social harmony. Bourgeois philosophy tries very hard to conceal the war raging throughout society, a war it does not dare declare – beneath the celestial veil of an imaginary peace, a peace it is incapable of establishing on earth. (Nizan, 1971: 156) In a critique of Henri-Louis Bergson’s work (1911), Nizan appreciates that the philosopher addresses the processes of immediate experience and attributes to these more significance than abstract rationalism or science for understanding reality. However, he notes that, after promising to address the concreteness of nature and life, the celebrated philosopher ends up replacing immutable abstractions with new ones, giving the appearance of life to mystical objects and substituting a vocabulary of movement for one of rest. Nizan (1967) describes as watchdogs all the professional guardians of the status quo, the intellectuals who never cease to protect and glorify a specific social group, usually their own. Such professional guardians may be pure metaphysicians, like Durkheim, or practical individuals such as judges. The latter sit in their sinister criminal courts, in domestic as well as in colonial territories, and keep sentencing rebels to death or to forced labour (Schalk, 1979). Nizan’s invective is primarily focused on philosophy, but his arguments extend to other academic disciplines, all in his view engaged in devising a very sophisticated set of principles and constructs supporting social stability. Some study

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philosophy, he remarks, without grasping the meaning and direction of what they are studying. Others may be vaguely motivated by the notion that philosophy involves ‘good intentions’ toward humanity, ‘and that through the pursuit of philosophy peace will spread among the men of good will’ (ibid.: 67). Nizan contends that abstract knowledge, and for that matter intelligence, can be used both for and against humankind. Philosophers can concentrate on eschatological truths or on concrete issues such as, for example, the incidence of tuberculosis in Paris. Those who choose the first path might be endowed with elegance of argument, technical subtlety and high stylistic skills, but live apart from society, having freed themselves from the chains of locality. They are heads without bodies, and by abstaining from reality they become lighter than angels. While providing abstract definitions of liberty, and at the same time by claiming neutrality and abstention from choice, in fact they make a partisan choice, thus participating like everybody else in the impure actuality of their time. ‘During WW1 they did what the generals told them to do, if they were too old to be mobilized, they followed with docility the ignorant popular movements and exhorted those who were mobilizable to die’ (ibid.: 68). Nizan urges students to stay away from these docile clercs of the bourgeoisie and not to wander on to the polished paths and frozen corridors of a spiritualist philosophy. However, he ardently believes in knowledge and intellectual activity, as his teaching and popular journalism testify. The public enemy number one, in his view, is illiteracy. Culture, however, resembles medicine: it can cure or kill. In the former case, it can help attain consciousness of the social reality, which in turn can assume an explosive value. Learning processes are of revolutionary significance, and the only obstacles preventing them from turning into tools for genuine social transformation are erected by the watchdogs and their deceptive philosophizing.

Conspiracy In Nizan’s most famous novel, The Conspiracy, a small group of young men of that awkward age between 20 and 24 decides to express its

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aversion to social injustice through the publication of a journal, Civil War, and to spread it, along with their anger, in the public domain. The plot is focused on the lives of five students, Rosenthal, Laforgue, Bloyé, Jurien and Pluvinage, and events take place between July 1928 and December 1929. Their ideas and projects are presented as no more than a series of ‘inconsequential gestures’ typifying the instability of young men in transition from childhood to manhood, ‘young men whose dependent student status ultimately places them at the periphery of social activity and deprives them of seriousness and credibility’ (Scriven, 1988: 151). Rosenthal believes in the pedagogical properties of political and philosophical literature and is confident that a new journal will ignite the revolutionary spirit of the masses. Laforgue is seized by a desire to rebel against his own wealthy condition and sees society’s true contours masked behind the myths of freedom, religious creed and hypocritical brotherhood. He conspires against his own social class, and such an endogenous betrayal is described by Nizan (2011) as threatening to bourgeois stability more fundamentally than any collective oppositional action. Contentious politics, for Nizan, is by now a tolerated but ineffective part of the ‘democratic’ process, a painless routine. Rosenthal and Laforgue share dreamy ideas and hopes, and their nobility lies in their will to subvert the system. Pluvinage, on the contrary, is a man of action, but his feverish activism ‘cannot but end badly, because he is basically concerned only with vengeance and believes in his destiny without any ironic reflection upon himself ’ (ibid.: 18). It is he who suggests that the front cover of Civil War should carry a machine gun. Sartre (1938: x) detects in some of these young men the fatal lightmindedness and the aggressive futility of those who have no duties and are by nature irresponsible. Nothing can really engage them, not even their membership of militant parties: this is a temporary diversion, devoid of consequences, as they can ‘always return to the embrace of their class’. ‘Conspiring’ for them is a way of whispering, sharing little mysteries and inventing implausible dangers. Their tenuous intrigues amount to a game, a feverish but abortive game, a form of play-acting whereby they lie to themselves while knowing they are running no risk.

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The inclination of the group towards radicalism is not guided by love for humanity or any other mawkish philanthropic feeling, theirs being a natural impulse to revolt. Humanitarianism, in their view, is tantamount to affectation, a thin veneer leading action nowhere. It is not cruelty and oppression they are fighting against, but idiocy, the prime quality of a declining, doomed system. They are stirred by the dull logic of power more than by its crimes, and their fight is not for the workers, who definitively refrain from imitating them, but for themselves, although the working class is in their mind their natural ally. Predestined victors of history, they embrace a philosophy of the inevitable, prefiguring a future stage in which society reaches harmony, shuns conflict and bans hypocrisy. Consequently, their mission consists of exposing mendacity in an ambitious plan to extend Marx’s analyses of the fetishism of commodities to all dominant values and principles. Such an extension would construct a universal classification of deception (Redfern, 1972). A modern encyclopedia is what they envisage as their contribution to revolt, one which announces through clear expressive means the big lie embedded in the status quo, unsettles the smug agents of domination and prophesies their demise. A Hegelian encyclopedia, theirs will, however, seek inspiration from Spinoza, his pantheism embracing in inclusive tolerance all genuine expressions of nature and humanity. People are suffocating inside shells of mendacity. We shall tell those hermit-crabs why they are dying. They’ll be furious with us, nobody likes truth for its own sake. But Marx said men must be given consciousness of themselves, even if they don’t want it. (Nizan, 2011: 42) This educative programme aims at infusing with an identity people who are dying without one, and includes a project of denigration addressed to all received ideas. It amounts to profanation of what society holds dear: when victorious on a world scale, they will, like Lenin once said, use gold for the purpose of building public lavatories in the streets of some of the world’s largest cities. Nizan displays both

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denigration and sympathy for these young people, who are not yet aware of how formless the world is, and how hard it is to fight against a ‘gelatinous mass with neither head nor tail, a kind of enormous jellyfish with hidden organs’ (Scriven, 1988: 149). After three months, Civil War enjoys the support of 500 subscribers and 800 single-copy purchasers, while three publishing houses give the journal paid advertising. But revolution, they realize, requires more than articles, and radical change ‘can be measured only by the sacrifices one makes to it and the risks one runs for it’ (Nizan, 2011: 48). The reader feels that, finally, the group of young men starts planning practical, risky action. But the plan is relatively tame. They set up a tiny network of industrial and military espionage, and Simon, an old friend who has joined the army, is asked to conspire with them by stealing the military defence plan for Paris, Area 2, which is locked in the barracks, in a little cupboard, rather like the lockers in school dormitories. Simon obliges and rummages among the files marked ‘confidential’ or ‘secret’, meeting no difficulty in discovering the only important item, the defence plan for Area 2. It is a notebook which, with extreme baldness, evokes war, revolution and civil strife, and places troops, machine guns and mortars in strategic city spots. Simon does not steal it but diligently copies its contents and sends it to Rosenthal. When he is found out, he excuses himself by saying that he is fascinated by that material and intends to write a novel with it. The spying activities, in brief, remain chimerical and fail to spark a militant action of sort, rather they signal the beginning of the end of the revolutionary cell. One of the boys commits suicide, and immediately afterwards Pluvinage is suspected by his associates to have reported to the police a generous gentleman who is hosting a member of the Communist Party on the run. When the evidence of the betrayal is undeniable, we learn that what really attracted Pluvinage to the group was the possibility of turning revolutionary ideas into illegal conduct; it was, therefore, the hidden, clandestine nature of its project. His intense vocation for mystery, unfulfilled by subversive activity confined to the publication of a journal, can now be directed elsewhere: he suddenly sees himself destined for the religion of police work, the discipline of the Special Branch.

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‘Some great idea must guide spies and informers, if they wish to survive. It is necessary for them to believe in the sacred character even of their treachery’ (ibid.: 222).

Active and passive nihilism Social movements scholars may view Paul Nizan’s conspiracy as an improbable example of collective action, as despite being based on an informal network of individuals and being engaged in conflict, it lacks the third key characteristic of social movements, namely the capacity to produce and be produced by collective identity (Diani, 1992). There is no socio-economic homogeneity among Nizan’s conspirators, who possess a ‘weak’ identity and are constantly troubled by uncertainty: they aristocratically distance themselves from the social groups whose aspirations may share some aspects with theirs but, at the same time, identify the enemy of those groups as their own. They are able to shift from denigration of the idiocy of power to allegiance to its formally appointed guardians, as if being inured to conspire they found it easy to engage in conspiracy even against their peers and themselves. Criminologists may refer to relative deprivation and deviant adaptations, mobilize subcultural and conflict theory, or turn to symbolic interactionism to surmise how oppositional behaviours are constituted and enacted. Some would focus on the ‘stylized dynamics of threatening or illicit’ conduct and modes of resistance (Carrabine et al., 2002: 75). Focusing on cultural aspects, they would explicate the attractions of ‘doing wrong’, as marginality accompanied by transgression may be exciting, a thrilling experience far more exhilarating than conformism (Katz, 1988; Presdee, 2000; Ferrell et al., 2008). Illicit conspiracy can be located in everyday life, a site of drama, tragedy and joy, and captured as a holistic phenomenon, with ‘its adrenaline, its pleasure and panic, its excitement, and its anger, rage and humiliation, its desperation and its edgework’ (Young, 2011: 84). Rule-breaking, in this perspective, is seen as a way of manufacturing excitement, escaping boredom, feeling alive and expressing subjectivity. Hedonism and sensual aesthetics are variables used by Katz (1988), who includes violent behaviour among those illicit

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conducts replete with seductive significance. Playfulness and excitement, therefore, are seen as the basic traits of offending, which requires investment of energies and provides the sensation of living intensely (Cusson, 1983). Sartre (1938: xii), who is not a criminologist, maintains that ­Nizan’s is not a novelist’s style, sly and hidden, but a style of combat, a weapon. In The Conspiracy, however, combat consists of a merely abstract fight seducing those who limit themselves to planning it. In Nizan’s novel there is no carnival of crime but of inaction, a contemplative posture adopted by the protagonists who seem satisfied with merely savouring their illicit purposes. The thrill for them is not produced by the illegal operations they carry out, rather it stems from the illegality of the field in which they intend to operate, while their excitement is augmented by the incapacity to make decisions and to act consequently. Nizan’s (1973: 2) most celebrated sentence is ‘I was twenty: I will not allow anyone to say it is the most beautiful age in life’, which conveys a mixed sense of hesitancy, impotence and unfulfilled desire. Criminologists who emphasize the stylistic, spectacular, cultural aspects of deviant acts may want to consider the seductive nature of inertia, procrastination, pessimistic indolence. Transgression, in sum, may just consist of metaphorically choosing one’s side of the barricades. But in what way can we interpret inaction as transgression? One way could be to equate Nizan’s conspiracy and its inertia with a form of political oblomovism, as superbly incarnated in the novel by Ivan Goncharov (2005). Oblomov would answer ‘no’ to the question ‘to be or not to be?’ because he is incapable of making important decisions or undertaking any significant actions. The son of an upper-middle-class member of the Russian landed gentry, he raises lassitude and apathy to an art form; he conducts his daily business from his bed, and when he glances at his slippers he is horrified by the thought of extending his feet in their direction. If he calls his servant, who arrives panting in his bedroom, he forgets why he called him and after shouting ‘return to your room until I have remembered’ decides that oblivion is preferable. According to conventional interpretations, Oblomov personifies the ineptitude and uselessness of landowners in pre-industrial societies, where

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innovation and enterprise are discouraged. The novel is deemed a story of non-events, of physical and mental immobility, which are rendered subtly morbid by the slow, obsessive rhythm of the narrative. The main character, chained as he is to inaction, and engulfed in spiritual paralysis, is said to be the emblem of a tragic and fascinating aspect of the Russian spirit, namely the reluctance to accept the throb of reality. Such reluctance is supposedly rooted in Oriental fatalism and in the typically Asian exaltation of the primacy of contemplation over action. Another way of approaching inaction could be to praise it for its philosophical proximity to radical criticism of economic activity, a form of atheism addressed to the religion of incessant development. Nizan’s conspirators, in this sense, could be regarded as examples of subversive anti-productivity, critics of the concept of economic growth and the sanctity of labour. As Oblomov senses that by devoting his time to action he might only generate useless products and wealth, so Nizan’s characters find action repulsive because it does not change things. This leads us to another interpretation. Nizan’s conspirators are conceptual figures, purveyors of scepticism and negative faith. They have lost interest in the world as it is, having reached awareness of their own inability to change it. Similar to Plato’s sophists, they can express one conviction with the same vehemence with which they support its opposite, and their lack of a sense of self leads them to think of all potential identities as so many optional roles they can play (Cutrofello, 2014). There is no destructive power in their negation, and their revolutionary indecision, which initially contains failure but also potential, will stay with them until they succumb. The type of nihilism depicted by Nizan, in brief, is passive because real goals are lacking, as are responses to the real. This type of nihilism is symptomatic of the ‘innervation of the will’, and because it is impossible for ‘the will not to will’, the history of passive nihilism culminates ‘not in the cassation of the will but in a will to nothingness’ (ibid.: 75). Hesitation, however, may coincide with awaiting the decline of the dominant values before attempting the creation of new ones. It can be regarded as a strategic choice rather than equated to indecisiveness. Delaying or tarrying is characteristically philosophical,

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and taking one’s time is anti-rhetorical: ‘Philosophers conduct their arguments in peace and at leisure […] Meanwhile, the man of rhetoric always has to speak under pressure of time; for the water clock hurries him forward’ (Chappell, 2005: 121). Expressing a similar opinion, Antonio Negri (2001) sees in the culture of grief and nothingness a form of action, a critique of dialectical thought which supposedly unites without generating innovation or ruptures. Delaying, therefore, may be revolutionary, as it hides the silent excavation and subterranean tunnelling which, eventually, will allow for conflict to make a sudden appearance. It is what Marx (1996: 546) sees as the invisible preparatory work leading to the fateful rebellions of 1848, which he hails with the unforgettable: ‘Well grubbed, old mole!’ The mole may be delayed, but is bound to come to light. Paul Nizan appears to confirm this view of inaction as transgression when he finds parallels between the age of Epicurus and his own. While in Plato’s time it is still possible, Nizan argues, to wish for the collective emancipation of society, during a period of debacle such as that witnessed by Epicurus (341–271 BC) one can only remain alone. In the oppressive and violent world experienced by Epicurus, the only possible salvation is that of the individual. Nizan emphasizes a similar doctrine of separation from society, using the word ‘secession’ to synthesize his views. A wise man will secede from active life, from ‘the savage struggles within the Athenian polis’ (Schalk, 1979: 70). In this respect, ataraxia is the key condition, the state of an undisturbed or unbothered soul, a kind of tranquility which is almost identical to pleasure, or to ‘thrilling excitement’, as it were.

Suicide If the culture of nothingness amounts to a strategy of delay, how can we situate suicide in the political framework drawn by Paul Nizan? Positivist criminologists attribute to individualistic political offenders, like those portrayed by Nizan, a form of congenital criminality associated with vanity, megalomania and intermittent geniality. Mystical figures, they embrace a dogma and are capable of impressing

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their followers with acts which may cause their own death. In fact, they are happy to die (Lombroso, 1894, 1902; Lombroso and Laschi, 1890). Nihilists are seen as obsessed by the differences between the wealthy and the destitute, and regicides such as Luigi Lucheni, who murdered the Austrian Empress, are described as philanthropic killers who expect, in turn, to be killed. Suicide, along with martyrdom, will be analyzed in more detail in Chapter 7. What should be noted here is how suicide may be enacted by those who feel that their ‘right of combat’ (to use a Durkheimian term) has been restricted to acts of self-injury. Self-inflicted harm, then, represents the control and triumph over one’s fate when such fate is being decided by others. More of this later. Lévinas (1987) argues that the distinctive feature of classical tragedy is the hero’s ability to commit suicide, as in the face of horrifying predicament, and when everything else fails what rebels have got left is their power to die. In Durkheimian terms again, the suicide of one of Nizan’s conspirators is not of an ‘egoistic’ type, namely it does not signal low levels of integration in a social group nor lack of identification with collective life and social pursuits. On the contrary, it is ‘altruistic’ suicide, marking the bonds the conspirator believes to have established with its natural ally: the working class. Ultimately, it is hard to assimilate this ‘altruistic’ self-annihilation into the ‘thrill and seduction’ paradigm, as this form of extreme transgression, while creating and inhabiting a web of meaning, excludes hedonism and playfulness from the feelings of those performing it. To paraphrase and upturn Sartre’s observation that communists cannot write a good novel because they have no right to become accomplices of their characters, we might say that criminologists cannot write good books unless they become complicit with the subjects they study, not only when they enact carnivals, but also when they commit suicide.

Betrayal and desistance Betrayal can be regarded as a form of moral suicide and is the second option available to unsuccessful conspirators. Jean-Paul Sartre (1973) includes it among the manifestations of radical impotence that failed

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revolutionaries transmit to younger generations when, defeat after defeat, rather than their wisdom and the fruits of their experience, all they have to teach is their past mistakes. Pulvinage is Nizan’s traitor and his father is chief clerk for burials in the Préfecture de la Seine. Close proximity to cemeteries, mortuaries and death compounds the deep sense of humiliation and resentment he harbours for his lowly social situation. As a student, he experiences both shame and inferiority in the presence of Rosenthal and Laforgue, who loaf in the superior social condition of their family. People like me are only capable of being loyal to winners, he confesses. Pluvinage, a loser by birth, cannot remain loyal to a party of losers (Scriven, 1988). Pluvinage has a great classical precedent, a member of the ‘group of five’ in Dostoevsky’s (1971) The Devils. The violent conspiracy of this group ends when Lyamshin locks himself in his room for hours; he seems to attempt suicide, but does not succeed. He then rushes off to the police, crawling on his knees, sobs and shrieks, kisses the floor, crying that he is not worthy to kiss the boots of the high officials who stand before him. They calm him down and speak nicely to him. He tells them everything, absolutely everything: all the facts, all he knows, anticipating their questions, giving them information about things in which they are not interested and they would never have thought of asking him. The thrill he has long associated with the clandestine activity of his group returns now in his conspiracy against his former conspiracy partners. Albert Camus (1981) turns betrayal into an act of violence which purportedly erases the violence previously perpetrated by revolutionaries and missionaries alike. He highlights the continuity in the core attitude of conspirators in spite of their apparent drastic shift. In L’Exil et le Royame, the Renegade, a former missionary, undertakes to convert with violence a notoriously cruel people. He is instead converted by them. When he hears the news that a new missionary is to arrive, the Renegade steals a gun and waits in ambush to murder him. In his symmetrical behavior, he has not changed. The thrill experienced in the previous allegiance turns into the thrill to cause harm to those who continue to be seduced by their own transgression. Seduction, in this case, is desistance

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from previous acts, a return to ‘normality’ or conformism. Criminologists emphasizing culture, therefore, may want to explore the thrill provoked by desistance, the passionate subjection experienced by Pluvinage, Lyamshin and the Renegade as a novel form of transgression. The criminological literature on desistance only partly and rarely captures this mechanism, and when it does it attributes a crucial role to the variable ‘imagination’. A ‘respectability ­package’ is referred to as a major influence on offenders’ desistance, a package formed of job stability and marriage (Giordano et al., 2002). Other key personal resources cited in the process are cognitive skills (­ Paternoster and Pogarsky, 2009), self-mastery (Maruna, 2001) and the ability to form high-quality social bonds (Laub and Sampson, 2001). Often associated with personal determination gained through family ties, desistance from crime is also linked to more general forms of social capital (Coleman, 1988) and to religious affiliation (Adorjan, 2012). In other contributions, the s­ ituational coping mechanisms investigated are used by desisters to overcome barriers to change and achieve meaningful lives. The self, it is suggested, emerges from a sense of temporal continuity between the past, the present and the future, and as humans possess a strong ­future orientation, they strive to understand the ‘wherefore’, namely the potential trajectory of their lives. In this sense, ‘the desistance process is also characterized by the active pursuit of a desired future self ’ (Healy, 2014: 874). Ex-offenders, therefore, must experience an internal shift which prepares them for change, and this is determined by the presence of new social networks opening up to them which promise the construction of a new identity. This shift may be simultaneous with an experience of ‘emotional mellowing’, which reduces the attractiveness of crime and enhances the ability to manage emotions (Giordano et al., 2007). Desisters, on the other hand, may adopt a redemptive attitude and display the wisdom they have acquired through their past experiences, but in order to do so they have to ‘imagine’ themselves as new individuals. This new image of themselves may take shape even during incarceration, which limits the offenders’ ability to creatively build a non-deviant identity. In this case, the event of incarceration has to be viewed as a transformative period leading

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them to desistance from criminal a­ ctivity (Soyer, 2014). The thrill of conformism, it is argued, may also be ­experienced while in ­custody: ‘Despite evidence to the contrary, narratives of current and former prisoners emphasize the deterrent effect of incarceration and describe their experiences in prison as motivation to turn your life around’ (ibid.: 91). Although imprisonment is unlikely to create opportunities for positive change, inmates end up ‘imagining’ their future self as conformist individuals. Subjection and conformism, in them, cause the same thrill ­experienced by Pluvinage, Lyamshin and the Renegade. Transgression and conformism – which is more thrilling?

The impossible communist Paul Nizan is obsessively loyal to his Party and eulogizes his membership as the only option open to him as an intellectual. His journalism is an act of communist militancy and when, in The Conspiracy, we encounter a member of the Party who is wanted by the police and is generously hidden by a benefactor in his house, we feel that the relationship between the two is not comparable to that which the man on the run has with his fellow party activists. His comrades are closer to him even when they are far away because ‘Party loyalties are more powerful than the loyalties of death and blood’ (Schalk, 1979: 54). Nizan, however, leaves the Party in 1939, when the Nazi– Soviet pact is established, and when in his view nobler coalitions could have been forged. He is against forming a united front with anybody who comes along, and even when the Party joins the large Popular Front alliance, he remains sceptical about cooperating with the Catholic Left. The doctrinal differences between the two groups are, in his view, ‘irreducible’. Perhaps, unlike André Breton, his dreams are not populated by hordes of Cossacks on their horses occupying the Place de la Concorde, but he still believes that the French should fight alongside the Soviet army to defeat fascism, hence his ‘impossible communism’. He cannot accept that the prosaic struggle of the Popular Front erases from the political agenda the scenario of social revolution. And it is for this reason that the Party brands him a traitor

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and a coward, trying to undermine his reputation and, later, to obliterate his memory completely. ‘The communists’, writes Sartre (1973: 8), ‘do not believe in Hell; they believe in nothingness’. Nizan’s decision to distance himself from the Party is difficult and painful, as Sartre comments, and the existential void produced in him only ends with death, just a year after his defection. But, as a cruel insinuation has it, his vivid description of betrayal is due to him being a traitor himself.

Conclusion Crime may cause joy, excitement and pleasure, and even violence may be morally and aesthetically motivated. Actions that would be wrong in one culture are right and even obligatory in others (Fiske and Rai, 2015). Such actions can be regarded as ‘virtuous’ in that they constitute and perpetuate social relationships and identities while cementing amicable bonds. Cultural analyses of deviance and crime contain a phenomenological element, in the sense that the events described appear to take shape in the heads of real individuals in specific moments in time, individuals who through action constitute and ground their own life world. Action is spontaneous, creative, the result of vitalism, a life-force which is at the core of human existence, led by incessant desire and affect. Events, therefore, can only be captured as meanings which make sense in the face of what Husserl (1931) describes as the things around us dancing like shadows. Affect as feeling, emotion or yearning are bound to lead to action which, while consolidating a notion of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, we can assume, will create forms of collective identity and genuine amity. From a Weberian perspective, we may infer that the cultural study of crime expresses an implicit refusal of naturalism and advocates an interpretative understanding of the subjective experience of social actors. Looking at the meaning actors give to themselves is indeed a cultural enterprise and rejects ‘neutral’ observation supposedly conducted by natural scientists. Schutz (1963) may not be the founder of cultural criminology, but his arguments show some assonance with this criminological version of vitalism. The world of nature, as explored by natural scientists, does not mean much to the molecules and atoms forming it. The

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reality as observed by the social scientist, conversely, has meaning and relevance for those who live, act and think in it. The life-world and the life-force presented by Paul Nizan in The Conspiracy bring to light a variety of aspects that require further cultural exploration. Conspiracy is thrilling, but contemplative, and its deviant nature may well reside in a plan, an exhilarating plot that will never be put in place. The prospect of eventually or potentially committing crime can suffice for those seduced by illegality. Their pleasure may be the mere result of an aesthetic admiration of imaginary crimes. Inaction, but even apathy, therefore, deserve equal analytical efforts for their role in promoting or hampering criminal activity. Inaction, however, may resemble a Marxist mole, which restrains life-force while digging tunnels and building opportunities for future outbursts. A culture of nothingness, as we have seen, characterizes passive nihilism but, as Negri suggests, can disguise radical alterity. In Nizan’s novel we also find that radicalism can be expressed through suicide, in its turn deserving of specific cultural analysis, although a thanatological element is required within the vitalism of current analyses. The deviance of Nizan’s conspirators does not cement amity but inspires the infliction of harm upon envied, competing friends. Finally, defection, betrayal and, in criminological terms, desistance are crucial manifestations of thrilling experiences and the excitement they cause is as relevant as that generated by deviant festivals and carnivals. In sum, cultural analyses of crime may look at the work of Paul Nizan and enrich its arguments through the appreciation and assimilation of his counter-arguments.

6 Armed struggle and civil war

Unfortunately, not all political violence is confined within the bounds of fantasy and contemplation. As discussed in a previous chapter, the violence deployed in riots is ‘non-teleological’ in nature, in that it is not precisely linked to specific demands but constitutes a request for recognition based on resentment. Armed struggle, on the contrary, possesses a guiding framework that prefigures specific objectives and inscribes action into a socio-political trajectory. The programme followed by armed struggle is part of a cognitive map of sorts that locates actors and their experience of conflict within a meaningful whole. Those engaged express values and harbour shared beliefs which may prefigure a completely new social system and, while doing so, establish definite battle lines. The spread of beliefs is crucial for the development of armed struggle, while communication preparing people for action is normally expressed through an informal exchange of views or through organized propaganda and agitation. What is important here is both the power of the images and beliefs transmitted and the effectiveness of the established communication machinery utilized. For this reason, those engaged in armed struggle are under constant pressure to calibrate their objectives with those mobilizing social movements, so that these can provide sympathy, support or even recruits.

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Armed struggle echoes the notion of the irregular fighter or partisan posited by Carl Schmitt (2007). Like those involved in civil or colonial wars, partisans do not abide by rules of battle, nor do they believe that regular forces are the only bearers of a jus ad bellum. They expect neither justice nor mercy from their enemies as they reject the notion of enmity prevailing in conventional warfare. Another characteristic of partisans, besides irregularity, is ‘political commitment which sets them apart from other fighters and from common thieves and criminals, whose motives aim at private enrichment’ (ibid.: 13). There is then the characteristic of mobility, namely the capacity to choose targets located outside and beyond a legally demarcated battlefield. Finally, partisans possess a tellurian character, that is to say the ability to find hospitality among groups and individuals embedded in networks of dissent and active in social conflict. Hence, as argued above, the necessity for those involved to share beliefs and goals with sections of social movements. As a rule, armed struggle involves violence against state actors or individuals of the elite, implying the creed that some governments or states have no right to be obeyed by their subjects and that social hierarchies are not to be respected. Governments, states and elites become the chosen targets of dissatisfied people who ‘deposit’ and accumulate rage in social movements and armed organizations, as if these were banks, before releasing it (Sloterdijk, 2016). The use of force, here, is perfectly congruent with views that social change is usually brought violently within the inevitable course of history. Armed struggle does not need to be led by highly motivated and ‘supreme’ leaders, but may be conducted by factions of well-­ organized social movements who take the leadership of already aggrieved and hostile social groups. The outbursts of these groups, in such cases, are not instigated by social movements or their leaders but are part and parcel of their routine hostility towards the system. Armed struggle is, therefore, an attempt to give hostile groups and their outbursts an organizational structure and a rationale, a calculable trend, so that uncoordinated hostility is slowly turned into military action (highly specialized and integrated) towards a predictable end.

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Pre-existing structures within social movements are, of course, paramount, though new forms of coordinated violence may emerge because of the poor results achieved by such structures. Social movements, however, at times provide armed struggle with infrastructures, an inherited repertoire of action, principles and a memory. Social movements, in their turn, along with the aggrieved groups they represent, interact with law enforcers, and the nature of such interaction is likely to determine the position taken by participants in respect of the battle lines. Some individuals and groups will adopt peaceful forms of protest as an integral part of their rights, while others will come to the conclusion that protest is quintessentially violent. Radicalization of protest, then, may produce harsher state repression and unleash a vicious circle of violence–repression– violence–repression (Della Porta, 1995). If, as a consequence, mobilization declines, those prepared to continue the fight will be left with a limited repertoire of action (Mansley, 2013), and will begin to perceive that the use of violent means becomes necessary. On the other hand, if mobilization does not decline, violence will be perceived as a mere extension of the social conflicts in which larger groups also engage. Some may therefore opt for armed struggle, which in their view is nothing other than the extension of already existing social conflict. At this stage, however, targets are immediately recognizable symbol, as they are related to specific arenas in which protesters engage.

Affect and dramaturgy There are key emotional factors that accompany the choice to join armed struggle. There are ‘intentional emotions’, that is emotions directed at cognitively explicable objects and ideas or, in other words, emotions that are sensitive to reason (Leys, 2017). Thus, armed struggle can become an option if it is included among the forms through which one’s social group has traditionally expressed its demands for change. In brief, the emotional aspect of joining armed organizations is rationalized through the fact that armed struggle belongs to the repertoire of action of the social group one refers to. On the other hand, there is ‘affect’, a ‘non-intentional emotion’ which is deemed

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to possess a pre-subjective, visceral nature, to be nonlinear, autonomous, anomalous, indeterminate and unpredictable; in a word, affect disrupts fixed or conventional meanings. Armed struggle may also contain this type of emotion. Social movements and armed struggle are also propelled by ‘living memory’, that is practical knowledge of historical events, of mindsets and beliefs belonging to one’s social groups and ­political tradition. Living memory for participants in contentious politics resembles the practical knowledge that characterizes craftsmanship and art work (Stiegler, 2017). In the same way that every painter sums up the history of painting (Deleuze, 2004), we might say that political activists (violent or not) recapitulate the history of the fight carried out by the social group they claim to represent. Armed struggle is a form of ‘instrumental aggression’ aimed at obtaining that which is deemed desirable. Therefore, its aim is not destruction as such, but destruction leading to the establishment of a new social order. However, activists who believe in the inevitability of revolutionary change will claim that the achievement of their aim, having been inscribed in the predictable course of history, is necessary rather than desirable. This certainty is commonly sustained through dramaturgical means: events are depicted as dramas, while images and emotionally intense rituals will multiply ties and expand solidarity (Alexander, 2017). ‘Those watching the performance don’t see it as a performance; they identity with the protagonists and experience enmity toward the antagonists on stage; they lose their sense of being an audience, experiencing not artificiality but verisimilitude’ (ibid.: 4–5). Participants in armed struggle, therefore, can provide poetically potent scripts, stage social dramas, and in this way motivate others to join them. Leaders become iconic, condensed, simplified and charismatic collective representations of the model of society they themselves propose. They create symbolic frameworks that re-fuse fragmented meanings, actions and institutions. They provide a new horizon of meanings, ‘they code and narrate newly emerging social realities in a manner that offers salvation’ (ibid.: 107).

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This process may be successful or otherwise. Let us look at a successful example of armed struggle.

Spear of the Nation In 1961 the African National Congress (ANC) gave official birth to its armed movement, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), and Nelson Mandela was appointed as commander-in-chief.The creation of the movement followed the massacre perpetrated in Sharpeville in March 1960, when 69 men, women and children were killed, about 200 wounded and around 1,800 protesters were arrested. The ANC was banned and Mandela went underground. He was an advocate of the rights of oppressed people to resist by whatever means available, legal and illegal, including armed struggle. In one of his numerous speeches, he remarked that 50 years of non-violence had brought the African people nothing but more and more repressive legislation, and fewer and fewer rights. After a long and anxious assessment, I and some colleagues came to the conclusion that, as violence was inevitable, it would be unrealistic and wrong for African leaders to continue preaching peace and non-violence at a time when the government met our peaceful demands with force. (Puryear, 2013: 3) The movement abandoned the Gandhian philosophy of passive resistance and the armed wing of the ANC started responding to the terrorism of the racist white minority with acts of sabotage. In his autobiography, Mandela (1995) explains that he never trained as a soldier, but studied revolutions and violent liberation action, particularly the struggle against the British in Palestine and against the French in Algeria. Four types of violent activities were considered: sabotage, guerrilla warfare, terrorism and open revolution. For a small and fledgling army like Spear of the Nation, revolution was inconceivable. Terrorism, on the other hand, would undermine any public support by the oppressed. Guerrilla warfare was a possibility, but since

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the ANC had been reluctant to embrace violence tout court, it made sense to start with the form of violence that inflicted the least harm against individuals. However, if sabotage would not produce the desired results, Mandela stressed that the movement should be prepared to shift to the next stages. In 1962, Mandela was arrested and received a five-year sentence, while in 1964 he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Only afterwards did sabotage and terrorism begin, when violent action addressed against national infrastructures and state military installations caused the death of army personnel but also the wounding of bystanders. In Manifesto of Spear of the Nation, published on 16 December 1961, it was stressed that all channels of peaceful protest had been barred: The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices – submit or fight.That time has now come to South Africa. We shall not submit and we have no choice but to hit back by all means in our power in defence of our people, our future and our freedom. (ANC, 1961: 3) The Manifesto alerted to the danger that the inevitable violent action carried out by the oppressed black communities could lead to forms of uncontrollable terrorism, producing an intensity of bitterness and hostility between the various components of the South African population. Such violence had to be controlled and given a precise strategic direction. On the other hand, violence was deemed necessary for people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy.The ANC rejected the definition of its armed members as terrorists, describing them rather as freedom fighters. We are fighting for democracy – majority rule – the right of the Africans to rule Africa. We are fighting for a South Africa in which there will be peace and harmony and equal rights for all people. We are not racialists, as the white oppressors are. The African National Congress has a message of freedom for all who live in our country. (Cherry, 2012: 47)

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Newsletters were circulated describing how to produce explosive devices using substances such as nitric acid, potassium permanganate and magnesium, but only after the Soweto uprising of 1976 did black activists begin to seek proper military training. Police records indicate that, between 1976 and 1986, approximately 130 people were killed by armed action. Of these, about 30 were members of various security forces and 100 were civilians. Of the civilians, 40 were white and 60 black. If these statistics are truthful, some consideration should be given to the possible evolution of armed struggle as a form of violent contention and to the dynamics guiding it. For now, however, let us briefly examine whether armed struggle in other contexts managed to achieve the results ultimately reached in South Africa.

Controversial outcomes The successful example of South Africa contrasts with the controversial outcome of similar struggles carried out in some Western European countries. The political violence expressed during the second half of the last century in Italy, Germany, the Basque Country and Northern Ireland shared one fundamental aspect. Violence in those countries was endemic and widespread among antagonistic social and political groups, therefore, armed organizations mirrored, in their radical choices, what they saw as the radicalism of contentious groups in their context. Normally, violent organizations rejected the negative label implied in the conventional use of the term ‘terrorism’, opting for the phrase ‘armed struggle’, intending to convey the notion that their acts constituted the continuation of the struggles conducted by those they purported to represent. Armed struggle, in their view, was concordant with the objectives and practices of social movements; it was an expression of conflicts over material gain and political space. Ideally, the targets of armed struggle, be they property or persons, were immediately recognizable symbols as they were related to specific arenas in which movements exercised counter-power. When persons were targeted, they were deemed individually responsible for performing acts or endorsing policies that hampered the development of social struggles. Another common aspect found in armed struggle in ­Europe in that period was the realization that protest was met with

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unprecedented repression and with acts of state terrorism that pushed some groups to consider the use of violence as a political tool. If the initial choice of using violent means was seen as a response to the violence met by political dissent, successive developments were interpreted as yet further signals that legitimate means of contention were becoming ineffective. Armed struggle, then, became performative in the sense that, by deploying it, armed organizations made it necessary. Armed action became assertive, truthful, ethical and therefore acceptable in the precise moment in which it was enacted (Austin, 1962). At this juncture, one may observe, the dynamic was similar to that displayed by the events in South Africa described above. The different trajectory followed by armed struggle in the European countries referred to here, however, becomes clear when the subjectivity of those involved is considered. Collective action, including armed struggle, testifies to the development of a view of social life as no longer determined by misfortune, but by injustice. From a cognitive standpoint, individuals collect information, data and inputs about the world in which they live. These are bundled together in the form of schemas, namely a coherent body of knowledge about past experiences that can be utilized for the interpretation of the present. Turning schemas into ‘frames’, collective action theory posits that contentious politics need to elaborate an interpretative ‘frame alignment’ with the activists it intends to mobilize and with the goals of aggrieved groups in general. Armed groups in Europe believed that, given what they saw as a potentially revolutionary situation, and due to their perceived closeness to the most radical sectors of social movements, ‘frame alignment’ could be achieved easily through the mobilization of collective violence. The type of frame alignment pursued by these groups is described by Snow et al. (1986) as ‘frame bridging’, that is to say a linkage of two or more ideologically congruent but structurally unconnected frames. This linkage was pursued by armed groups on a purely organizational level, as participants in social movements were deemed ideologically close but organizationally distant, and the ‘bridging’ effort was accompanied by the display of military power meant to appeal to potential recruits.

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Armed struggle rendered manifest the endemic violence present in political contention, and was practised by groups fighting for the total modification of social and institutional arrangements (Italy and Germany) as well as by patriots fighting against foreign occupation (the Basque Country and Northern Ireland). Such confrontational groups had a range of claim-making modalities at their disposal, from conventional peaceful action to coordinated destructive action, so that violent organizations were at times viewed as legitimate and often enjoyed popular support. Moreover, such organizations developed thanks to pre-existing subcultures and infrastructures, both experienced as legitimate in day-to-day social conflict. It is worth moving away from specific examples and expanding the analysis on a more general level. Normally, the beliefs inspiring armed struggle are fostered by the alienation and dissatisfaction experienced by aggrieved sections of the population and their willingness to protest. Such willingness is interpreted as a political mandate conferred upon armed organizations. The choice to use arms, however, may soon be caught up with its own inherent militaristic mechanisms, whereby effectiveness and strength slowly come to be measured in terms of firepower rather than political power. In this phase, the violent act becomes increasingly self-referential as it appears as a mark of the organization rather than a sign of the social conflict in the name of which it is performed. An escalating process may then lead to a different stage. While concrete achievements are relentlessly dismantled and political space narrowed, violent organizations may take a relatively independent trajectory. Their action, for instance, can be channelled into the pursuit of a limited range of objectives whose achievement, under normal circumstances, would not require the use of high degrees of violence. In other words, perfectly legitimate goals slowly come to be pursued through illegitimate means. Armed struggle, thus, turns into armed trade unionism, while the growth of the armed organizations, the recruitment of members and the accumulation of firepower start losing connections with the social issues originally addressed. In a subsequent phase, armed struggle may evolve into armed propaganda as organizations become completely disconnected from the social objectives

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allegedly inspiring them, and devote most of their energies to the accumulation of military strength. Violent acts, at this stage, simply allude to the possibility that the state monopoly in the use of force can be challenged and that breaking away from legally accepted forms of contention is necessary. This is when military episodes, in most cases, are no longer decodable as manifestations of wider social conflicts, but as products of a military organization seeking self-promotion. Social dynamics, as points of reference for political action, slowly become redundant, while the armed organization pursues its own reproduction in terms of membership and infrastructures. In a successive phase, the propaganda aspect ends up prevailing, with organizations merely signalling their existence and seeking self-promotion among the uncertain political activists still remaining. The creation of clandestine infrastructures, the search for finance and weapons and the constant problem of recruiting members overtake the social concerns from which armed action has emerged. Targets are no longer chosen on the basis of their significance in relation to social issues, but for their capacity to illustrate the military power of the organization (Ruggiero, 2006). Political violence, in such cases, aims at strengthening resolve and group cohesion, at conveying an image of determination and potency, and involves an element of spectacular propaganda, making it attractive to potential recruits and menacing to chosen enemies. Armed struggle, therefore, may slowly turn into a private, circumscribed clash between violent organizations and violent states, while potential supporters are made mere spectators. The nexus of collective action–political violence is broken or no longer perceived, leaving armed organizations in total isolation. Ultimately, sympathizers and aggrieved groups see armed struggle as extraneous to their history and practice, while even members start to defect. Social movements themselves make armed organizations finally realize that what was previously interpreted as widespread support for violent action has now turned into clear rejection. Movements, then, may continue to express their grievances and make their collective claims, and while adopting totally different forms of struggle, implicitly and explicitly repel a notion of ‘vanguard’: armed organizations can no longer claim that they represent

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specific social actors, and should become aware that they only represent themselves. In conclusion, armed struggle can be viewed as the outcome of specific social conditions and ideas, of distinctive relations among groups, of inherited repertories of action and contingent opportunities (Tilly, 2003). If ideas and opportunities cannot be destroyed, then it is the link between armed practice and collective claim-making that can be modified. When this link is severed, armed struggle fails (Ruggiero, 2010). Returning to the European countries addressed in this section, I would leave it to the readers to establish whether armed struggle in those countries produced positive outcomes.

Avoiding civil war Back to South Africa now, where the ANC did not believe that the apartheid government could de defeated militarily; it merely trusted that armed struggle would be one element of a larger struggle, with mass mobilization and resistance inside the country and economic and political pressure from the outside. The majority of people in South Africa considered themselves neither morally nor legally obliged to obey laws made by a parliament in which they were not represented. But when disobedience turned into armed struggle, Mandela (1995) himself expressed the fear that uncoordinated and spontaneous collective violence could turn into a bloody civil war.

Burger’s Daughter This fear also emerges in a perceptive novel by Nadine Gordimer (1979) set in the 1970s, which tells the story of a group of white anti-apartheid activists in South Africa. In Burger’s Daughter, the main character, Rosa, is brought up in an environment totally hostile to the apartheid government and both her parents die in prison while serving sentences for treason. She attends meetings alongside black activists, who often treat her with suspicion: true, they say, her parents died in prison, but so have many black parents. These activists claim that they do not need her help.

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In June 1976 Soweto school children start protesting about the inferior education afforded to them and refuse being taught in ­A frikaans. They go on a rampage, which includes killing white welfare workers. The police brutally put down the uprising, resulting in hundreds of deaths. More than 4,000 people are charged with offences arising out of the riots, including incitement, arson, public violence and sabotage. Funerals, the only category of public gathering not banned, have become huge mass meeting where the obsequies of the riot victim being buried are marked by new deaths and fresh wounds as the police attack mourners singing freedom songs and shaking black power salutes. (Gordimer, 1988: 131) In October 1977, many organizations and people critical of the white government are banned and in November the same year Rosa is detained. But ‘where do whites fit in’? This is the question posed by Gordimer when looking at the Black Consciousness Movement. White ultra-liberals are said to behave as though they want to make friends with the crocodile so they will be the last to be eaten. ‘Whites of unlikely political shades continue to affirm a fervent desire to talk to black, just talk to them – as if three hundred years of oppression were a family misunderstanding that could be explained away’ (ibid.: 124). Back to reality. Bishop Desmond Tutu remarks that, although the movement is non-racial and welcomes the participation of all, ‘at this stage the leadership of the struggle must be firmly in black hands … Whites unfortunately have the habit of taking over and usurping the leadership and taking the crucial decisions’ (ibid.: 267). In 1964, Mandela states: I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I

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hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die. (Mandela, 1964) On release from prison, in 1990, he reiterates: We have waited too long for our freedom. Now is the time to intensify the struggle on all fronts. To relax our efforts now would be a mistake which generations to come will not be able to forgive … We call on our white compatriots to join us in the shaping of a new South Africa. (Mandela, 1990) In brief, armed struggle may degenerate into civil war if alliances and generalizable goals are not identified, and it is a merit of South ­African people and political organizations that such a war was avoided. The following section attempts to describe the characteristics of this ­specific form of political violence.

Violence within national territories Since 1945, 25 million people have died in civil combat, while ­millions more have been wounded, displaced or impoverished ­(Armitage, 2017). Ideas, definitions and understandings of civil war have always been volatile and contested. What is also controversial is where exactly in history the analysis of this type of political violence should begin. In ancient Greece, the distinction was sharp between violent conflict against external enemies (polemos) and among or within cities (stasis). The former was deemed a source of potential glory, while the latter a cause of ruin and decline. Polemos constituted a form of international politics, stasis a form of calamitous anti-­ politics (Esposito, 2018). But it is with events that occurred in ancient Rome that the origin of civil war is commonly identified. In 87 BC, two main factions fought for power in Rome: the ‘optimates’ (patricians) and the ‘populares’ (plebeians), and the confrontation between them ended in horrendous bloodshed, known

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in history as the civil war of Marius and Sulla (Abbott, 1902). Scholars mention this conflict as the main source for the study of ancient civil war, although they also refer to Caesar’s (2006) three books that cover the period between 49 and 48 BC, when the then Governor of Gaul described himself as the victim of a conspiracy being hatched in Rome. As the terms of his mandate in Gaul expired, Caesar was called back to Rome to face charges of corruption. Such charges were pressed by his political enemies, including Pompeius, Scipio and Marcus Cicero, with whom Caesar initially attempted to reach an accommodation. But the power competition led to military battles that spread to Greece and Egypt, where ­Pompeius was allegedly killed. Roman poet Lucan (1989) noted that the wounds inflicted by the hand of the fellow-citizen sink deeper, and that civil wars are like the sickness of the body politic, destroying it from within. When the study of civil war takes ancient Rome as a starting point, it is assumed that this type of political violence can only occur if a distinct citizenry and political community has been established, therefore if a civitas has been created. In the current time, instead, civil wars seem to proliferate owing to the lack of a civitas, becoming the most destructive form of organized human violence. It could be objected, however, that the connotation ‘civil war’ is normally applied to unsuccessful rebellions or uprisings that defy established governments and states. We celebrate some such uprisings as exercises of people’s right to determine their political destiny, but we condemn others as illegal rebellions that deserve to be suppressed at all costs. By labelling a conflict ‘civil war’, commentators perhaps intend to deny any form of legitimacy to violent struggles, but were such struggles to prove successful they would not be termed civil wars at all. Large violent conflicts within national territories may start with riots and insurrections, then take the shape of a civil war whereby citizens take sides for one contender or the other, but if the challenging party triumphs, the new appellation becomes revolution. This is what happened in Russia after 1917 and in China in 1949. ‘Revolution possesses far more positive connotations than the more grubby and ambivalent civil war’ (Colley, 2017: 43).

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The horrors of civil warfare are narrated in holy books and often understood as forms of punishment inflicted on disbelievers and sinners. The violent clashes that killed over 20 million Chinese in the 1850s and 1860s, the so-called Taiping Rebellion, were also often interpreted as divine retribution for immoral, decadent or irreligious behaviour (Meyer-Fong, 2013). Carnage was rationalized in these terms, particularly by illiterate people, who could only turn to the gods to make sense of their suffering, find the way to moral values and evade divine condemnation. Wars within states appear to characterize the last 60 years of global history, an unprecedented shift in the pattern of violent human conflict for centuries. ‘According to one widely cited estimate, since 1945 there have been 259 conflicts around the world that have risen to the level of a war, and the vast majority of those were internal conflicts’ (Armitage, 2017: 7). Regarded as non-international in character, civil war can be defined as a conflict that erupts within a national territory where a faction aims to violently replace an established authority or secede from it. Arguably, civil wars last longer than conventional wars because combatants know that they will not survive defeat. According to a quantitative definition, civil war is ‘sustained military combat, primarily internal, resulting in at least 1000 battle deaths per year’ (ibid.: 217). Econometric studies use a coding rule based on battle deaths associated with internal conflicts. Designed to facilitate researchers in the creation of a usable dataset for analytical purposes, this quantitative definition does not consider the spatial and temporal aspects of large-scale violence. The former aspect refers to the participation of numerically large groups of citizens, while the latter to the duration of the violent conflict. These two variables give rise to a different interpretive model that looks at ‘regional war complexes’ rather than civil wars, the former being characterized by the participation of ‘foreigners’ (Gersovitz and Kriger, 2013). The focus, in this case, is on the individuals and groups who are neither inhabitants nor citizens of a country where large-scale violence is occurring, but may be directly involved in the conflict or limit their role to the provision of arms, bases or other forms of assistance. ‘A regional war complex has high foreign

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participation, and domestic participation inside at least one of the countries involved in the violent conflict must be high enough to challenge the government’s monopoly of force in that country’ (ibid.: 173). Adopting this definition, the international aspect of civil wars assumes a crucial role. The international element, however, can play a role if external forces are invited to support one of the fighting factions or both. In the past, it was mainly ideology that shaped regional war complexes, for example the support of communist countries for liberation struggles in Africa and elsewhere. Today, by contrast, the involvement of ‘foreigners’ may be led by material interests that transcend political philosophies. Moreover, civil wars can also be caused by external forces, as in the cases of Iraq and Libya. In the current context, due to growing human mobility and the infinite connections between national states and communities, all wars can be regarded as civil wars. Perhaps this is the sense of Foucault’s (2001) argument whereby civil war does not indicate the dissolution but the daily exercise of power. It is worth testing this hypothesis.

Civil war and chaos Many violent acts carried out during civil wars possess an ambiguous nature, as they reveal a political as well as a private motivation. According to a Hobbesian interpretive frame, civil war testifies to the breakdown of authority and the emergence of violently competing motivations, manifested through random explosions of self-interest. This interpretation finds support in Thucydides’ (2000) classic description of civil war in Corcyra, where people who had never experienced equitable treatment by the elite felt that their hour had come. They attempted to get rid of their poverty and, ardently coveting their neighbours’ goods, were drawn into pitiless excesses so that the initial spirit leading them drowned in ungovernable passions. Thucydides uses words such as ‘confusion’, ‘enmity’ and ‘revenge’, all connected to a process of the privatization of violence. On the other hand, according to a Schmittian interpretive frame, civil war

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is a palpitating clash of loyalties and beliefs, where political enemies become private competitors only in that they have so been designated through prior processes of stigmatization and labelling. Both interpretations support Foucault’s notion of civil war as exercise of power: in the first case power unleashes destructive self-love, and in the second it demarcates a friend–enemy boundary that turns selflove into hostility for the other. Civil wars may have a ‘master cleavage’, but often end up revealing local or private issues: ‘Individuals and local actors take advantage of the war to settle local or private conflicts often bearing little or no relation to the causes of the war or the goals of the belligerents’ (Kalyvas, 2003: 476). The existence of local, rather than master cleavages invites caution when applying identity labels to participants in civil wars. In an abstract communicative process, beliefs and identities are transmitted from a core ideology held by an identifiable leadership to peripheral nodes and local combatants. In this sense, those who fight at the local level are expected to be replicas of their leaders, but in reality actors in civil war cannot be treated as if they were unitary. An example provided by Kalyvas focuses on the violence between the neighbouring villages of ­Coagh and Ardboe in Northern Ireland, which cost the lives of 30 men in the space of three years in the late 1980s and 1990s (from a combined population of just over 1,000 people). The deaths, we are told, were not simply caused by violent clashes between the Catholic Irish Republican Army and the Protestant Ulster Volunteer Force, but also by personal vendettas and a cycle of blood feud that pitted these particular two villages against each other (Toolis, 1997). ‘In other words, the nature of the violence in this areas cannot be understood by simple reference to the religious cleavage in Northern Ireland but requires knowledge about the local cleavage between Coagh and Ardboe’ (Kalyvas, 2003: 482). Intergroup hostility, revenge and greed may not prevail, but certainly depict civil wars less as the joint action of individuals and organizations than ambiguous events where diverse goals are pursued. Different identities and interests are involved in acts of violence that straddle the divide between the individual and the collective, political ideology and private gain. Let us look at a literary example.

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Mariano Azuela’s The Underdogs Azuela’s (2006) novel of the Mexican Revolution, which describes civil war as a succession of chaotic events, raises among readers and critics the question whether the author puts forth a defence of the revolution or intends to convey a counter-revolutionary message. However, instead of choosing one or another character or a specific set of events, we might have to listen to the chorus of different voices and viewpoints of those who speak for the author. Azuela shows how attacks on governmental forces are often triggered by personal reasons. He suggests that one revolutionary joined the armed struggle because he had murdered someone and was therefore escaping the law. Another had accidently poisoned his girlfriend with an aphrodisiac, and yet another found life as a follower of Pancho Villa more exciting than working as a waiter. A former medical student and right-winger joined the civil war and then switched sides, driven by opportunism. In this novel, some characters are cynical, hypocritical and cowardly, while others, after becoming revolutionaries for idealistic reasons, become disillusioned and live off the loot they capture. Azuela seems to describe how a revolution degenerates into civil war, rather than civil war turning into a revolution. One key character, when asked why he continues fighting, replies that ‘the revolution is a hurricane, and the man who gives himself to her is not a man anymore, he is the miserable dry leaf swept by the wind’ (ibid.: 38). Disappointed revolutionaries state that, after offering their enthusiasm to the cause, namely to overthrow miserable assassins, the insurgents are raising monsters of the same species. The bravery and heroism of some men contrast with the bestiality and desire for pillage of others, although at the end, even in its savagery, the revolution is depicted as ‘beautiful’. In sum, we are told a story of indescribable confusion that possesses the body of an inner order.The terrible elements of the chaos described by Azuela are integrally related; seen as a whole, they fall into place. Perhaps the author means to suggest that chaos generates a new organic world: ignorance, horror, wisdom and revelation intermingle in what history, afterwards, will designate as a revolution. Hannah Arendt (2016) warned that, in post-conflict contexts, institutions allowing individuals and groups to participate

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in collective decision making should be immediately put in place. Without such participatory institutions, the system born of the conflict just ended would degenerate into something similar to the regime being overthrown. This warning is based on the assumption that armed conflict involves a simple two-sided confrontation, an assumption that is falsified by the analysis of civil war as chaos provided here. As we shall see in Chapter 8, chaos also features as the nucleus of the analysis (socio-political and literary) of old and new wars.

7 Random killing and martyrdom

Some analyses of contemporary terrorism focus on processes of radicalization of pre-existing political movements, on the sense of identity the former share with the latter and on the self-consideration of those involved as members of a broader oppressed and humiliated community (De La Corte, 2014).Terrorism is said to originate from collective strains caused by significantly more powerful others (Agnew, 2010). These analyses, in fact, may explain terrorism as well as all other forms of collective violence, including the armed struggle variety examined in the previous chapter. In other words, they do not discuss in any detail the type of political violence that expresses itself through random killing and martyrdom, as the present chapter will attempt to do. ‘Attacks on soldiers are not terrorist attacks’: this is the opinion of Michael Walzer (2006: 3), in a way echoing the view expressed in the previous chapter that violence against state actors is more appropriately defined as armed struggle. Terrorism, instead, consists in the deliberate killing of innocent people, of non-combatants, at random. This definition brings us back to the different stages of the escalating process examined so far. When the accumulation of military force, though significant, appears to be insufficient to match that possessed by the institutions,

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armed propaganda becomes unrealistic. Political activists and social groups in general cannot be offered competitive structures and practices leading to a different social order. Defeat is most likely and social and political gains are replaced with gains in other, less palpable spheres. The choice of targets can no longer be justified by the specific social goal pursued, but is given a transcendental justification that Camus (1965) terms historical. According to Camus, there are some political conflicts emphasizing history, and others emphasizing humanity. The emphasis on history destroys all limits to human action because history itself becomes the supreme judge of the morality of the action. Violent groups inspired by a sense of historical inevitability appropriate the ‘right to punish’ from their enemy and, after dressing it with a religious mantle, put punishment at the centre of the universe. The sense of historical inevitability makes violence randomized, limitless: history will vindicate the legitimacy of that violence (Ruggiero, 2006). Depending on the character of the terrorist organization involved, history will bring a secular just system or a theocratic perfect one. Echoes of hate crime emerge from this formulation, with victims being perceived as representatives of specific communities and being attacked not in their capacity as individuals, but as individuals belonging to a real or imagined alien and inimical group. Hatred may also be based on identities, lifestyles, cultural values and tastes, and constitutes a reservoir of bitter memories that triggers violent antagonism. And when random attacks are conducted, particularly in representative democracies, those hit are deemed culpable, if not of specific wrongdoing, of having elected those representing them. The causes of terrorism have been examined from a variety of perspectives, one of which revolves around material conditions.

Poverty or wealth? Half the world population lives in a condition of poverty and marginalization, and if such condition were closely connected to terrorism, by now we would all be dead. In the West, terrorism has been examined as a corollary of social exclusion. Extremists are said to come from the poorest and

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rundown parts of cities, where youth are raised in large housing estates and where trouble flares up periodically. Accounts illustrate the fractured lives of young second-generation migrants, their alienation, exclusion, family size, poverty and disrupted upbringings. Some traverse the pathways from home to care and from crime to prison, struggle within the education system and display all the ‘predictors of criminal behaviour’ (Walklate and Mythen, 2016: 337). However, purely structural approaches to the issue may be insufficient to explain the process: ‘It is erroneous to presume that material deprivation works in a simple and/or straightforward manner in relation to the propensity to commit violence’ (ibid.: 338). True, radicalization takes place when a considerable cultural and relational distance, along with severe forms of inequality and injustice, exist between the parties involved. But to claim that inequality and social injustice are the main causes of terrorism neglects the fact that there is no terrorism in the 50 countries listed by the United Nations as the poorest, least developed, most unjust and unequal. As Sen (2015: 165) has argued, The simple thesis linking poverty with violence is empirically much too crude, both because the linkage of poverty and crime is far from universally observed, and because there are other social factors … Calcutta is not only one of the poorest cities in India – and indeed in the world – it so happens that it also has a very low crime rate. (Ibid.: 165) From a diametrically opposite perspective, it is noted that terrorists come from wealthier backgrounds than the average person in societies from which they originate (Krueger, 2007). This is also the case when anti-Semitic, anti-gay and anti-black random violence are examined, namely when the object of study is right-wing terrorism. However, research findings suggest that people of a higher educational level are more likely to find random attacks against Westerners justifiable when such attacks occur in their country of residence. Among Palestinians, the greatest degree of support for random attacks against Israelis is provided by individuals who are better

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educated and have higher-status professions. Members of Hezbollah are less likely to come from impoverished families, as are insurgents in Iraq. In sum, ‘poverty breeds terrorism’ is too simple a prediction: wealth and privilege are important variables in the genealogy of some terrorist activity and they ‘do not sit comfortably with the theory of relative deprivation’ (Gambetta and Hertog, 2016: 59). Although the Tamil Tigers and the IRA may be significant exceptions, ‘there is little support for the view that economic circumstances are an important cause of participation in terrorism’ (Krueger, 2007: 6).

A significance quest Radicalization of young people may be generated by individual psychological factors, but also by collective animosity against injustice and power. From the area of psychology, for instance, research ­studies have focused on the processes leading to terrorism, conceptualizing the terrorist act as the final step on a narrowing staircase ­(Moghaddam, 2005). These processes are said to involve individuals who believe they have no voice in society and are guided by a ‘significance quest’ accompanied by various ideological reasons (Victoroff and Kruglanski, 2009). One of the causes identified in the literature is the feeling of ‘weakness, irrelevance, marginalization and subordination experienced by Muslim people’, combined with the memory of the glorious past of a great transnational civilization (Toscano, 2016: 123). The ‘reactionary utopia’ of the Caliphate, for example, is explained in these terms, namely as the result of frustration determined by the gap between expectations and achievement. The frustration thesis seems to apply to both prevailing models of terrorism: ‘the fanatic who is outside any appeal to rationality, and the calculating actor who lacks any capacity for human empathy’ (McDonald, 2013: 11). Authors advocating the ‘new terrorism’ model emphasize its pathological aspects, arguing that participants suffer from personality disorder and mental unbalance. On the other hand, terror has also been associated with the search for redemption, with protagonists neither ‘fanatical’ nor ‘calculating’, but just enacting redemptive violence that transforms and ‘saves’ at the same time (Weisbrod,

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2002). Why and how those searching redemption access terrorist organizations is a key research and law enforcement concern. Working closely with Islamic fundamentalists, Sageman (2008, 2017) gained an intimate understanding of the development and shape of their networks. Focusing on the global Salafi jihad, he refutes the explanation that factors such as poverty, trauma, madness or ignorance drive people to terrorism. He highlights, instead, the crucial role of social networks in the transformation of isolated individuals into warriors. Biographical data on some 200 participants in jihad reveal that, for the vast majority, social bonds predated ideological commitment, and that these bonds inspired alienated young Muslims to join the jihad. Affiliation is shown to be a bottom-up process, with young people volunteering to join the organization, while friendship and kinship bonds emerge as key factors in shaping the networks. Sageman dismantles the view that terrorist networks resemble mafia families and that the tactics used against organized crime will somehow work against terror, a point that is reinforced by the organizational structure of the worldwide Caliphate, proclaimed in 2014 by ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (Warrick, 2015). In brief, pre-existing bonds (kinship, friendship and later informal cliques) facilitate the radicalization of individuals and groups who might meet in their neighborhoods or on the internet, although leaders also promote initiatives aimed at recruitment, indoctrination and training. Looking at the formation of terrorist networks, the point can be made that the invasion of a country is often followed by organized violent resistance, and that invasions destabilize regimes and trigger sectarian attacks. The example of Libya after the successful foreign intervention to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 is germane here. The country rapidly descended into factional chaos, riven by competing militias and led by two rival governments (Ismael and Ismael, 2013). The disintegration of Gaddafi’s coastguard and navy, moreover, gave unprecedented impetus to people-smuggling across the Mediterranean. On another front, it is estimated that over 30 per cent of the founders of ISIS were former members of the Ba’athist secret services

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of Iraq, who enacted a form of revenge, responding to the invasion of their country with indiscriminate attacks (Gerges, 2015; Lynch, 2015). Along with this imitative dynamic, aspects such as criminalization, labelling processes and phobias can be focused upon, suggesting that these enhance rather than decelerate the radicalization of those who find themselves on the receiving end (Mythen and Walklate, 2006; Ahmed, 2015; Abbas and Awan, 2015; Khan, 2016; Ruggiero, 2017a). It should be noted that such processes do encourage random victimization, although soft targets are ‘dominant and increasing, while particularly well-protected targets are almost totally avoided’ (Hemmingby, 2017: 25). In other words, the general public is more exposed than high-ranking individuals or highly symbolic buildings or premises such as parliaments, governmental institutions or business headquarters. This is particularly the case when the choice of targets is not decided by the core leadership of the terrorist group but left to the direct perpetrators, who have local knowledge and run limited risk of detection during the preparatory stage.

Deculturation and faith Young immigrants do not join terrorist networks out of existential vacuum or mere marginalization, but from resentment born of the humiliation suffered by people to whom they feel close, for instance, the Palestinians, the Chechens, the Iraqis and the Syrians. While their parents chose where to live and partly maintained the culture of their country of origin, the young distanced themselves from that culture without acquiring a new one: ‘the danger that ruins life in the poor districts is not Islam or multiculturalism … it is deculturation’ (Todorov, 2014: 168). Scholars in the area of theology have attempted to find in sacred texts the cause of contemporary terrorism. For example, charting the history of the Islamic State since its first incarnation in the seventh century, the following Hadith (a prophecy emanating from Muhammad) has been highlighted. Widely accepted among Sunni Islamists, the prophecy states that the history of the Umma (the Muslim international community) will traverse five phases: first,

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the Prophet himself will rule; then Caliphs will rule according to the Prophet’s teachings; then force will be necessary for those teachings to spread; later, coercive rules will be established; finally, the time of the caliphate will return and usher in the end of the world (Kennedy, 2016; Small, 2016). The Caliph, it should be specified, is not only the representative of the Prophet but also of God: he is God on earth (Adonis, 2016). Radical Islam, according to this reading, constantly recycles the remains of the past because it is in the past that its future is believed to lie. This notion of ‘frozen time’, or yearning for a lost mythical utopia set in the seventh-­century Islamic theocracy, finds ideal reception in traditional mindsets, characterized by ‘following’ rather than ‘questioning’. Believers, in other words, are asked to simply repeat and reproduce the truths of revelation. Radical critics contend that, historically, Islam was founded on tribalism, anger for conquest and the power of money. It was imposed by force, therefore violence was its original major component: ‘In the foundational text, those who disbelieve in the communications of Allah shall have a severe chastisement … We shall make them enter fire; so oft as their skins are thoroughly burned’ (ibid.: 39). Prayers may solicit God to erase unbelievers from the earth, so that murder, inevitably, becomes sacred. Moreover, a certain reading of the Revelation conveys the notion that the Prophet of the Muslims is the ultimate prophet, that he speaks definitive truths and that humans have nothing more to say or to add. In turn, ‘God has nothing more to say or to add. He has said His last word to His last Prophet’ (ibid.: 57). Challenging causations derived from foundational texts, other scholars have underlined how the Quran is replete with suggestions around dialogue, peace and the development of harmonious interfaith relationships. There are many passages in the Quran that destroy the idea, propagated by some, that non-Muslims are infidels and must be eliminated (Horkuc, 2009; Wills, 2016). Finally, the argument has been made that not Islam, but religion in general has always played a role in war and terrorist violence, even in advanced secular countries (Buc, 2015; Sacks, 2015; Hassner, 2016). Currently, international conflict in general is being ‘theologized’,

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as wars and military interventions, led by the Judeo-Christian West in the name of noble causes, are also, from a certain perspective, wars of religion (Derrida, 2002). This state of affairs was exacerbated by US President George W. Bush’s use of the emotive word ‘crusade’ in his speech to announce the war against terrorism shortly after the 9/11 attack in 2001 (see Chapter 9 for more on religion and violence). Becoming a terrorist, on the other hand, amounts to ‘pure and simple regression that offers a mixture of sacrificial and ­criminal heroism’ (Badiou, 2016: 56). In his unceremonious analysis, ­Badiou sees in contemporary extremists ‘fascist armed gangs with a ­religious tinge’, arguing that religion has always provided a rhetorical cover for violent gangs: Franco’s Falangist thugs were blessed by priests, and even the mafia ‘professes a punctilious Catholicism’ (ibid.: 42–43). It could also be added that Blair’s warmongering was one of the outcomes of his relentless flirting with the Catholic Church. Religion, death and sacrifice have often developed into the cult of martyrdom, and contemporary suicide bombers are just the ­latest example of this development originating from political or religious beliefs (Barlow, 2016). Joining terrorist networks, whether through religious belief or not, is the final stage of the construction of a nihilist subjectivity, prompted by the desire for revenge and destruction and coupled with subtle alienated imitation. Nihilist subjectivities incorporate a ‘desire for the West: the desire to possess, to share in what is represented, what is vaunted everywhere as the luxury of the West’ (Badiou, 2016: 48–49). Revenge and destruction, however, are formalized through the mythology of tradition, as is often the case in liberation struggles. The parallel may be illuminating. The history of anti-colonization gives several examples of how national struggles aim at liberating peoples from external oppressors as well as from the internal effects of that oppression. Traditional local elites in colonies were formed of individuals who mediated foreign rule, negotiated or accommodated demands, ‘making the best of a difficult and often humiliating relationship’ (Walzer, 2015: 2). These elites offering liberation were likely to be regarded with suspicion, and forced

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to accept nationalist claims. ‘Even Gandhi was deeply opposed to many aspects of Hindu culture, especially the fate of the untouchables. He was assassinated by someone committed to a more literal, or more traditional, or perhaps more radically nationalist version of Hinduism’ (ibid.: 4). Liberation entails forms of traditionalism, and the achievement of independence may witness the growth of anti-modernization sentiments as a weapon against the oppressor. While Fanon (1965) was celebrating the birth of the ‘new Algerian’, fundamentalism was already beginning its political counter-revolution. Religion  was used by leaders as a tool for their immediate purpose, namely creating political unity in the anticolonial struggle, but resentment brewed among groups of people who disliked ‘those secularizing and modernizing elites, with their foreign ideas, their patronizing attitudes, and their big projects’ (Walzer, 2015: 26). Real liberators, in sum, were expected to set past and future glory against present humiliation, and to display their ‘alterity’ from the enemy in the form of the martyrdom they were prepared to endure. The struggle, therefore, was not simply inspired by the desire for independence, but also by the necessity to destroy the ancient enemy, the invader, members of alien faiths and the infidels. The type of violence ascribed to radicalized Islam, however, contains some additional, original elements. The formation of nihilist networks today, while pursuing the destruction of ancient enemies, aims at constructing commercial power: ISIS sold petrol, gas supplies, artworks, cotton, arms, slaves and women (Badiou, 2016; Adonis, 2016). This has spawned a specialist, if inconclusive, literature on the nexus between terrorism and organized crime (Ruggiero, 2017b). That all organizations, including non-state entities, engage in commercial initiatives should not be surprising in a world that preaches unfettered freedom of enterprise and unchecked accumulation of profits. When organizations resort to acts of terror, however, we may presume they feel that they have no space left for peaceful interaction. For example, the invasion of a country may be followed by resistance in the form of terrorist acts, as we have seen, while terrorist acts may determine responses of a terrorist (extra legem) nature by states. This mimetic dynamic leads to other considerations.

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The radicalization of democracy If the context in which political violence is performed is itself violent, an escalating process allows the parties involved to devise increasingly violent practices. Such practices take on the nature of terrorism when violence becomes random and organizations using it adopt a concept of collective liability applied to the groups against which they fight. Both terrorism and counter-terrorism may choose ‘pure’ forms of violence in an imitative process that rapidly becomes war-like (Witte, 1996; Black, 2004). Terrorism and state-sponsored terrorism are linked in this causal chain that exhibits feud-like elements of vengeance, each side answering random violence with random violence. Some characteristics of contemporary democracies act as catalysers of this process. Empirical theories of democracy tend to focus on existing models, so that they end up endorsing the status quo as the most preferable arrangement. Inspired by a sense of ‘realism’, such theories jettison suggestions of improvement, let alone of alternative models, treating them as idealistic, empirically inadequate or ‘unreal’ (Held, 2006). However, the performance of ‘real’ democratic systems cannot be dissociated from the evaluation expressed by those who experience the functioning of such systems. Civil society, for instance, may not limit its action to the periodical expression of voting preferences, but is likely to put forward demands and, in so doing, exercise a form of surveillance or vigilance over institutional decisions. A public sphere distinct from the state apparatus, in other words, constitutes a key component of what we ought to understand for democracy. Democratic decision making, in brief, can be accomplished through political action from below. Not all politics is contentious, as it commonly consists of elections, consultation, ceremony and bureaucratic process (McAdam et al., 2001). Social movements, instead, do express contentious politics when they make ‘contained’ and/or ‘transgressive’ claims, namely when demands are put forward through well-established means and/or through innovative means. Ultimately, democracy distinguishes itself from other regimes only if its elected political agents are able to interact with challengers, with new political entities and their innovative collective action (Tilly, 2004, 2007).

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This classification was proposed by some among the very founders of classical political thought, with Machiavelli (1970), for instance, identifying as corrupt those systems which proved unable to deal with tumults and other forms of troubling dissent. Contention, including violent contention, Machiavelli argued, causes no harm, particularly when the elite, through changes in social arrangements and legislation, defeats the corrupt elements within itself. Livy’s history suggests that the absence of corruption was the reason why the numerous tumults that took place in Rome ‘did no harm, but, on the contrary, were an advantage to that republic’ (Bull, 2016: 35). ‘In the historical evolution of democratic regimes, a circuit of surveillance, anchored outside state institutions, has developed side by side with the institutions of electoral accountability … democracy develops with the permanent contestation of power’ (Della Porta, 2013: 5). Non-state aggregations, including independent media and professionals, pressure groups, non-governmental organizations and social movements have traditionally played such a surveillance function. The latter, in particular, as relevant actors and purveyors of collective needs and sentiments, express implicit judgements on elites and their activity. What distinguishes democratic systems is their specific capacity to respond to such judgements or, to put it differently, their ability to deal with contentious politics. Democracies, in brief, can be classified on the basis of the elasticity of their structures and the degree to which they encourage political processes and social dynamism leading to change (Ruggiero and Montagna, 2008). Intolerance towards dissent constitutes one of the major manifestations of today’s crisis of politics, which hampers the possibility of collective action, denies space for negotiation between rulers and ruled, and ultimately prevents human communities from representing themselves as agents of their own history (Balibar, 2016). In this sense, the very notion of citizenship is ‘under siege and reduced to impotence’, while democratic systems take on a ‘pure’ form, namely they become capable of dealing exclusively with their own logic and the mechanisms of their own reproduction (ibid.: 12). Individuals and groups, as a consequence, are expelled from their place in the world (Sassen, 2014).

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While reducing the opportunities for participatory forms of action, contemporary democracies simultaneously expand the sphere of delegation. Thus, the electoral process becomes increasingly influenced by private interests expressed through the initiative of donors and lobbyists. Soliciting bribes is now termed ‘fundraising’ and bribery itself ‘lobbying’, while bank lobbyists ‘shape or even write the legislation that is supposed to regulate their banks’ (Graeber, 2013: 114). Secrecy characterizes many operations conducted by contemporary global elites, in the economic as well as in the political realm (Urry, 2014). The term ‘off-shore’, applied to the range of financial irregularities that allow the hiding of wealth (Ruggiero, 2017c), can also describe contemporary mechanisms of democratic decision making and practices, which in turn are increasingly ‘hidden’ from public scrutiny. While participation is discouraged, enclaves of political and economic power become increasingly unreceptive to the moods and needs of citizens. These enclaves constitute forms of ‘off-shore democracies’, in the sense that the dynamics of their action, the procedures of their decision making and their very capacity to make decisions affecting all are hidden from the electorate. This leads to a process of political de-skilling of the electorate, which grows impotent, disillusioned and, again, apathetic. Lack of participation marks the simultaneous decline of deliberative practices, namely those processes leading to the formation of opinions in interaction with others. These practices characterize social movements and the way in which their horizontal communication produces tolerance for the other and acceptance of diversity. In brief, off-shore democracies are unable to deal with political contention, to interact with challengers, to accept contestation and to submit choices to collective assessment and deliberation. They testify to a crisis of politics that pushes them in the direction of increasing secrecy. Crucial decisions affecting all are made in closed enclaves impervious to popular control. Off-shore forms of government, militarization and the massive presence of police officers, transforming public spaces into war zones, are signs of the radicalization of democracy, a process also taking place at the international level.

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In the name of freedom Anxious Dictators and Wavering Democracies was the title of a recent report published by Freedom House (2016) in which the US and ­Europe were described as struggling to cope with international events, particularly unresolved regional conflicts. Their role in exacerbating such conflicts was not explicitly mentioned, although both their action and inaction were said to have ‘generated unprecedented numbers of refugees and incubated terrorist groups that inspired or organized attacks on targets abroad’ (ibid.: 1).‘Wavering democracies’ were accused of responding to such issues through the development of populist campaigns and the adoption of security measures that run counter to the core values of free societies. Displaying a lack of self-confidence, democracies were said to fuel xenophobic feelings, creating a climate in which attacks on facilities hosting refugees, the erection of fences and the creation of draconian laws become legitimized. In effect, the European establishment’s inability to manage these new challenges – on top of the lingering economic woes that began nearly a decade ago – gave fresh impetus to those who have questioned the European project and the liberal, universal values that it represents. (Ibid.: 2) Intolerant policies are implemented in the name of patriotism and the draconian measures adopted against the ‘intruders’ find an echo in violent strategies of law enforcement and crowd control against all dissenters. The radicalization of democracy at the international level also entails the formation of a planetary oligarchy and the concentration of the world’s resources, along with the promotion of values and principles justifying them. The word freedom, for instance, has been appropriated by those who deny it to the other, namely right-wing, xenophobic parties springing up across Europe, so that a concept purportedly belonging to the democratic tradition is being used to destroy that tradition. Recent invasions, illegal wars, torture, kidnappings, the use of prohibited weapons and the killing of civilians have been perpetrated in

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the name of this type of freedom. Similarly, the mercenary-­state partnerships and their destructive activities have been justified through the benefit they are bound to produce for the establishment of global liberty. With drones and homicide missions, democracies can assassinate people on the secret orders of heads of state, and ‘for a highly targeted death (say, a gang chief ) there are on average nine collateral victims’ (Badiou, 2016: 60). More than collateral damage, these assassinations amount to deterrence addressed to entire populations. The radicalization of democracy is a response to a crisis of ­hegemony, when rules are suspended or eliminated and open ‘wars of manoeuvre’ are waged against internal and external enemies ­( Jessop, 2016). This process triggers the creation of ‘deep states’, namely ­hidden auxiliary power networks that supplement the ‘off-shore’ democratic entities mentioned above. Democracy, in this way, arms itself with the very forces that threaten it (Todorov, 2014). Openness, moderation and temperance are replaced by excess, hubris and feelings of omnipotence, while freedom and free enterprise intertwine with military missions which, rather than engaging in the arduous task of establishing states, simply destroy states (Badiou, 2016). The enjoyment of rights is polarized, setting freedom of enterprise against freedom to remedy entrepreneurial social harm, freedom to establish political agendas against freedom to oppose them, freedom to engage in war against freedom to demonstrate against it. The radicalization of democracy takes on the nature of an auto-­ immune disorder that threatens the life of contemporary societies and the legal systems that underwrite them. The war on terror is, therefore, akin to slow suicide, as societies attempting to protect themselves, in fact, destroy the defensive mechanisms that are supposed to guarantee their survival. ‘Repression – whether it be through the police, the military, or the economy – ends up producing and regenerating the very thing it seeks to disarm’ (Derrida, 2003: 99). Radicalized combatants are, thus, doubly suicidal, as they incorporate two suicides in one: their own and the suicide of the radicalized democracies they fight. In brief, the militarization of internal conflict and the transformation of domestic public spaces into war zones are accompanied by a parallel process occurring at the international level. Here, intolerance is expressed through illegal invasions, the use of

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prohibited techniques and practices, secretive homicide missions, and the transformation of international public spaces into global war markets. The causal chain illustrated by the narrowing ladder mentioned above may lead to the extreme choice of self-sacrifice, as we shall discuss later.

Organizations and networks This causal chain is also detectable in the very structure that organizations are assuming. In other words, responding to random violence with random violence not only causes the proliferation and higher intensity of attacks, but also shapes the organizational structure through which these are carried out. Non-state violent organizations must, by definition, adopt clandestine structures, although the model with which they present themselves may vary according to contexts and in response to institutional action (Beck, 2015). In situations where popular support is widespread, terrorist groups may set up dual structures composed of an official, legitimate layer of activists and a hidden nucleus of combatants waging armed attacks. This dual structure seems to survive as far as terrorist organizations maintain strong links with social movements and perceive themselves as representatives of aggrieved groups (Combs, 2013; Martin, 2010). Lack of support from such groups who express their contentious politics through visible social movement activity often determines the collapse of terrorist groups (Ruggiero, 2010). On the other hand, repression of social movements weakens the tempering function such movements may exercise, leading to spiralling and senseless violence. For example, the major upturn in IRA membership and terrorist activities in Northern Ireland followed the introduction of internment in 1971 (Spjut, 1986). Radicalized Islamic groups have evolved over the last two decades following international events and the intensification of institutional responses. In the 1990s, for instance, hard-core militants prevailed in organizations that displayed a high degree of professionalism and role differentiation. The distance between leaders and adherents was kept to a minimum, and all participants were

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tasked with specific operations that they were well able to carry out due to expertise and appropriate skills. Recruitment was selective and based, among other things, on proven ideological loyalty, military expertise, possession of resources, range of reliable followers, status and available key contacts. The prevailing model was, therefore, one that echoed the old international political organizations, with a central committee dictating the ‘line’, establishing the goals, identifying possible allies and drawing a short-term as well as a long-term strategy. This, of course, was the attainment of power, pursued through the building of strong links among participants, supporting social groups and their allies. This structure, which hosted members operating according to the principles of ‘authoritarian centralism’, was slowly supplemented by the creation of cellular units more or less coordinated among themselves and with increasingly weaker links with the central structure. Prevailing anti-terrorism strategies contributed to this evolution, as the ‘enemy’ was isolated and kept at increasing distance from civil society and its contentious expressions. The increase in social and relational distance from collective feelings and aggrieved groups forced organizations into the interstices of discontent, in an attempt to gather the ‘detritus’ left behind by social, cultural and political polarization. Violence is less destructive where the adversaries are closer in social space, a principle of which democracies may be aware but prefer to exploit with the aim of turning more or less defensible causes into delirious destruction. Drastic ruptures were created, and enemies were forced to redefine themselves and radically reshape their strategy. This process is similar to that accompanying the criminalization of social movements, which leads in equal measure to some participants abandoning the fight and some choosing clandestine action. A scale shift was produced, whereby ascending violence was met with harsher exemplary punishments and spectacular retaliation. In response, violent groups launched yet higher levels of threats and deployed more spectacular violence (Tilly, 2004). Attacks by scattered cells started to follow a ‘logic’ rather than an established ‘programme’, with copycat action being conducted in contexts that were diverse and isolated from one another.

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Communication among terrorist cells, in brief, began to revolve around the symbolic nature of the destructive act, a form of signature indicating a common identity. Such terrorist cells, which presumably are still operating now, are devoid of an international reach, but become international thanks to the images they furnish, the imagination they stimulate and the repetitions they encourage. ‘Violence increasingly seeks excess and rupture rather than organization and programme’ (McDonald, 2013: 168). Such a view is substantiated by the wave of ‘low-tech’ attacks carried out in recent years across Europe. In London alone, two men ran down Trooper Lee Rigby near Woolwich Barracks, then stabbed him to death. An attack in March 2017 led to four people being killed after being run down by a van, then the perpetrator stabbing a police officer to death at the gates of the Palace of Westminster. In the following month, eight people were killed and 48 seriously injured, when three male terrorists ran down pedestrians on London Bridge, then ran into Borough Market with knives, before being shot dead by police. In Nice, 87 were killed by a terrorist truck driver who mowed down pedestrians out celebrating Bastille Day 2016, and a similar attack occurred at the Berlin Christmas Market in December 2016, killing 12 and injuring 56 (Harris, 2017). In the current phase, the development of ‘networks of cells’ seems to constitute the prevailing trend. Not long ago the core structure was located in specific territories acquired by a military force, while peripheral entities were scattered and offered their support in a variety of fashions. At the height of its power, ISIS was said to adopt Mao’s revolutionary warfare strategy, based on the formation of an irregular army. But while for Mao this army relied mainly on peasants, ISIS availed itself of the expertise of jihadists from previous conflicts mixed with professional soldiers and intelligence personnel (Whiteside, 2016). ISIS conducted dozens of prison breaks, freeing thousands of veterans, while some 20,000 inmates were released between 2008 and 2010 in rudderless countries afflicted by civil war, such as Iraq. Again, with supreme irony, the future self-declared Caliph of the worldwide Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was released from detainment in Iraq by ISIS

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forces (Warrick, 2015). Prisoners, in brief, constitute perhaps a major pool of potential recruits, an army born of chaos held by those in command through a vertical apparatus and functional bureaus. This organizational form was copied largely from al Qaeda, was financially self-sufficient, media savvy and was kept together by a strong leadership. At the same time, small groups of individuals may just plan and execute attacks which seem to be consistent with the strategy of the core organization, with or without prior assent or post-facto endorsement by that organization. Recruitment may also spread to and attract young women who are prepared to become spouses of combatants in the regions where the organization rules. New combatants, moreover, may be recruited from the large repository of aggrieved Muslims resident in most Western countries, as we have seen. In brief, it no longer seems that terrorism can be imputed to a single, however loosely, organized group. Along with hierarchical organizations, there are bands of followers who act outside formal structures and ‘are motivated by feelings and beliefs widely shared among millions of Muslims worldwide … The independence of the attacks in Madrid (2004), London (2005) and Mumbai (2008) from Al Qaeda control or direction is a vivid demonstration’ (Blum and Heymann, 2010: 162). At times, anti-radicalization strategies and the radicalized others activate their respective hidden networks and tools, with the former choosing illegal forms of annihilating the enemy and the latter mobilizing fragmented groups and identities forced into a clandestine existence. Repression may push dissent underground but fail to destroy the informal networks and the social relationships through which identities are structured. Extreme repression, moreover, reduces the variety of points of reference for aggrieved groups, selecting the most extreme among them. This is when state agents can blend elements of warfare with those of criminal justice, thus responding to the radicalization they have created. Although at times radical violence may appear to be an unpredictable outburst or unexplainable explosion, it possesses a ‘geometrical precision’. It occurs when the social geometry of a conflict is violent. ‘Every form of violence has its own structure, whether a beating structure,

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dueling structure, lynching structure, feuding structure, genocide structure – or terrorist structure. Structures kill and maim, not individuals or collectivities’ (Black, 2004: 15).

Voluntary negation of the body In the early 1980s, a group of young Iranians confronted the Iraqi machine guns wearing ‘heaven’s keys’ (bombs) around their neck. For them, dying on the path to Allah was not dying, but a vital act of faith that accelerates the coming of the Apocalypse. Similarly, the New Testament describes the fall of Babylon, the corrupt city that must be destroyed so that pagans are replaced by ‘the just’, and the final defeat of the anti-Christ following the Parousia, the second coming of the Messiah (Di Cesare, 2017). Authors have searched for the ancestors of contemporary suicide bombers, listing Samson, the Zealots-Sicarii in Roman Palestine and the Assassins in Persia among others (Gambetta, 2005). However, apocalyptic killing and suicide became criminological concerns thanks to the studies of the Positivist School, when regicides sentenced to death were happy to put their head on the scaffold for the sacred cause of anarchy (Lombroso, 1894; Lombroso and Laschi, 1890). Mysticism was their central characteristic, acquired while embracing a dogma and through the conviction that theirs was a mission. ‘Indirect suicide’ was the definition applied to these solitary fighters, who by attacking an aristocrat in a crowded street knew that the chances to escape would be meagre. If not killed then and there, they knew they would be sentenced to death. The notion of political suicide returned in the 1960s, when a police raid on an apartment in Chicago resulted in the killing of members of the Black Panther Party (Wilkins and Clark, 1973). Regarded as an execution without trial, the episode was seen as marking the reduction of the range of options available to the Panthers, to the point that violent responses on their part appeared no less than self-inflicted violence. In a rationalization of this shift, Newton (1973) distinguished between reactionary and revolutionary suicide. The former was described as the reaction of persons who take their own life in response to social conditions that overwhelm

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them and condemn them to helplessness. There are many suicides among young black men who have been ‘deprived of human dignity, crushed by oppressive forces, and denied their right to live as proud and free human beings’ (ibid.: 4). At the heart of the concept of revolutionary suicide, conversely, there was the belief that ‘it is better to oppose the forces that would drive me to self-murder than to endure them’. Revolutionary suicide was, therefore, the price of self-respect and did not imply a death wish. On the contrary: ‘We have such desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible’ (ibid.: 5). It should be noted that the large majority of such suicides were carried out by secular rather than religious organizations and individuals. During the last two decades, suicide missions have taken place in many countries, including Lebanon, Israel, Sri Lanka, Iraq, the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Algeria, Morocco, Turkey, Chechnya and Uzbekistan (De La Corte, 2014). Interpretations of the phenomenon vary, with some arguing that suicide attacks involve some degree of rationality, as they are seen as the most effective way of attaining desired goals. This goal-oriented behaviour is chosen for the tactical and operative advantages it grants: higher lethality, intense psychological and social impact and wide media coverage. Suicide communicates determination, commitment to escalate, solicitation of recruits, the capacity to hit well-protected and high value targets. ‘The notion of instrumental orientation of suicide behaviour is supported … by the fact that most of the suicide attacks do not constitute isolated incidents but are grouped in campaigns, according to a precise schedule and guidelines’ (ibid.: 2). The certainty, rather than the risk, of death is therefore accepted by virtue of a rational calculus of its impact: the spread of a sense of vulnerability upon entire populations and the threat of repeated future attacks (Wilcox, 2015). Suicide missions, on the other hand, take place when conflicts become too asymmetric, although responses to them are most likely to increase asymmetry. Studies have focused on cases in which the death of perpetrators is strictly necessary for the success of the mission, and in which those who take part are neither deceived nor forced to do so.

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Discussions have centred on whether self-inflicted death is instrumental for the achievement of the desired effect or whether what is important for perpetrators is ‘not just to kill but to die at the same time’ (Gambetta, 2005: vii). The determination suicide bombers communicate is reiterated as theirs appears as a ‘fighting intent that cannot be deterred: what can be scarier than knowing there are people who value their lives less than your death?’ (ibid.: 266). But there is more in suicide missions, for example the message that, as knights of the Apocalypse, the perpetrators defy any notion of exchange and negotiation: the life they give away as a gift cannot be returned, unless the system itself commits suicide. And this is what happens, as we have seen, when reactions seem akin to tetanic spasms, with political organisms which, by responding with equal violence, squander their antibodies. Suicide missions cause paralysis and immunodeficiency (Baudrillard, 2002). Suicidal attacks cause the collapse of the inter-subjective order, abolishing the distinction between a subject and an object, a human being and a thing. In the vocabulary suggested by Kristeva (1980), they exemplify ‘abjection’, namely the erasure of boundaries and identities that are essential for our entrance into the symbolic order of society. Auschwitz is an example of the ‘abject’, where bodies are displayed as lifeless and mutilated flesh, provoking horror and disgust. Similarly, suicide missions expose the vacuity of the notion of the body as a whole, an entity different and other from the surrounding things. Suicide missions blur the boundaries between nature and culture, biology and technology; the body of the attacker blurs the boundaries between flesh and metal (Wilcox, 2015). Whether inspired by religious creed or not, suicide signals the refusal of the power over life and death detained by the sovereign, the voluntary negation of the body in the face of those who control bodies. Suicide therefore rejects servitude, it is a form of exodus, like fleeing the forces of oppression, ‘an elemental act of liberation and a threat that every form of sovereignty constantly has to manage, contain, or displace’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 333). Suicidal or not, terrorism, curiously, echoes neoliberalism as it affirms a theory of infinite action, it puts into practice animal spirit and individual unrestrained initiative (Di Cesare, 2017). Terrorism

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incorporates a notion of self-love that, in the economic as well as in the political sphere, is bound to go awry. If sovereignty consists in possessing the most credible threat, and in the right to suspend rights, terrorism imitates those who are most credible in the exercise of such right. Terror imitates the war on terror, and vice versa. Both produce mixtures of bits and pieces of flesh belonging to attackers and victims (Wilcox, 2015). After Achilles has killed Hector (Boitani, 2017), the body of the latter is claimed by his father: the killing has not totally disfigured it. After the clash of terror and counter-terror today, on the contrary, bodies cannot be claimed or reassembled; only small parts of bodies are left on the ground.

8 Chaotic murder

It is time to move to another extreme form of political violence. This chapter proposes an understanding of war and criminology through the use of the creative sources offered by literature. These sources, while communicating exemplary meanings and morals, can help describe and comprehend the social and cultural landscapes of war and crime. Stendhal and Tolstoy are chosen as major classical providers of such sources, and an analysis of their respective novels, The Charterhouse of Parma and War and Peace, will offer support to the idea that the inclusion of war in criminological thinking is timely as well as necessary. If it is true that literature enshrines cultural values, it is plausible to maintain that it is also an instrument for resisting social and political decay (Boxall, 2015). Literature can unravel oppression and indicate possibilities for action, as it can make unpredictable things happen in contexts described as static and unchangeable. The imaginary representations offered by fiction can foreground the systemic contradictions of societies, while art in general can convey ‘complexes of ideas which tend to generate activities towards changes of the prevailing order’ (Malloch and Munro, 2013: 2). The perspective adopted in this chapter, echoing the observations made previously around contemplation and desistence, contains elements of cultural criminology, which is similarly engaged

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in unveiling the human dimensions of crime, the evidence of everyday existence and the ‘aesthetic’ edge of deviance (Presdee, 2000). What follows is an attempt to engage with the growing ‘popular’ criminology that shapes collective understandings of crime, and might be seen as corrective of, or supplementary to, conventional criminological knowledge. However, the chapter does not limit itself to adding yet other viewpoints in relation to war and crime, or to conveying a better understanding of the subject matter. The understanding it seeks to communicate comes in the form of artistic imagination, and imagination is a prerequisite of empathy: imagining the suffering of others, seeing their face, as Lévinas (1996) would argue, is crucial for peaceful co-existence. In this sense, this chapter tries to locate empathy at the centre of criminology, a criminology that strives to delineate a variety of social frames (Goffman, 1974) in that it digs ‘into human motives, intentions, goals, aspirations, dreams and desires rather than proposing mechanical, natural, technical, law-like or “dehumanized” answers and solutions’ ( Jacobsen, 2014: 3). The writers discussed here experience events while renouncing conventional language and, like children, use only their senses and their imagination, giving us all a lesson on how criminology could develop. Looking through the eyes of Stendhal, it is possible to see war as chaos and narcissism, two crucial protagonists of The Charterhouse of Parma, a novel that Tolstoy admired. War and Peace follows the trajectory of its author, who through the horror of destruction and killing, reaches his spiritual goal, a unique mélange of primitive Christianity, anarchism and pacifism. This trajectory will bring us to a series of sociological and criminological concepts that contain a radical critique of war. The origin of war novels is found in epic poetry and classics such as Homer’s The Iliad and Virgil’s The Aeneid. This type of ­fictional literature was also influenced by the tragedies of Euripides, ­Seneca, Marlowe and Shakespeare. In the seventeenth century, while realistic portrayals timidly took shape, the genre was largely represented by picaresque satires. The origin of anti-war novels, our interest here, is more difficult to trace, although Aristotle’s (1995) view proposed half a millennium ago may be a candidate, namely his description of war as hunting, the hunt for human rather than

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animal prey. Sophocles was well aware of the ‘death of heroes’, particularly when he narrated the savagery ingrained in the very being of Aias and Herakles. The latter engages in brutish, deceitful, selfish acts, and when he dies, burned by acid, the audience finds it difficult to feel sorry for him. Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost, on the other hand, can also be regarded as founding texts of anti-war literary sensitivities. The nineteenth century saw both the flourishing of realistic ­descriptions of wars and the appearance of unsurpassed anti-war novels. The choice of Stendhal and Tolstoy, in this chapter, is due to the paradigmatic nature of their novels and the exemplary mixture of horror and empathy we find in them. Many important anti-war novels have been produced in the twentieth century, for example All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque), A ­Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway), The Case of Sargent Grischa (Arnold Zweig), Troubled Sleep ( Jean-Paul Sartre), and L’Acacia (Claude ­Simon). The authors of these books, we may speculate, would not object to the suggestion that Stendhal and Tolstoy are the progenitors of the genre. Even when reading more recent novels focused on the tragedies of Iran and Iraq, such as Son of Iran (Sayyid Noureddin Afi) and One Woman’s War (Seyyedeh Zahra Hosseini), we may perhaps be authorized to regard them as Stendhal and Tolstoy’s distant progeny.

Deception In a late novella based on a Renaissance manuscript, Giulio is a brigand who is determined to visit the woman he loves, Elena, whose father has locked her in a convent. The Abbess of Castro (Stendhal, 2014) is replete with amorous and military undertaking, where seductions of women are planned as military campaigns. The adventurer is advised by his more experienced companions to travel in disguise, never confess his real name, never tell the truth and, if he sees no advantage in any particular falsehood, to lie ‘at random’. It describes political and familial machinations and offers a profoundly unsentimental view of war, waged by ambitious and shallow individuals. Dissimulation is practised by many of Stendhal’s characters, with Julien in The Red and the Black (Stendhal, 2002) hiding his love for

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Mathilde for fear of losing her, and achieving success by expressing the opposite of what he believes (Robinson, 2017). The author, too, made a habit of deception, multiplying his pseudonyms, disclaiming authorship and writing about a journey through Rome while sitting in a café in Paris. The Charterhouse of Parma received an admiring review by ­Balzac, exactly because of its author’s artful use of deception: lies, codes, fantasy, secrecy, faints, bluff, dissimulation – the basic stuff of fiction. But Stendhal is aware that he has to avoid clichés and fine writing, and regards beauty of phraseology, its roundness and rhythm, as a fault. This is why, while writing The Charterhouse of Parma, in order to acquire the desired style, he occasionally reads a few pages of the Civil Code. War is part of passion, something one needs in order to avoid boredom: without passions one is stupid (ibid.: 61). But all battlefields are the same: the stench, the mud, the dead robbed of their boots. Fabrizio, while trying to join his regiment, bumps into a corpse who obstructs his path and horrifies him and his horse. Naturally pale, he turns green when facing the repugnant spectacle: a bullet has entered the poor soldier through his nose and disfigured him horribly, leaving him with a wide-open eye (Stendhal, 2006). If passionate, war is also a chaotic affair, with soldiers ignoring where they are going and failing to distinguish friend from foe. Fabrizio, as chaotic as the chaos surrounding him, will nevertheless gain the reputation of a valiant and brave officer. He has little recollection of what he has been involved in, and yet his imagined exploits will grant him an aura of heroism. Stendhal lived in the transitional period from the ancien régime through the age of Napoleon and saw the return of the monarchy in France. He wrote his novels well after the fall of Napoleon and his grief for that fall transpires in many pages he wrote. In his personal experience as a soldier, he saw that many around him were not the heroic figures he hoped to become ( Josephson, 1946). They stole from fellow soldiers while being thrilled by their role as men of action. Sure, in the Charterhouse, General Bonaparte enters Milan at the head of a youthful army and teaches the world that after so many centuries Caesar and Alexander have a successor. But in reality, when Stendhal enthusiastically joins Napoleon, who decides to

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invade Russia, he realizes how deluded the General is in his belief that the expedition would amount to a series of quick victories (May, 1977). Stendhal’s trip to Russia provides images that he will not forget: war is a dirty business. When he reaches Smolensk, he finds the town in flames, and in his letters confesses to his unhappiness, noting that he has changed, and his old thirst for the new has been entirely quenched. All he sees is an ocean of barbarity where ‘not a sound finds an echo in my soul’ (Stendhal, 1952: 139). He is disgusted by the entire situation and relieved when Napoleon orders a withdrawal from Moscow. The battle leaves 20,000–30,000 combatants and as many non-combatants on the ground. Back in Paris, in 1813, Stendhal still yearns for more, and is sent to Germany, where he witnesses the Battle of Bautzen: again, the general confusion strikes him as many soldiers do not seem to make out exactly what is happening (Alter and Cosman, 1986). Presumably, this experience provides him with the material for his celebrated description of the Battle of Waterloo in The Charterhouse of Parma. The noise of the battle is unbearable, human shouts mix with gunshots, and Fabrizio is terrified: the hero of The Charterhouse, in brief, is very unheroic. A field is strewn with bodies, and the soldiers exclaim joyfully ‘Red-coats! Red coats!’ Many of the enemies wearing read coats are still alive and ask for help, to no avail. Horses are streaming with blood, their hooves caught in their own entrails. But Fabrizio’s ambition is satisfied: he is finally under fire; he can see shots criss-crossing in the air. ‘At last I can kill’, he whispers. But again, he can hardly understand what is happening. Soldiers steal horses from each other and chase the thieves on the battlefield, while someone is sawing someone else’s leg in order to stop gangrene developing. Fabrizio shuts his eyes, drinks four glasses of brandy, and at the end he is drunk, happy and disgusted. War after all is not that noble and universal impetus of elect souls seeking glory. After his exploits, Fabrizio also sees that among non-­combatants egotism, greed and violence spread during and after the war. He witnesses the intrigues, the plundering, the careers based on hypocrisy and criminality encouraged by the general climate of

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hostility. Far from the battlefield, life mimics war. In Parma, where Fabrizio establishes himself and kills a man in an unnecessary duel, he counts on a lady who is prepared to help him by choosing lovers among the powerful members of inimical political parties. These men have concerns of capital importance, namely how many buttons should the soldiers’ uniform have – seven or nine? These are monsters of avidity and acrimony but can help turn harsh prison sentences into mild punishment. These ‘liberals’ see virtue less as the search for happiness of the greatest number than the accomplishment of their own happiness first of all. Despotism reigns and judges rejoice when someone is hung. These ‘souls of mud’ who emit contempt become heads of the police and all citizens tremble when facing them, as they do when facing the sovereign. Aristocrats hide their wealth and dream of illegally exporting their diamonds to Geneva, where they plot to settle and escape taxes and prosecution. In brief, war is criminogenic for those who fight but also for those who do not.

The criminology of war More than a century after Stendhal, Bonger (1936) discusses the crimes caused by war situations. In such situations, he argues, all the factors which may lead to crime are driven up; family life is ripped apart, children are neglected, destitution spreads, while scarcity of goods generates theft and begets illicit markets. Note that, similarly, in the Charterhouse the neglect of the child born of the relationship between Fabrizio and Clelia leads to his death. Bonger suggests that crime is also caused by general demoralization, while violent behaviour increases as a mimetic outcome of the spectacle of ‘killing, maiming and terrible destruction’ (ibid.: 105). The dark figure of crime goes up, due to the weakening of institutional agencies such as the police and the judiciary. War, therefore, pushes all towards criminality, including those who are engaged in the battlefield, although ‘the figures of the crimes committed in the field will probably never be published’ (ibid.). The chaotic situation described by Stendhal echoes that prevailing in contemporary wars. It is a situation well captured by Kaldor

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(2001), who noted the shift from old to new wars, highlighting the ascent of new bellicose agencies specializing in the use of violence. In Iraq, chaos inspired ‘market patriotism’ and generated profit (Whyte, 2007), so that international security and business interests ended up coinciding. In current war situations it is extremely hard to distinguish crimes committed by those who fight from crimes committed by those who do not: paramilitary organizations, organized criminal groups, corporations, private contractors, advisors and mercenary companies (Whyte, 2003; Ruggiero, 2015b). The criminology of war foregrounds mass violence, violations of human rights and state crime. It focuses on gender-specific victimization (see Chapter 9) and on increases of social and ideological control, on the development of new techniques of surveillance and corresponding derogation of civil rights ( Jamieson, 1998). Stendhal equates war with ambition, excitement in following leaders and indifference in killing enemies. Although Fabrizio is not even sure he has killed anyone, and despite his nauseous reaction to the spectacle of death, he feels that a career as a soldier will bring glory, along with an aura of undeserved heroism that will help him once discharged. As a consequence, both on the frontline and in civil society, he literally gets away with murder, makes a successful career, and at the end his only penance consists in becoming a preacher and solitary inhabitant of the Charterhouse. The criminology of war, too, connects warfare with private success, looking at the nexus linking the public and the private areas, the expansion of private international policing and global security (Lea, 2016). State accountability, it is felt, is thus eroded, while new actors are invested with the legitimacy to use violence as a tool for the development of market strategies and the consequent accumulation of political power. Echoing Stendhal, who shifts from crimes committed at war to crimes committed in public and private interactions, war has been equated to a new form of corporate crime. Analyses of war as crime focus on the illegality perpetrated by invading states and the criminality of private enterprises these states involve in their military ventures. The hazy areas of ‘conflict consultancy’ and ‘security services’ are examined, highlighting the shared traits of war and the crimes of the powerful (Ruggiero, 2007).

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A contemporary understanding of war may still be inspired by the work of von Clausewitz (1968), who conceptualized war as a remarkable trinity: first, primordial violence, hatred, and enmity driven by blind instinct; second, probability and chance; and third, political calculation. This remarkable trinity is rendered as the three-dimensional illegality of contemporary wars: first, the illegal nature of their very inception; second, the nebulous normative contexts in which they take place; and third, the criminal fashion in which they are fought. Of course, von Clausewitz wrote about ‘old wars’, but his remark that often, by waging war, ‘governments part company with their peoples’ (ibid.: 235) finds an echo in contemporary events, when majorities invoking peace are ignored. In the current situation, however, majorities may be ignored as well as stimulated by what Stahl (2009) has termed ‘militainment’, that is to say the militarization of entertainment and of popular culture, regarded as a new social formation of our catastrophic times. As an extreme sport, war is now incorporated in the military–­industrial– media–entertainment complex, being divulged by films and feeding a burgeoning military toy industry, complete with collectable marine-like teddy bears for adults. Moreover, war becomes interactive, allowing citizens to play and act as virtual soldiers. With the ‘privatization’ of international conflict, a crucial statement by Karl von Clausewitz is validated, namely that we can compare war to commerce, which is also a conflict between human interests and activities. Business, war and statecraft are contests between organizations, and they only differ in their weapon or tools of competition. In business, as in war, the notion of ‘thriving on chaos’ has entered management theory: international confusion is exploited to create and shape the marketplace in locations previously regarded as impenetrable (Peters, 1991). Skilled competitors ‘will ride the whirlwind of chaos’ and the tempest will sweep the losers away (Levinson, 1994: xxii). Thriving on chaos means that we cannot shout ‘to safe harbour’, for there is none: every corner of the world, every political turbulence and human and social crisis offers business opportunities. ‘Thriving on chaos’ applied to management predates the application of the same philosophy to war; it is in the

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realm of the former that uncertainty is met by emphasizing a set of new basics – enhanced responsiveness, increased flexibility and continuous, short-cycle innovation (Ruggiero, 2013a). The Charterhouse of Parma contains several of these aspects, as chaos, illegality, violence on the battlefield and in society intertwine, echoing van Clausewitz’s notion that war, careers and competition share a similar logic, and anticipating insights developed by the criminology of war. Let us turn to Lev Tolstoy for further insights.

Spiritualized rationalism Excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church, Tolstoy claimed that God is his desire, the desire to know Him. A severe, sometimes savage moralist, setting non-violence above every other value, Tolstoy uses a technique of ‘strangeness’ to convey his views. This technique, in combination with the tonality of his prose, makes the reader think that the author has seen an object or a conduct for the first time (Bloom, 1995). According to Lukacs (1972), the defeat of the 1848 uprisings in the most important Western European countries brought about profound ideological depression, a universal despairing pessimism that descended on the greatest writers of the time. While some turned to forms of tragic nihilism, others pursued regeneration by facing life in a way that shunned petrified conventionalities. For this reason the things that Zola, Ibsen and Tolstoy seemed to have in common made a great impression, namely their adherence to reality and their ruthless, uncompromising reproduction of life. Realism, however, did not entail impassibility or cynicism, and unlike naturalism contained ‘a passionate striving to hold a mirror up to the world in order to redeem it’ (ibid.: 247). The exposure of the ills of society in Tolstoy is performed through the description of events whose causes, evolution and even ultimate purpose remain vague. Under the surface of common everyday reality, he detects ‘great unknown and unfathomable forces’ to which he gives dramatic expression (ibid.: 248). War and Peace, like other war novels, hinges on individual destinies and blind, uncontrollable forces (Tolstoy, 1962).

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Such narratives have something in common with the picaresque novel, in that the latter is built around the tribulations of some individual who is plunged into an incoherent, dangerous and unpredictable social world where the contours of reality constantly tend to shift and change shape. (Boltanski, 2014: 126) Echoing The Charterhouse of Parma, War and Peace represents N ­ apoleon imagining that his campaign against Russia would be played out in the same ‘traditional’ five acts, just like all his previous campaigns: ‘march against the capital, a great battle, entry into the capital, conclusion of a peace treaty, triumphal return to Paris’ (Lucaks, 1972: 252). But everything happens quite differently, as the novel displays a lack of clear strategies and sensible reasoning in many of its protagonists, who seem to be led by mysterious forces to act as they do. General Kutuzov is regarded as weak by his soldiers, but he is only wavering between which action to undertake by his constantly changing perception of circumstances. In this, he is as irresolute as those who keep at a distance from war, like for instance Nicholas, who resolves to return to Sonya, but then marries Mary, or like Hélène who surprisingly pairs with Pierre. Instinct dictates choice, although errors are repeatedly made that leave a sense of void and uselessness. The war itself is a succession of useless battles, and Andrei joins in with the expectation of finding meaning in earthly life. He only glimpses it, in the form of a spiritual vision, when an injury he suffers makes him nearly moribund. Pierre, in turn, finds his life empty and false, not only for having married the wrong woman but also because he is unable to understand why humans are on the earth. The mystical practices of Freemasonry, to which he adheres, fail to provide an answer, as does the unaccomplished dream to assassinate Napoleon. The rationality of the French is contrasted with the faith of the Russians, and the latter proves victorious in the Battle of Borodino, which is far more than a decisive turning point in the war. During the occupation of Moscow, reason and logical strategy are defeated by instinct and spirituality, and while the Russian elite apes the invaders by learning their language, it is the humble farmer Platon Karataev who inspires the unworldly resistance of the Muscovites.

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Tolstoy portrays different social groups – peasants and servants, architects and aristocrats, military commanders and nurses – and those in charge of exercising some form of leadership are depicted as the most inadequate. He questions their abilities: the Tsar seems an unremarkable man, and Napoleon himself, the plump and clumsy body immersed in the bathtub, is far from appearing as the glorious conqueror of Europe. Lack of appreciation for leaders indicates Tolstoy’s view that history is not the creation of great men, but the outcome of acts performed by masses of individuals engaged in a common effort and aided by chains of circumstances. In his philosophy of history laid down in the concluding pages of War and Peace, he sees under the calm sea of pacified Europe the movements of humankind, the forming of aggregations which are set to prepare future events. These movements are guided by laws unknown to us that secretly determine collective action. Chance gave power to Napoleon, chance enticed his followers and chance determined his fall. The mysterious pattern of events echoes the mystery of death. For Tolstoy, death is not a biological but a moral event. When approaching the end at Austerlitz, Andrei feels the absurdity of the chain of command to which he is subjected and, witnessing the death of others, finally understands the insanity of war and all ­v iolent human conflicts. The heroic code associated with battles, violence and the cult of manliness is shattered, and in the final pages of War and Peace the ‘victories’ achieved by the Western powers in Africa are described as crimes. Those invasions, depicted as glorious deeds worthy of Caesar and Alexander the Great, regarded as a source of pride and glory, are instead labelled by Tolstoy as examples of cruelty and genocide. This denunciation is proffered through the device of ‘not understanding’ previously used by Voltaire and Montesquieu, who portray French social structure from the point of view of a foreigner who knows little about it. Tolstoy employs this device widely, in the description of a battle from the point of view of an uncomprehending combatant, or in the chronicle of political events and of a session in the Moscow Duma. War and military exploits are, in this way, ‘de-heroized’ (Bakhtin, 1981).

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Criminalizing war The criminology of war addresses several of these issues. The Battle of Borodino caused some 70,000 casualties in a ­single day, leading Tolstoy to question whether acts of heroism can be assessed through the number of victims they cause. S­ imilarly, the massive violence and victimization that constitute the essence of war prompt criminologists to question the official definitions of crime ( Jamieson, 2014). Challenging established paradigms that separate legality from illegality, the pathological aspects of war suggest new interpretations and research agendas. War is often included within the study of state crime, an arena which investigates pathological manifestations of power and the complicity between institutional and economic interests. For instance, a­ uthors have explored how war situations encourage joint action by state and private forces and how violence, therefore, can be seen as ‘dual purpose’, ‘simultaneously serving private and political goals’ (Green and Ward, 2009:  609). ‘War as crime’ has been analysed as an amalgam of illegality perpetrated by invading states and the criminality of the private enterprises these states involve in their military ventures. The shared traits of war and white-collar crime have been highlighted, and the definition of ‘war as corporate crime’ situated within the analytical framework of the study of the crimes of the powerful (Ruggiero, 2007, 2016). Quintessentially interdisciplinary in nature, criminology has examined war from the perspective of international law, providing insights into victims and perpetrators without which the brutality of international conflicts would disappear behind legalistic preoccupations (Roberts and McMillan, 2003). The denunciation of the heroic code in Tolstoy finds echoes in contributions mobilizing responsibility among scholars in pointing to human suffering in war. Tolstoy’s realistic tones find reiteration in academics claiming that heroism hides atrocities, which compels everyone, including criminologists, to take sides and speak out (Hagan and Rymond-Richmond, 2009). The rational logic of battle, juxtaposed by Tolstoy to spirituality, echoes current attempts to justify war as a reasonable way of changing

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repressive regimes by exporting (or imposing) democracy. Contemporary Napoleons are tackled by movements fighting against war, as in Tolstoy’s luminous and tolerant peasants such as Platon Karataev. They are also opposed by critics who see in war an attempt to put violence at the service of what is purported to be a higher moral good, namely the relational model in which some countries are subservient and dependent on others. In this respect, see Tolstoy’s radical criticism of the ‘glory’ achieved by dominant countries in Africa. The criminology of war has argued that challenging this relational model ignites various reactions, from puzzlement to outrage to violence. What is specifically challenged, in the perception of invaders, is their integrity or unity and a hierarchical arrangement deemed natural. Violence becomes in this way morally motivated in that it aims ‘toward realizing ideal models of relationships’, restoring hierarchy, integrity and unity (Fiske and Rai, 2015:  6). Invaders, normally, are most disposed to violence when they regard their own group or country as cohesive, inherently superior and historically or divinely appointed to cover a special international role and determine the shape and destiny of the world. Against these self-serving assumptions, Tolstoy’s spirituality posits that all wars are inherently criminal, a view that sounds like a call to criminologists to act as pacifist moral entrepreneurs (Ruggiero, 2005). Elements of cultural criminology, as noted at the beginning, are scattered in this chapter, while it should be acknowledged that a ‘cultural criminology of war’ is now developing in its own right (Klein, 2016). This new area of research seeks ‘a theoretical framework for understanding how culture and ideology contribute to war, particularly ideological “enlistment of the public”’ (ibid.: 369). The role of the public is examined as are the ways in which the elites legitimize their decisions to wage war. ‘Catalysts’ have been identified in the form of deep cultural ideas that support military aggression. These include socialization, alienation, definition of situations, obedience to authority and normalization. ‘Aggressive war has structural and cultural/ideological roots. A criminology of war must further analyze the social, ideological, and psychological levels on which war is promoted’ (ibid.: 382). Imagination, as mentioned in the initial pages of this chapter, is the added variable used here, a prerequisite of empathy, discussed

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by Emmanuel Lévinas (1996) in his ethics of alterity. Lévinas explores otherness in the aftermath of the Holocaust, emphasizing the responsibility we all have when meeting others. The encounter is eminently social, as the other is what we are not, and our interaction requires non-violent mutuality, so that our reciprocal alterity is preserved. Empathy, in such encounters, entails that the other becomes a neighbour because his/her face summons us, at times begs us, reminding us of our responsibility. The notion of community here turns into a signifying meeting with difference that is not founded on knowledge about the other, but upon being-­ for and feeling-for the other. War is the opposite of this notion of community, its violence being the experience of a totality that binds the self to a country, its interests and its own opinion of itself. Empathy, by contrast, unbinds the subject by binding it to the other; it provides a guideline for action in the name of life ­(Critchley, 2012). Responsibility has an experimental character, of course. It is a practice that seeks to preserve rather than destroy; it is not a principle, but a practice which attends to the precariousness of life. The practice of empathy causes shuddering and trembling, experienced as justice understood as the prohibition to murder and the acknowledgement of human weakness (Lévinas, 1969). ‘When the counting begins, understanding ceases’ goes a polemical statement intended to critique the predominance of quantitative studies of crime ( Jacobsen, 2014). This author has a less categorical opinion of such studies, although he shares concerns around the bogus of positivism (Young, 2011), its fetishism (Ferrell, 2009) and the methodological inhibition caused by the obsession with measurements, which may lead to lack of genuine intellectual puzzlement and passionate curiosity (Mills, 1959). Fiction and war have featured jointly in the preceding pages, implicitly granting the former the power to elucidate meanings and prompt new analytical paths to criminology. As stressed in the Introduction, fiction may assuage our dissatisfaction with life, encourage us to become ‘other’ and, simultaneously, challenge the existing order. We feel defrauded after having read War and Peace when we return to our world, made up of boundaries and prohibitions. ‘Literature reminds us that the world is badly made and that it could better’ (ibid.: 10).

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But this is only one aspect, well exemplified by Anna K ­ arenina, who finds in reading a taunting reminder of the life she does not live, or by Emma Bovary, who devours books and imagines that the fictional lives are her own, thus becoming a heroine of ­Balzac or Sue. Don Quixote also devours books and models his behaviour according to certain fictional codes that he deems just and proper, ‘though he knows that he himself is neither Lancelot nor Amadis’ (Manguel, 2013: 117). However, the fiction examined in this ­chapter is bereft of the balsamic power that might assuage our daily existence; it does not provide a provisional suspension from our life, nor does it compel us to imitate its heroes and heroines. On the contrary, Stendhal and Tolstoy see little heroism in the wars they describe, detecting in them pure ignoble carnages. In other words, if their war novels do remind us that the world is badly made it is because they are ruthless reflections of that world. Stendhal’s and Tolstoy’s writings stand as a powerful encouragement to criminologists to include war in all its different aspects among their objects of study. Before their novels appeared, war had already been described as ignoble carnage or heroic butchery. Candide, an alien catapulted into a society he did not know, witnesses people covering themselves with honour after disembowelling and raping their enemies (Voltaire, 2006). He learns that Homer’s Iliad is universally appreciated despite its interminable sequence of fights and battles, the seemingly endless account of the siege of Troy that many readers should find nothing short of intolerable (Brombert, 1999). Primo Levi (1981, 1986) disliked The Iliad for much the same reason, finding its reading intolerable: that orgy of battles, wounds and corpses, that stupid endless war and the childish anger of Achilles fighting it. Following in Voltaire’s footpath, Stendhal and Tolstoy demote the hero to the rank slaughterer. The Charterhouse of Parma and War and Peace both feature ­Napoleon, whom Hegel saw as the world-spirit on horseback. Stendhal and Tolstoy, instead, feature vanity and egotism, chaos and deception, brutality and crime. Their moral indignation and pessimism feeds the hope that tolerance and justice might be the outcome of their own antiheroic stance, a stance that the criminology of war may want to adopt.

9 Belligerence as sexual violence

In Florence, most visitors admire ‘The Kidnapping of the ­Sabine Women’, a sculpture by Giambologna displayed in Piazza della ­Signoria. Pictorial representations of the sculpture have been p­ roduced by Rubens, Poussin, Degas and Picasso.The story of the kidnapping is narrated by Livy, who describes how the men of Rome committed a mass abduction of young women from neighbouring cities.The raptio, a word that can be translated as kidnapping but also as rape, occurred after Romulus organized a festival of Neptune Equester, a ­marvelous celebration that attracted men, women and children from surrounding localities scattered in the region of Rome. At a signal given by Romulus, the Romans fought the Sabine men and grabbed the ­Sabine women (Boitani, 2017). A topos in ancient history, ­abduction travers the Persian Wars (Herodotus, 2010), where the origin of the armed conflict and the beginning of the hostility between Westerners and the Orient coincides with the mutual abduction of women by Greeks and Persians. Fighting men and grabbing women is also one of the themes of the Old Testament, where warriors are given the opportunity to capture and kill their male enemies and take the females for them.

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Then ‘if you have no delight in them, you should let them go where they will; but you shall not sell them for money, you shall not treat them as slaves, because you have already humiliated them’ (Cohn Eskenazi, 2018: 3). In another biblical story, found in the book of Numbers, M ­ oses incites the Israelites to destroy the Midianites, and when the ­former have slain all their enemies and captured all their women, they return to Moses to receive his praise. Instead, he vents his fury because they should have killed all the men but also the women, except the virgins, who they should have kept for themselves. In contemporary wars, the victors are less likely to kidnap and assimilate the virgins; rather, their interest in captured women being expressed through rape (Rafter, 2016). Let us look at how the humiliation, abduction and rape of women continue in the contemporary era.

The production of masculinities A specific form of crime against women, war can be seen as an acutely pathological expression of masculinity (Oliver, 2007; C ­ avarero, 2007; Butler, 2009; Barberet, 2014). The wartime rape of women has been identified as part of the rules of war, a mode of communication among men, and the elevation of masculinity that accompanies war as a way of destroying the enemy’s culture. Rooted in contempt for women (Steifert, 1994), wartime rape is inscribed in a temporal continuum of violence (prewar, war-fighting, peacemaking and postwar) and in space and place (from the bedroom to the battlefield) ­(Cockburn, 2014). The existence of rape itself is a constant of warfare, and while the type and quantity of sexual violence vary, ‘it is a truism to say that where there is war, there is rape’ (Mullins, 2016: 117). The following are some examples. In December 1937, the capital of Nationalist China, Nanking, fell to the Japanese. Only in 1945 were the invaders defeated, along with their Nazi allies. In those seven years mass executions of soldiers and the slaughtering and raping of tens of thousands of women were carried out publicly, and they were not the outcome

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of a temporary lapse of military discipline: they were designed to terrorize (Chang, 1997). In the verses of W.H Auden (1950: 279): And maps can really point to places Where life is evil now: Nanking; Dachau Rape was also routine during and after World War II, perpetrated in Germany by regular soldiers of the Western Alliance (Gebhardt, 2016). A taboo among the victors, the mass rape of German women is ignored in order not to relativize the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis. At least 190,000 women were raped after the war by US troops, and more by Soviet, British, Belgian and French soldiers. There are still women living in old people’s homes who ‘only need to hear a word in English for the memory to return’ (ibid.: 3). The exclusive blame laid upon monstrous Russian or Moroccan rapists hid the reality that Western liberators ‘followed precisely the same script of plunder and rape’ (ibid.: 5). Repeated attempts to hide the abuse of women during the Vietnam War have also been made, despite the evidence that has emerged since 1975. There has been a persistent inclination not to make the US military’s sexual violence in the country a topic of research or discussion. ‘The underlying lack of coverage is an unspoken decision by producers of cultural narratives to keep silent about and even deny such atrocities’ (Weaver, 2010: 7). The dominant narrative described veterans as mythical victims, undeserving of the hostility of antiwar protesters, mainly women or men with long hair. Throughout the twentieth century wars have increasingly targeted civil populations. In some cases armies have avoided fighting one another, going straight for the cities and their inhabitants, raping, destroying the achievements of the daily civilizing work of women (Stevanovic, 1997). Genocidal rape is the phrase associated with the violence suffered by Croatian and Bosnian women in the former Yugoslavia, a violence aimed at destroying specific social and ethnic groups. An estimated 50,000 rapes were perpetrated in

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Bosnia in the early 1990s (Heineman, 2011). In 1993, videotapes of the rapes were made available on the international pornography market (Allen, 1996). Rape camps are now holiday resorts, for example Vilina Vlas Spa Hotel, in Višegrad, where the swimming pool was a killing ground and where tourists sleep in the same beds in which Muslim women were attacked (Graham-Harrison, 2018). In countries at war medical conditions that had virtually disappeared return, particularly affecting women who have been raped: they epitomize war against women. Recent examples include the mass rape of Yezidi women in the Iraqi zones under ISIS control (Otten, 2017), while a most infamous episode involving non-state actors is the kidnapping of nearly 300 mainly Christian girls in Chibok (Nigeria) in 2014 by Boko Haram. The girls were ‘guilty’ of receiving a non-Islamic education (Comolli, 2017; Thurston, 2017). Military violence against women continues today in the West, with women in the US army challenging commanders who pretend to have zero tolerance for military sexual assault. Rapes are committed by ‘ideal soldiers’ while the very officers and commanders to whom women must report their victimization are either the perpetrators or covering up for them. Making the reports public, investigating and prosecuting the perpetrators would jeopardize their reputations and careers (Blum, 2013). War designates hegemonic and subordinate masculinities, a racialized hierarchy that ostracizes and exploits the latter ‘along with womanhood and femininity’ (Leatherman, 2011: 18). Women suffer multiple victimization and, besides rape, they pay a high toll when civilians are attacked, infrastructures are damaged and social order as a whole collapses. According to the UN (2000), women and girls are particularly affected by the destruction of hospitals, health centres, schools, water supply systems, roads and other means of transport. This means they have even less access to basic social services, which aggravates primary and reproductive health problems. This also opens the door to growing infant and maternal mortality, increased violence, sexual exploitation and higher risks of HIV. Conflicts destroy the social fabric, dislocate families and communities, spread material poverty, exacerbate vulnerability to violence and deconstruct the social codes and norms governing

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how to live together. This notwithstanding, women maintain the viability of refugee and displaced persons camps, ensure peaceful cohabitation, protect their families, recreate community ties, and somehow hold their communities together. In a resolution passed in 2008, the UN Security Council described rape as a tactic of war and a threat to international security. Women and girls are particularly targeted by the use of sexual violence as a tool to humiliate, dominate, instil fear and disperse or forcibly relocate civilian members of a community or ethnic group. The UN resolution also called for the exclusion of sexual violence crimes from amnesty provisions in the context of conflict resolution processes. Ultimately, it has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in armed conflict (OHCHR, 2008). A report released by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC, 2015: 12) shows that rape is considered a method of warfare when armed forces or groups ‘use it to torture, injure, extract information, degrade, displace, intimidate, punish or simply to destroy the fabric of the community’. Moreover, women who have been raped are often believed to bring dishonor upon their families and may be rejected on the assumption that they have been infected with HIV/AIDS. The report also provides a picture of how contemporary wars uproot millions of people and how displaced women have to manage alone in abysmal conditions, ‘with inadequate access to food, water, shelter and health care’ (ibid.: 4). These responsibilities do not exempt them from the risk of sexual violence. Women constitute the larger section of refugee populations and are dominant in activities that create ‘safe’ and neutral spaces in conflicted societies. ‘They often provide the grassroots networking and social support structures that are relied upon by local and international elites to embed peace processes’ (Aolan et al., 2011: 6). Yet, they are not granted a significant role in peace negotiations, and normally the formal end of hostilities has little effect on the quality of their lives. Masculinity prevails even when women are at work in wars, where their skills are not acknowledged or rewarded, and their patriotic duty consists in simply releasing men from industry so that they can fight for their country. In wars, women at work are

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often met with resistance and hostility, with governments and trade unions establishing strategies to protect the masculinity of the workplace (Goodman, 2001). Also in contemporary wars women may be recruited to participate in the ‘collective effort’, but they are more likely to pay for the consequences of the militarization of the public space, especially when organized violence reaches neighborhoods and villages. Here, established role divisions and misogynistic attitudes are reproduced and reinforced, aggressive masculinity is asserted and control and domination are exacerbated. ‘Women are subject to the same constraints related to their lower status, while their situation as displaced persons or refugees brings other challenges and forces them to carry the major socioeconomic burdens of the crisis’ (UN, 2000: 15). The worst forms of physical and sexual violence against women and girls are committed within this context, with torture and murder also targeting displaced women and girls gathered in refugee camps: in Africa women and children make up 80 per cent of the people uprooted by war. Conflicts, in brief, reveal the discriminations visible during peacetime, amplifying the experience of females in their communities. In this sense, violence proves the most effective modality for the production of gendered identities, an extreme way of maintaining power relations. As Beauvoir (1989) stated, one is not born, but rather becomes a woman, a process compounded and accelerated by violent conflict. War produces subjects, femininities and masculinities: the former as auxiliary subjects helping the warriors through material support and care, including military base prostitution (Wilcox, 2015); the latter as alleged protectors of women, not only their own, but those of the enemy. The invasion of Afghanistan was justified, among others things, by the intention of the West to impose respect for women in a retrograde sexist society.

Male fantasies and abject bodies Male Fantasies is a study of the imaginative world of the German Freikorps movement, a book by Klaus Theweleit (1987) that follows the formation and evolution of this paramilitary organization since

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the end of World War I. Male Fantasies tells the story of how this group fought against the newly formed Weimar Republic between 1918 and 1923, engaged in bloody confrontations with republican loyalists and engineered some of the most notorious assassinations of the period. When disbanded, its members dispersed but some acquired a prominent role in the Nazi regime.The author examines the fantasies of these men in order to evince the root of their conduct. His central contention is that the Freikorps soldiers were afraid of women, if not profoundly hostile to them, to the point of desiring their death. But not all women were the same, in their view. ‘White’ women were sisters, mothers and nurses, their sexuality was restrained and pure, while ‘red’ women were intemperate and could dangerously engulf men in a whirlpool of depravity. The latter were either whores or Communists. Liquidity and dirt obsessively occupied the imagination of these soldiers, whose identity was at a loss in the face of fluids, associated to ‘notions as mire, morass, slime and excrement’ (Robinson, 1988: 2). Their political creed was therefore bolstered by their fear of sexuality. They loathed all of the hybrid substances that were produced by the body and flowed on, in, over, and out of the body: the floods and stickiness of sucking kisses; the swamps of the vagina, with their slime and mire; the pap and slime of male semen; the film of sweat … the warmth that dissolves physical boundaries. (Theweleit, 1987: 58) Was this an exaggerated version of experiences and feelings shared by many men? Liquidity, seepage and leakiness are the marks of reproduction, often associated with signs of the abject: ‘women’s bodies have been discursively produced as bodies of fear and contempt’ (Wilcox, 2015: 99). Disgust for bodies reveals fear of contamination and a parallel pursuit of purity, as humans, in this case men, are terrified by their own animalism (Nussbaum, 2004). Upright walking sets a distance between our nose and the sources of our bodily secretions, making our olfaction incapable of detecting the smell of parts of our bodies (Freud, 1930). Women’s erect posture, however, is deemed insufficient for them to break

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away from ‘the animalistic world of excretion, smell and sexuality’ (Nussbaum, 2004: 90). Similarly, anti-Semitic propaganda depicts Jews as porous, sticky and womanlike slimy; women and Jews like abscesses hidden in the clean body of humanity, both releasing revolting odours, with Jewish women being doubly disgusting. By contrast, the men of the future are described as metallic and dry, resilient and immortal. ‘Underlying this obsessive focus on images of steel and metal is the sense that our mere mortality is something shameful, something we need to hide or, better yet, to transcend altogether’ (ibid.: 109). Murder is a way of transcending one’s immortality, the translation of anguish and self-deprecation into the annihilation of the other, a form of self-protection against suicide. In Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky, 1979), Sonia feels that by killing the old lady Raskolnikov has killed himself: what have you done to yourself? (Kristeva, 1989: 196). The example below shows how ‘transcending’ mortality may also turn into genocide.

Gender-selective genocide The Rwandan genocide began in April 1994, when Hutu militia killed hundreds of thousands of Tutsis, mostly with machetes and other simple weapons. It is suggested that this was a response to previous mass murder committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Army, which invaded the country from neighbouring Uganda. The invaders, in fact, were the offspring of Tutsi refugees who were determined to return home (Epstein, 2018). Chauvinist Hutu newspapers, magazines and radio programmes reminded readers that Hutus were the original occupants of the Great Lakes region and that Tutsis were Nilotics – supposedly warlike pastoralists from Ethiopia who had conquered and enslaved Hutus in the seventeenth century. The invasion by the R ­ wandan Patriotic Army, they claimed, was part of a conspiracy to re-­ establish the evil Nilotic empire. In December 1993, a picture of a machete appeared on the front page of a Hutu publication, accompanied by a caption wondering what weapon could be more effective to defeat the Inyenzi (Tutsi cockroaches) (Rever, 2018).

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More than 250,000 Tutsi women suffered rape and sexual mutilation, often with family members as forced witnesses. Some of the perpetrators were carriers of the AIDS virus who intentionally infected their victims. The ‘genderside’ or gender-selective mass killing gave resourceless, idle young men a purpose in life: they could steal, kill, rape, and then join their friends at the bar (Prunier, 1997; Jones, 2002).

Our Lady of the Nile This is the title of a novel by Scholastique Mukasonga (2012) and the name of the fictional girls’ lycée outside Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. Mukasonga is a Rwandan writer whose books of memoir and fiction span the century from the advent of colonialism in 1894 to the genocide that occurred exactly 100 years later. Thirty-seven members of her family were among the nearly 1 million people killed (Lucas, 2018). Mukasonga’s lycée applies a strict quota: two Tutsi students for every 20 pupils, and the two are bullied into writing the French essays for all. Virginia is one of them and knows she can never reveal her secrets if she wants to stay alive. According to the teachings of her parents, her tongue is her enemy. The whites had taught the local population that there are two races in Rwanda, identified by experts who came to measure their skulls. The Tutsis are described as cockroaches, snakes or rodents, and are suspected to be planning the seizure of the whole region. This is why an eye is kept on them, ‘but one day we’ll maybe have to get rid of them, starting with those who infect our schools and our university’ (Mukasonga, 2012: 119). Then, one day, two Hutu girls get out of the school and stay away all night. On returning, they invent a story that is likely to sound credible to everyone. They say they were attacked by a number of men with dark cloth disguising their faces, men who wanted to rape them, and that they knew the attackers were Tutsi who were set to storm the lycée and ‘rape all the pupils, and torture them horribly and kill them, the nuns wouldn’t be spared either, not even the whites’ (ibid.: 203). Soldiers are mobilized, who ransack the few enclosures believed to be still inhabited by Tutsis. They rip open

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granaries, smash everything, question all the occupants, even the children – in vain. But the operation is deemed successful, as the Tutsis need constant reminding that they are merely cockroaches. Finally, ‘Our Lady of the Nile’ is stormed by men brandishing huge clubs, while the Hutu girls push the Tutsis into the middle of the courtyard. However, there is no need to kill them: Catch a few, whack them a few times, that’ll make them lose their taste for studying.They’ll perish in the mountains, of hunger and cold, or be devoured by feral dogs and wild beasts. Those who survive and manage to cross the border will be forced to sell those bodies of theirs that they are so proud of, for the price of a tomato at the market. (Ibid.: 241) One girl is caught, however, and after being undressed she is forced by blows from the soldiers’ sticks to dance stark naked. ‘They spread her legs. I won’t tell you what they did with their sticks, nor how they finished her off ’ (ibid.).

Subjugated subjects Men rape other men, too. In 2016, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees assigned a Stanford University researcher a seemingly impossible task, namely an investigation into male rape and sexual torture in the Syrian conflict. She found that between 20 and 30 per cent of male refugees in Kurdistan, Lebanon and Jordan experienced unwanted sexual contact or harassment while in Syrian detention (Chynoweth, 2017). Male bodies are made abject through psychological pain and humiliating feminization, but also through physical attack, as in sexual forms of torture. During the Syrian conflict, gay and bisexual men were the main target of opportunistic predators, while the treatment of heterosexual men included electric shocks applied to genitals accompanied by rape with penetrating objects. Paedophiles attacked young boys, and in some cases the violence culminated in point-blank shootings of the genitals.The victims reacted by isolating themselves and withdrawing from family and friends, as they felt ‘different’, having lost their role as protectors of their loved ones.

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Male rape was systematically used by rival factions in Libya, where a Tunis-based investigating group detailed more than 650 cases. Video footage shows men being raped with objects including rockets and broomsticks, a practice intended to neutralize opponents: ‘survivors generally feel too damaged to rejoin political, military or civic life’ (Allegra, 2017: 26). They are now subjugated subjects. But let us return to violence against women and girls which, as we have seen, reinforces social and gender hierarchies, destroys subjects but also creates them as destroyable. In war, while targeting the female components of the enemy, violence also sends signals to female compatriots, creating a nationalistic bond with them and, at the same time, inculcating fear: the same may happen to them in case social and gender hierarchies are challenged. The subjugated female subjects thus created can collaborate or imitate the male perpetrators and, by endorsing the violence perpetrated against ­female enemies, attempt to divert it from them. In Rwanda, women played a role in the planning of the mass killing, shaping decisions about who would be killed and how. A key promoter of the genocide was Agatha Habyarimana, the President’s wife, who led the ‘Zero Group’ engaged in the reduction to zero of the Tutsi presence in Rwanda. In her turn, Pauline N ­ yiramadsuhuko, Minister for Family, Welfare and the Advancement of Women, ­supervised the detention of Tutsis in a stadium, where they were raped, tortured, set on fire and killed. ‘Local women too participated as perpetrators. Some looted the bodies and homes of dead Tutsis; some told militia members where Tutsis were hiding; some encouraged their sons and husbands to kill’ (Rafter, 2016: 162). ‘Himpathy’ is the term used by Manne (2017) to explain this form of complicity as the outcome of patriarchal policing that may work in women’s minds. Misogyny, in her view, is a property of ­social environments in which women are likely to encounter ­hostility when violating norms and ignoring conventional expectations. It is the law enforcement branch of the patriarchal system, while sexism is its justification (Hirsch, 2018). When women are complicit in misogyny, empathizing with the male aggressor rather than with the female victim, they reveal how they are conditioned ‘in upholding their position of power and entitlement’

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(ibid.:  7). Failing to be complicit would cost women the stigma of the ­Medusa, the epitome of illegitimate and depraved power. ­Contemporary women who dare to take on male dominance are still figured as monsters with a snaky head (Beard, 2017). In Nazi Germany, women assisted doctors, starving children to death or injecting them with poison. They were nurses employed in paediatric clinics and, like the physicians, received extra pay for murdering disabled children. ‘Killing did not require a break with their usual, gender-dictated duties: feeding the ill (or, in this case, not feeding them), giving injections, taking orders from doctors’ (Rafter, 2016: 168). Complicity and participation of women in political violence can, of course, take other forms.

Female warriors Female suicide bombers challenge the exclusion of women from ­political contention, but at the same time allude to how their bodies, already experienced as abject, are to be used as disposable weapons. Research conducted in Israel compared incarcerated Arab/­ Palestinian women involved in conventional crime with those involved in acts of terrorism (or security violations) (Berko et al., 2010). Limiting our attention to the latter cohort, most security violators had spent ‘normal’ childhoods and only one reported a history of abuse. The father of only one of these women had spent time in prison for terrorist activities, while most described their mothers as simple, self-sacrificing and dedicated. Despite the closeness shared with parents, particularly mothers, none of the women interviewed had discussed their involvement in violence with their parents. Only in one case were parents involved in the recruitment of their daughter. A nineteen-year-old who had been raped as a child and, later, had her face disfigured by an explosion, was encouraged to become a suicide bomber. Dishonoured and unlikely to find a husband, she could conclude her life in glory while relieving her parents from her subsistence costs. Most women had little familiarity with Israeli culture and history; still, they were blinded by a deep hatred for Jews. Some

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derived such hatred from the harm suffered by persons close to them in the conflict. Their personal life had been affected, they stated, hence their vengeful spirit. One of them had been arrested just as she was embarking on a suicide mission, and claimed that ‘she would be capable of looking at an Israeli baby in a crib and blowing herself up next to him and his mother’ (ibid.: 676). There was a prevailing self-perception of resilience and strength, although the conventional role of women in Palestinian society was not challenged. The Palestinian female warriors had been brought up in traditional environments and had had little contact with men outside their extended family. Most accepted the rearing of children and the serving of husbands as their primary duty. Some, however, believed that their acts would disprove the notion that women are weak and inept. Involvement in violence, in this sense, was seen as a step towards equality with men. Others expressed pride for their ability to play a traditional female role while at the same time being fighters. Brides of Palestine, they could procreate, bearing heroism in their womb and simultaneously perform patriotic acts: their children would join the cause, kill and die. The feeling of being somewhat exceptional was widely shared, as they felt empowered by their military commitment allowing them to behave in otherwise prohibited fashions. ‘In the course of performing a military attack, it is possible to take off the veil, wear pants, or even travel unaccompanied in a car with a guy’ (ibid.: 679). Some had escaped difficult family situations or humiliation by husbands. Others had chosen violence out of despair, after family members had stopped them having a relationship they desired. Religion featured among the motivating factors, particularly the rewards they expected in their afterlife. In Paradise they would be able to choose their partner, meet the Prophet, become beautiful, eat delicious food and drink rivers of alcohol. Shunned by their families, incapable of fulfilling their designated functions, naturally barren or unwilling to procreate, shamed by rape, female suicide bombers redeem themselves through absolute sacrifice. Anonymous in their veil, they go out to kill disguised with a ponytail, a pretty smile and a pair of sneakers (Victor, 2003; Oliver, 2007). These women, who are denied access to political

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representation, are vulnerable to the rhetoric of extreme violence and ‘participate’ in collective action by imitating the male warriors. Martyrdom is the price they pay if they want to share the logic of power: paradoxically, they kill in the name of principles that exclude them (Kristeva, 2005).

A pornographic gaze Women at war can engage in abuse on an equal footing with men. The female soldiers serving as prison guards in Abu Ghraib received extensive media coverage, provoking disbelief and shock.The pictures published all over the world conveyed a mixture of sexual innuendo and ruthless violence typically provided by the gut press and video games alike. They epitomized a pornographic way of looking at human interactions: ‘The pornographic way of looking or seeing takes the object of its gaze for its own pleasure or as a spectacle for its own enjoyment without regard for the subjectivity of those looked at’ (Oliver, 2007: 2). According to one established definition, pornography is a form of sex discrimination graphically suggesting the subordination of women. It uses images and words that present women as dehumanized sexual objects, things or commodities. Pornography tries to persuade viewers that women enjoy humiliation and pain, that they desire submission and servility, that they can be reduced to parts of their body and that they are filthy or inferior (MacKinnon, 1991). In Kelly Oliver’s (2007) analysis, the pornographic gaze reinforces the power and agency of the looker while erasing or debasing the looked-at. The pornography of Abu Ghraib, moreover, reiterates the myths of dangerous or threatening women, which received distinctive connotations in criminology and fiction during the nineteenth century (Ruggiero, 2006). The following are succinct examples. Danger and threat associated with female combatants were discussed by positivist criminologists, who argued that women were hot participants not in revolutionary processes, but in tumults and riots. This was due to their innate hereticism, which exposed them to imitative epidemics, dragging them into all sorts of excesses.

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In epidemics of madness women were said to distinguish themselves for their extravagance and exaltation, the outcomes of their more instinctive and excitable nature. Lombroso and Laschi (1890) described how during the riots of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women cut the bodies of enemies to pieces and ate them. They were only active when rebellions were particularly ferocious: ‘The French Revolution was prepared by thinkers and encyclopaedists, but during the riots women were on the front line. Female fishmongers dragged men along, joined the troops and the mutinees, howling and massacring’ (ibid.: 229). In the days of solemn executions, the front positions around the guillotine were reserved for these ‘furies’, who came forward to witness agony as close as they possibly could. They covered the screams of the victims with their explosion of laughter and the noise of their singing. Women have always surpassed men in ­cruelty, a thought shared by Zola (1967), who describes a v­ iolent workers’ strike where women distinguish themselves by their ­obscene ­ferocity: they tear off the penises of their dead enemies and wave them as flags. Back to more recent events, the occupation of Iraq reminds us also of colonial and imperial violence presenting itself as a contemporary extension of imperialist ventures, where the ‘natives’ are depicted as primordial because of the inferiority of their weaponry and because they only possess one thing, their bodies. Those bodies are displayed in their nudity to provoke humiliation, engender vulnerability and cause fear, but also as the only miserable possession of hopeless insurgents who fight against technologically advanced warriors. One is certainly entitled to annihilate them. The chilling photograph showing soldier Lynndie England keeping a prisoner on a leash is unequivocal: she was ordered to treat prisoners like dogs, although we ignore whether she was also instructed to make prisoners bark. What make us uneasy about those images are, on the one hand, ‘the perky grins and cheerleaders’ smiles on the faces of these teenage girls’ which are totally out of place in the theatre of war, and on the other hand, ‘the very idea that women can be interrogation tools’ because their sexuality is a threatening weapon (Oliver, 2007: 5). There is, however, an

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unmistakable happiness on the tormentors’ faces, a lack of shame and a cheerful sadism encouraged by prediction of impunity. The pornographic way of waging war, it might be suggested, is used by both parties involved: the insurgents, who rely on the media to assert their will to fight, and the Western soldiers, who shock them with dangerous sexuality. In this sense, the Abu Ghraib photographs echo the images celebrating suicide bombings and beheadings: ‘these two sets of presumably antagonistic images are the most intimate of partners’ (Linfield, 2010: xvii). Those who believe in formal democracy may suggest that the Abu Ghraib pictures remind us ‘how easily cruelty flourishes when the rule of law is abandoned’ (Linfield, 2010: 156). By contrast, sceptical commentators, who detect in the rule of law loopholes for violent arbitrariness, link those photos to the casual brutality of American culture, embodied in pornography, video games and truculent movies, a culture which ‘has created a generation of moral cretins immune to, or even delighted in, the horrors of real violence’ (ibid.: 153). Violence was seen as fun; the prisoners were being initiated into American culture (Sontag, 2004; Žižek, 2004). Finally, the use of fake menstrual blood in the interrogations carried out in Guantanamo Bay was meant to break recalcitrant prisoners: ‘Patriarchal cultures have traditionally regarded menstrual blood as unclean and disgusting’ (Oliver, 2007: 22). Women as abusive prison guards, ultimately, convey a Freudian notion of the ‘uncanny’, the ambiguous character hiding a mysterious danger, the woman who is associated with life and death, who can offer but also withhold nourishment (Freud, 1919).

Nation building Sexual violence, as discussed in this chapter, resembles a form of patriotism, a heroic conduct that binds men together while strengthening their national or group identity. Rape has ‘always been a tool for constructing masculinity as a gender of potency and control, with the right of subjugation’ (Rafter, 2016: 166). As we have seen, however, rape may also regulate the clash between masculinities, whereby the male victims are feminized. Hatred for women and the perception of

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their inferiority renders war rape inevitable, but in war the inimical other in general is assimilated to the female gender, so that its destruction is justified. Iraqi prisoners, let us not forget, were forced (by male and female soldiers alike) to wear women’s briefs. At war, moreover, sexual violence is set up as spectacle, either through photographs or through public live display, as the construction of dominance is meant to leave indelible marks among the witnesses. Destroying the enemy means destroying their capacity to reproduce themselves, hence the fury against their genitals. Some rapists used sticks, machetes and boiling water to destroy the women’s reproductive organs; others deliberately infected their victims with sexual diseases and deliberately impregnated them. Women who survived, when not committing infanticide or abandoning the newborn, had to cope with the stigma attached to their having generated ‘hate babies’ (Nowrojee, 1996). This chapter has described contexts in which feelings of inadequacy turn into hatred for the other, suggesting that contemporary armed conflicts see a shift from rape as an inevitable by-product of war to a weapon of war. Gendered violence appears to be an instrument for the building of nations and the constitution of homogenous groups, targeting girls, boys, women and men, who are made helpless to prevent it. Shakespeare (1936: 181) was well aware of this aspect. In his Henry V, the Governor of Harfleur is told to surrender or the English soldiers will rape the town’s virgins, smash the heads of old men and impale all the newborns on spikes: I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur till in her ashes she lie buried. The gates of mercy shall be all shut up, And the fleshed soldier, rough and hard of heart, In liberty of bloody hand shall range With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass Your fresh fair virgins and your flowering infants The English king is then celebrated for the invasion of France and his military might captures the psyche of his subjects, while his nation building alternates glorification of rape and pillage with mawkish

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expressions of patriotic glory (Taylor, 1979). A war criminal? Perhaps. A mock trial of Henry V held in Washington in March 2010 charged the king with invading a country, raping women and girls, killing infants and prisoners. The verdict was predictable (Watts and Sutherland, 2000; Warre, 2017). But let us now leave the repellent world of sexual violence and state building and see if the realm of religion and political violence has less nauseating material on offer.

10 Numinous terror

The bells are pealing and the guns saluting, Now thank we God who told us to enlist And gave us rifles to be used for shooting, The mob is vulgar, God is a Fascist (Brecht, 2017) We are all dead persons on leave, and religions help us getting ready to die. They are forms of rigorous training for death. (Critchley, 2008)

Religions often incite bloody wars between opposed and exclusive gods. Mythic battles, sacred weapons, holy heroes and divine wars permeate their traditions. Images and legends point to conquest through sacrifice and death, be that self-inflicted or inflicted on others. Sacrificial rites and militant martyrdom are related to personal experience, on the one hand, and to social and political conflicts, on the other. This chapter addresses religious violence from a specific perspective, namely the relationship between such violence and the socio-political change it is intended to produce.

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Most believers strongly defend their own faith by emphasizing the messages of peace, solidarity and reconciliation their creed incorporates. Violence, according to this view, is peripheral to religion, and only comes to the fore when justifications are sought to attack irreducible enemies, that is foes who prove impervious to dialogue and impermeable to persuasion. Yet, violent narratives traverse many religious traditions, and are often situated at the core of their sacred texts. Liturgy may be adorned with messages of love and symbols of ecumenical tolerance, but militant believers can always turn their inner convictions into tools for the violent conversion (or annihilation) of others. One can argue that the ‘great global religious traditions, because of their history of intertwining clerical authority with political powers’ are all inclined to violence ( Juergensmeyer et al., 2013: 2). Contemporary accounts, however, are not confined to global religious traditions, and before reviewing these accounts, it is worth foregrounding the following mythological precedent.

Iphigenia The daughter of Agamemnon is sacrificed in return for a change in the wind that will help him sail towards the enemy. Agamemnon loves his children, but the gods have been consulted and this is what they have ordered him to do. He has no choice because if the wind does not change the whole army will face death. In the contemporary rendition by Colm Tóibín (2018: 28), Iphigenia accepts her death as a way of rescuing those who are in danger. She has no right to be in love with life, she says. Those who die will be replaced. ‘I will give myself for the army’s sake, for my father’s sake, for my country’s sake. I will meet my own sacrifice with a smile.’Victory in battle will then be her victory, and the memory of her name will last longer than the lives of many. There may be something sick, as Nietzsche (1974) suggests, in these rites of self-destruction, self-torment elevated to an ethics. Or perhaps this type of sacrifice can be assimilated to a prosaic material exchange or even to a type of celestial bribery: I give you this if you’ll give me that (Davies, 1981). But the true martyr does not expect anything in return: giving cannot be ruined by reciprocity

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(Derrida, 1992b). One cannot compel the gods to make a return. However, the wind blows, Agamemnon and his army are rescued and will be victorious, while Iphigenia’s throat is cut by a sharp, thin knife, as many spectators, including her father, chant supplications to the gods.

Divine violence All major holy books contain allusions to warfare: ‘I will set the Egyptians against the Egyptians’, declares the King James version of the book of Isaiah: ‘and they shall fight every one against his brother, and every one against his neighbour’ (Colley, 2017: 43). Scriptural traditions and founding cults are alimented by violent myths, metaphors and apocalyptic expectations, although these are not necessarily meant to inspire the practical conduct of believers. ‘Almost every major tradition, for example, has some notion of sacrifice and some notion of cosmic war, a grand moral struggle that underlies all reality and can be used to justify acts of real warfare’ (Juergensmeyer et al., 2013: 12). Justifications for the use of violence may not be narrowly theological, nor is violence intrinsic in the individual and collective religious experience, but the recourse to violent action may at times pursue political power through the mobilization of transcendental necessity. Self-inflicted harm and self-mortification in Christian and other traditions are commonly regarded as a way of attaining purification and a higher status in the afterworld (Stewart and Strathern, 2013). However, punishing and harming one’s body can also legitimize the punishing and harming of others, and in this sense set off a mimicking process whereby the violence of founding myths is transformed into human violence sanctioned by divine sources (Kitts, 2013). Divine violence can manifest itself in natural disasters that keep humans in awe, prompting an association of uncontrollable force and terrifying catastrophe. At times even wars are deemed manifestations of divine anger, punishments for people’s sins. In a previous chapter we have seen the example of the civil wars that killed over 20 million Chinese in the 1850s and 1860s, when death

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was interpreted as divine retribution for immoral, decadent or irreligious behaviour (Meyer-Fong, 2013). Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist commentators rationalized the carnage in these terms, turning to religion to make sense of the apparently arbitrary horrors (Colley, 2017). On the other hand, collective violence enacted by humans who imitate divinities is often deemed a lever for the transformation of societies and states and the establishment of perpetual peace. It is this quest for a superior cosmic order that puts believers in motion in the social and political spheres. The images transmitted are too powerful to be ignored or just cherished by religious communities as mere cultural artefacts. Spectacles of warfare are offered where gods and heroes mingle and angels and saints participate, guiding the warriors or supporting the just war. ‘Christ and the Virgin Mary marched with the first crusaders into Syria’ (ibid.: 415). In sum, these artefacts provide hagiographies and memories in which faith is linked with action, often violence action. The persistent marriage of war and religion in classical literatures makes warriors imitators who, in turn, are likely to be imitated, as fighting and killing find immediate justification in the scriptures. Religion is, therefore, a material force exercised by individuals who strive to expand their spirit as well as their communities, whose mission it is to shape themselves as saintly and, simultaneously, violently shape others. While we cannot simply associate religion with violence, the constant presence of the latter in many religious traditions signals our enduring obsession with it. Cosmic wars are fought by Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist individuals and groups, all engaged in a drama populated by heroes and martyrs who implicitly demonize the enemy. Religion as cosmic war, then, transcends the intimate experience of believers seeking to approach the divine, as it sets individuals and groups against each other. Believing in a god entails interacting with those who do not, and such interaction can evolve into hostility. Religion provides political identities and transmits vengeful ideologies that may lead to acts of violence as public performance, symbolic statements aimed at providing a sense of empowerment to those exercising such acts and the communities to which they belong ( Juergensmeyer, 2000). By offering ideological

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resources, religion depicts alternative views of public order against the current one, experienced as repressive and unholy. Those who bomb abortion clinics, for instance, dream of a social order in which the unborn are protected. In general, acts of terror in the name of religion are seen as manifestations of an ongoing battle in a world characterized by a definitive conflict. Religious and political ideologies are thus intertwined, and if the former do not ordinarily lead to violence, they do so ‘with the coalescence of a peculiar set of circumstances – political, social, and ideological – when religion becomes fused with violent expressions of social aspirations, personal pride, and movement for political change’ (ibid.: 10). Religious violence ‘acts out’ as performance, is promotional. It dramatizes grievances, as Arendt (1970) suggests. It might be described as symbolic in that it refers to something beyond its immediate target: a grander conquest, an ultimate battle. Tactically, this type of violence would seem to overlook the concrete goal pursued and, as such, it could be analysed as one would any other symbol, ritual or sacred drama. But religious violence is not confined to propaganda boundaries; it is also inspired by what is presumed to be a strategy for change, in this echoing political contentious action that, through propaganda, describes its targets as satanic foes while promising a future without them. The paradox is that religious violence, when addressed to secular systems, produces the opposite of the peace it promises, in that the cosmic war it alludes to is a never-ending process leading to increasing violence and counter-­ violence. The conflict between good and evil implicit in religious violence elicits a similar notion of conflict among those targeted, so that while religion creates violence, secularism becomes itself a form of religion that unleashes its own sacred violence in response. What we can detect here is not an example of a clash between civilizations, but a violent conflict between two similarly religious entities, one simultaneously instigating and responding to the other. In sum, the spread of secularism prompts a specific religious attachment to a certain creed, thus indirectly encouraging violence: secularism and violence ‘are each other’s inevitable counterparts and thus follow and shadow each other incessantly’ (De Vries, 2013: 518). Religious violence may be the result of preposterous or malign ideologies, but should not be deemed bereft of a political vision.

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Humans have been butchering each other since the dawn of time, or at least since the concept of the sacred saw the light of day. But violence is a curse and a blessing at the same time in that it is creative and destructive, ‘life-giving and death-dealing’ (Eagleton, 2005: 2). When violence is interpreted as a religious dictate, it creates fraternities and sororities while designating the menacing forces that plan to destroy them. How religious conversion and practice amount to acts of creation and destruction is exemplified in the following short story.

The Gospel According to Mark The events occur in March 1928, at La Colorada, a ranch in the south of Argentina, and the protagonist is Baltasar Espinosa, a 33-year-old man from Buenos Aires. The Gospel According to Mark is a short story in which Jorge Luis Borges (1970) describes the protagonist as a man of unlimited kindness and magnetic oratory ability. Invited by his cousin to spend the summer at La Colorada, he meets the Gutres who work and live there. When his cousin is called back to the city for business, Baltasar is left with the uncouth and illiterate family and, after dinner, reads a couple of chapters of a novel to them, but the reading raises little interest. When he finds a Bible in the house and reads parts of it after the evening meals, he notices how absorbed his listeners become. The story of a God who is crucified on Golgotha captures their imaginations, while their respect for their guest grows incessantly. Baltasar shows the mysterious capacity to heal a pet lamb with pills rather than applying a cobweb to its wound, and the gratitude of the farmers becomes immense as a result. He starts giving gentle orders which are immediately obeyed by the Gutres, who ask him to read the story of the crucifixion over and over again, so that they can understand it better. While he reads to them, he notices that they are secretly stealing the crumbs he drops on the table, which they presumably collect in a reliquary. One day he is asked if Christ had let Himself be killed so that all other humans could be saved, and the answer is that He saved everyone from hell, including the Romans who hammered the nails

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on the cross. Hell, he explains to his bewildered hosts, is a place situated under the ground where souls burn for eternity. One afternoon, after reading once again the story of the crucifixion, he takes a nap and his light sleep is disturbed by a persistent hammering. When he gets up, he is met by the Gutres bowing and kneeling, all begging to be blessed. Then he is spat at, shoved about, hit and transfixed with a lance. When dragged out of the house, ‘Baltasar Espinoza understood what awaited him on the other side of the door. When they opened it, he saw a patch of sky. A bird sang out, a goldfinch, he thought. The shed was without a roof; they had pulled down the beams to make the cross’ (Borges, 1970: 105).

A secular age? Borges’ new converts start their Christian career with murder, a crime they would never have committed had they retained their secular nature. But how can the secular–religious dichotomy help explain religious violence? The distinction between the temporal and the spiritual, albeit never totally achieved, was encouraged by a new conception of good socio-political order that was delinked from the good life proposed by Christianity (Taylor, 2016). The new idea of society had at its core the satisfaction of the needs of individuals and collectivities and their protection. The mutual benefits derived from the new arrangements were firmly rooted in the sphere of the immanent, where the self-sufficiency of the secular was asserted. The French Revolution strongly contributed to this process, aiming at the foundation of an independent morality, one freed from religious constraints. Attempts were made to relegate faith to the private sphere, although intolerant traits persisted particularly in monotheistic creeds: Judaism, which Christianity and Islam inherited, [is] based on the key notion of ‘true religion’ and the contrast notion of ‘idolatry’, which has to be avoided at all cost. Hence the very widespread idea that intolerance is built into religions that find their origin in Judaic monotheism. (Ibid.: 12)

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Religion is still seen as an incendiary realm of human feelings, where what is at stake is far higher than prosaic concerns and earthly interests: religion requires that reason be trumped by passion (Cavanaugh, 2017).Yet, the millions of deaths caused by collective violence, during the last and the current century, can be mostly attributed to secular or atheist warriors. In brief, secular violence is absolved as something benign, while death caused by intense religious infatuation is deemed unacceptable. ‘Religion poisons everything because everything poisonous is labeled religious’ (ibid.: 24). The difference between pre-modern societies and modern states is often identified in the relationship they respectively establish with faith or with some form of ultimate truth. Churches seem to be separate, at least in some contexts, from political structures, and their spiritual injunctions appear to be unheeded when policies are created. However, Christian faith, for example, laid down authoritative prescriptions through the clergy or the coercive strength of communities of believers. Secularity, instead, witnesses the decline of religious practice, with states and citizens turning away from God: ‘The shift to secularity consists of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace’ (Taylor, 2007: 3). Religion may convey a sense of fullness that unsettles and erases the ordinary way of being in the world; it can provide energy that dissolves worries while uniting us with others. Without religion we may experience an absence, an exile, a condition of melancholy, ennui. It is the dissatisfaction and resentment we find in Baudelaire’s spleen, an obsession with mortality resolved through the proposition of seeking constant pleasure. This search, however, does not succeed in hiding the brevity of life, as ancient Egyptians knew well: they would always adorn a celebratory feast with a skeleton or other emblems of human caducity. Without God, we are forced to escape the tyranny of human faces and erect barricades separating us from the world (Baudelaire, 1970). Secularity, however, does not eliminate the terror of the numinous, like Christian revelation only partly rejected earlier understandings of divine violence and sacrifice. Destruction is given a meaning, in religion as well as in politics, and requires

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the submission to a higher collective purpose, which is benign. This is how secular intent inherits the culture of sacrifice, it gathers agents of violence depicting their action as sacred. The violence of God is appropriated by warriors who internalize a numinous force and unleash it against the designated enemies because they too see themselves as having a divine mandate. In wars, each side confidently enrols God among its supporters: conquest is for the blessed. When the enemy is described as a barbarian or a pagan, then secular violence brings the same atrocities that are enacted in the name of God. Therefore, sacred killing survives and reinvents itself, becoming ‘virtue’ guided by clean, clinical and technological murder. ‘And when we move into the twentieth century, we can see a revolutionary violence, boosted by rational technology which dwarfs the horrors of all earlier ages’ (Taylor, 2007: 687).

Low and high time Horror, therefore, survives the rejection of religion by adopting ­ideological-political forms. If this happens in secular contexts, what lesson can other parts of the world learn? Secular time (saeculum) is profane time, contrasted to eternal, higher time. The secular state, therefore, can only be supported if it does not destroy eternal time altogether. Hence attempts to avoid the marginalization of religion from public life. ‘In order to be a Muslim by conviction and free choice, which is the only way one can be a Muslim, I need a secular state’ (An-Na’im, 2016: 45). Here, a secular state means a political authority that is neutral ­regarding religious doctrine. In fact, it is not possible to exclude religion from politics because the political behaviour of believers is expected to be influenced by their religious beliefs (An-Na’im, 2010). Ideally, professing a creed entails individual responsibility in complying with sacred principles, and this responsibility cannot be delegated to an external secular authority, it cannot be institutionalized. In reality, as we know, such principles are often disregarded by believers of all religions, even where countries appear to be held together by a specific faith. On the other hand, the notion of secularism has been imposed and distorted by colonialism in order to facilitate and perpetuate

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colonial relations: ‘European powers subjected colonized peoples to Euro-memory. By imposing languages, colonial administrators and Christian missionaries simultaneously broke native memory and constructed a new reality through which the colonized had to perceive the world’ (An-Na’im, 2016: 51). Colonial strategies, of course, also focused on the creation of a complicit local elite who embraced the culture of the colonizers, thus intensifying the loss of indigenous culture. The colonial subjects, in this way, were required to erase their past and see themselves through the eyes of the hegemonic memory of their masters. This notwithstanding, the secular remained related to the profane, the base, the lowly, in opposition to the godly and sacred, which may explain why post-colonial subjects find it repelling. This repulsion may be equated to a form of ‘anti-modernism’, but it also brings echoes of oppositional radicalism, as expressed, for instance, by Gandhi. His rejection of the secularism of the conquerors chimes with the religious dissenting tradition of the Western world, where abandoning religion meant opening up infinite possibilities for material interest and where modern science was enslaved to the vulgar pursuit and exploitation of natural resources. The very shift from the concept of nature to the concept of natural resources, in fact, would have been problematic without the justifications provided by secularist ideas. It is not surprising that Gandhi, when asked what he thought about English civilization, replied it would be a good idea. He saw God as immanent within nature, therefore he fought against those who planned the destruction of agrarian village life. He also clearly saw the link between Anglican orthodoxy and commercial interests, which made nature available for unprecedented, large-scale and systematic plunder (Bilgrami, 2016a, 2016b).

Imitators of Jesus Religious violence, in the analysis proposed so far, finds fertile ground when it is linked to specific social conflicts and incorporates a political dimension, when it is met with equal or superior violence by secular agents and, ultimately, when the field in which contentious demands can be formulated is progressively restricted. Embracing religion, as we have also seen, entails an implicit rejection of the notion of secularism,

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regarded as base, low, unholy and vulgar. As an extreme form of religious violence, martyrdom deserves some supplementary analysis. Voluntary death enjoys a noble tradition: think of Socrates who drinks the cup containing hemlock. In his eloquent self-defence, the great philosopher says that he would rather die with his ideas than survive with those of his accusers (Plato, 2013). His problem is not avoiding death, but falsity, which runs deeper than death. When the hour of departure arrives, he goes his way: he dies and his accusers live, and he does not know which is better. Embracing death for one’s faith holds enduring fascination, as we find in earlier Christianity, which injects some new elements into the practice. Self-sacrifice is connotative of heroism but also of mysticism. Defenceless but supernatural, martyrs imitate Jesus, as we see in the hagiography of Stephen and Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch. The latter nurses an ardent desire to be injured by his persecutors. He needs to suffer, he wants to be tortured, although he is not sure he is worth it. Imitators of Jesus include gladiators who kill themselves rather than face humiliation in the arena (Mitchell, 2012). Death, however, is meant to bring transformation, as if it contained the seed of a new life. It is, again, a political act sprouting social change. Ignatius describes himself as the wheat of God that will be turned into fresh bread. Death, moreover, is a cheap price to pay if it gives immortality and eternal glory, rewards in the afterlife and exemplary principles that will guide the life of others. Martyrdom, in brief, is inscribed in the collective memory of a community, granting identity and transmitting values. In this respect, see the exemplary death of Iphigenia mentioned above. When the status of Christianity changed, becoming the official faith, stories of martyrdom survived. Agony became the mark of a spiritual choice and, as such, it was celebrated. ‘The result is that many of these stories of martyrdom continue to reverberate hundreds of years after they were first told’ (ibid.: 41).

From Joan d’Arc to Hamza Al-Kateeb When the Maid of Orléans was burnt at the stake in Rouen in 1431, she was 19 years of age. It is exactly with the aim of avoiding the reverberation of her martyrdom and its celebration that the authorities

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did all they could to make her remains disappear. Her body was burned several times, as if this would also erase her memory. After a retrial in 1456, she was found innocent and declared a martyr. Over 35 films have been made about her life and martyrdom, showing her with a sword in one hand and the cross in the other. In Saint Joan, George Bernard Shaw (1924) presents her arguments in a chilling dialogue with the Archbishop, who says that the voices she hears are echoes of her madness and the voice of God on earth is the voice of the Church Militant. If she keeps her judgement, the Church will disown her, leaving her to whatever fate her presumption will bring upon her. Sure, she is alone, but ‘my loneliness will be my strength too: it is better to be alone with God. His friendship will not fail me, nor His counsel, nor His love. In His strength I will dare, and dare, and dare, until I die’ (ibid.: 67). Joan became a symbol of nationalism and militancy, like contemporary martyrs become icons of protest movements in political conflicts. Thirteen-year-old Hamza Al-Kateeb was arrested in Syria in 2011 and returned to his parents as a mutilated body. His pictures were displayed at mass demonstrations. The self-­immolation of street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia in 2010 inspired the revolt in the country. Martyrs’ Day is celebrated on 6 May in Beirut to commemorate the execution of patriots by the Ottomans in Damascus in 1916. Squares, streets and bridges are named after martyrs. In Fallujah, after the US coalition killed more than 500 insurgents, a football pitch where the bodies were buried is known as Martyrs’ Cemetery. Martyrdom was invoked by Iranian leaders to encourage young people to join the war effort ‘and to show grieving relatives that the death of their son, father or brother was not a meaningless waste in a seemingly endless war, but rather a religiously significant sacrifice’ (Mitchell, 2012: 55).

The evolution of martyrdom There is a dual meaning to death in Christianity: on the one hand, there is a natural death, while on the other, there is death as infinite love, the supreme renunciation of self for the sake of the Other. The second meaning indicates an inner conversion, a change ending in

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splendor ‘in the feast honouring the reception of the human being into the divine Idea’ (Kristeva, 1989: 136). Martyrdom can indicate this type of infinite love. Contemporary notions of martyrdom, however, connect the heroism of self-sacrifice with the deaths of others. Homi-suicide or murderous martyrdom could be appropriate definitions. Spoiled of the original peaceful ideal, martyrdom now inspires the belligerence of the surviving community, lending itself to imitation and conferring on warriors feelings of righteousness. But beyond theological or religious interpretations, murderous martyrdom contains a promotional factor addressed to friends and a horrendous message directed at enemies. It is a desperate act committed by those who feel overwhelmed by the power of the enemy and is characteristic of liberation struggles adopting extreme strategies to end foreign occupation (Bloom, 2005). At times, such strategies are chosen against the teachings of the professed doctrine, which may suggest that believers, rather than slaughtering others, should slaughter their own ego with the dagger of self-discipline. Some research suggests that defence of territory, more than religion, features among the motivations for suicide attacks. This was true at least until 2003, when most attacks were carried out not by a religious group, but by a secular, ethnic, armed movement, such as the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka (Pape, 2005). Bombers were not found to be marginalized, poor, uneducated zealots, as they are often portrayed, but staunch nationalists committed to the defence of their history, culture and territory from alien power (­ Juergensmeyer, 2017). The link between education level, discipline of study and type of radicalism has been explored, showing that a disproportionate share of Islamist radicals come from an engineering background (Gambetta and Hertog, 2016). Bombers, in any case, can be described as ‘devoted actors’ who feel that it is their duty to defend their identity and their cherished values irrespective of the costs incurred. Devoid of instrumental rationality, such actors regard their preferences as non-negotiable (Atran, 2017). They avoid calculus and disregard consequences while pursuing group cohesion: ­‘Identity fusion occurs when personal and group identities collapse into a unique identity to generate a collective sense of invincibility

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and special destiny’ (ibid.: 70). It is therefore a­ rgued that pure rationality cannot give a complete account of suicide m ­ issions, and that ­motivations can be delinked from consequences. Emotions related to pain and personal loss, humiliation, hate or ­revenge, it is felt, can play a decisive motivational role (Ricolfi, 2005). From an opposite perspective, rational choice theory and its notion of utility have indeed been applied in the analysis of religious terror. The pursuit and maximization of one’s interest, it is claimed, includes the attainment of non-material goals such as spiritual fulfilment and a glorious afterlife. Utility, on the other hand, can also be conceived as solidarity and generosity towards others. In this sense, the rational choice model is said to contain a kernel composed of egotism and altruism, a dual core that might explain even the conduct of devoted actors (Nemeth, 2017).

Religion as a resource Is religion abused by political activists to justify violent action? ‘Is religion the problem or the victim?’ (Juergensmeyer, 2017: 11). Numinous terror, as argued so far, inspires political violence, offering a range of sacred resources, including the support of God’s blessings. Warriors rely on divinities who take their side; they compete for the favour of God. In brief, the parties involved engage in a contest over sacred resources (Avalos, 2005). Religion as a resource frames secular conflicts that may revolve around nationalism, economic power or cultural identity, and is accessed when frustration or despair prevail. Such resource is at the disposal of terror and anti-terror alike, allowing both to demonize the enemy, escape moral guilt and sanctify retaliation. Violent Jews, Hindus, Muslims and Christians have been very active over the recent years. Lutherans, Presbyterians and neo-­ Calvinists have attacked abortion clinics and followers of ­Christian Identity have bombed day-care centres and gay bars. White ­Christians were responsible for the atrocities at the Atlanta O ­ lympic Park and, finally, the Christian Cosmotheism embraced by Timothy McVeigh was the ideological justification for the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building: ‘there have been far more

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attacks by Christian terrorist groups on American soil in the last fifteen years than Muslim ones’ ( Juergensmeyer, 2017: 14).

The Turner Diaries William Luther Pierce, under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald, published The Turner Diaries in 1978. The novel is a sort of bible of the racist far right, in which white American nationalists exterminate Jews, gays, non-whites and whites who support, or marry, black persons. The narrative details the violent, apocalyptic overthrow of the Federal Government, referred to as the System. It shows the formation of underground cells engaged in guerrilla war and their expansion following the introduction of punitive legislation by the System. The FBI offices are bombed, mortars are launched in the streets of Washington, Southern California is occupied, Jews and mixed-race individuals are summarily executed and ‘race traitors’ are hung in what becomes known as ‘the day of the rope’. At the end, the organization conquers the world: Africa is invaded and all its black inhabitants are killed, a full-scale assault is launched with nuclear, biological and radiological weapons until the entire continent of Asia is pulverized (Macdonald, 1978). Guerrillas are initiated into the ‘Order’, a secret religious organization professing Cosmotheism, based on an apocalyptic theology and a millenarian message that attracted many racist and Nazi militants, including Timothy McVeigh, the bomber of the federal Building in Oklahoma City. This syncretic faith combines an evolutionary theory and mysticism that encourage the destruction of the present order and promise the birth of a new era dominated by the holy chosen. Timothy McVeigh was connected with the Christian Identity movement, which also preached the necessity of violent action to re-establish the dominance of the white race. In an interview, McVeigh said he was raised as a Catholic, received the sacrament of confirmation and maintained the core beliefs of Catholicism. He added that he believed in God, although he had abandoned Catholicism and now simply called himself a Christian. For him, The Turner Diaries contained a clear allusion to the divine Day of Judgement ( Johnson, 2015).

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The religion of the faithless The adoption of a religious lifestyle may be essential for violent political actors who seek both civil and sacred justifications. Religion often describes the world as a field of clashing forces in which believers have a moral obligation to advance their transcendental ends (Cavanaugh, 2017). However, all political beliefs, it could be argued, are immersed in a religious aura which takes the form of fidelity and loyalty to a cause, or to a set of transcendental convictions that Oscar Wilde attributes even to atheists, described as ‘confraternities of the faithless’ (Wilde, 1954; Critchley, 2012; Ruggiero, 2013b). In sum, understanding the contemporary political reality requires an analysis of the nature, history and force of politics as a civil religion, namely ‘the sacralization of politics in its diverse and contradictory forms, which arises when a political unit transforms itself into a sacred entity as a way of buttressing its claim to legitimacy’ (Critchley, 2012: 78). Rousseau’s (1997) Catechism of the Citizen (Critchley, 2009) and Bakunin’s Revolutionary Catechism (1972a) provide, in this respect, authoritative examples. On the values of original Christianity, ­Bakunin had no theoretical hesitation. If the realization of freedom, he argued, is what heads the agenda of history, we must not only act politically, but in our politics act religiously. Freedom, the true expression of justice and love, he said, is our aim. And it is for us alone, who are called the enemies of the Christian religion, to take it as our ‘highest duty even in the most ardent fights, really to exercise this love, this highest command of Christ and the only way to true Christianity’ (Bakunin, 1972b: 56). Politics, religious terrorism and biblical apocalypse intermingle in some contemporary analyses. Studying the structure of violence, humans can be described as animals who acquire their desires by imitating others, a process that ignites mimetic rivalry and manifests itself with chaos, conflict and mutual hostility (Girard, 1988). The state of crisis thus reached can be superseded when the opposition of everyone against everyone ceases and a shared target appears. This is when all particular conflicts are turned into one single conflict: an agreement is reached as to who the common victim should be (Dahl, 2017). In this way, political contention adopts religious tones, and by doing so it designates adversaries as

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scapegoats. The culture of martyrdom, in brief, is also present in political ideologies, which describe killing as altruistic and venerable action in pursuit of one’s preferred social order. Such order is the secular, albeit also heavenly, reward political militants will allegedly receive. When political action is accompanied by excessive group cohesiveness, extreme decisions can be made. Manichean worldviews take shape while a process of depersonalization makes militants perceive themselves as interchangeable. As a result, preference is given to the interests and goals of the organization against personal needs and goals, which in turn provokes moral disengagement and the suspension of ordinary ethical standards. The adversary is also depersonalized, or dehumanized, becoming an abject target to be eliminated (De La Corte, 2014). Political violence comprises more than acts of terror. It combines theatrical, expressive and cultural signals in a performance that is supposed to show how social systems can be changed. Like religious violence, politics tells the story of a class or a group and how it can resist oppression and retaliate against those who rob it of honour and dignity. Following exemplary attacks, the audience is expected to take action in response to those who humiliate them (Nanninga, 2017). Those involved seek to build or restructure a meaningful identity, reduce uncertainty and enhance self-esteem, while political activity offers what they are looking for: an ideology, a morality, a profound meaning and an optimistic vision of the future. Politics deprives violence of its numinous power but identifies a higher one, which is deemed ultimately benign. Divine violence is thus appropriated so that battles can rage. In defence of political sacrifice, it could be argued that love involves a similar form of self-giving (Eagleton, 2018). Sacrifice cements social bonds while violence, as the midwife of history, accompanies the birth of a new social system, with pain being the prelude to joy. After all, social change does not mean smooth evolution, therefore its depth is proportionate to the violent means utilized. The springing of life from death is, among other things, the emergence of civilisation from barbarism. Most civilised orders are the fruit of carnage, dispossession, occupation, usurpation

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or extermination … Hegel sees history as a slaughter bench on which innumerable sacrifices have been performed. (Ibid.: 12) Political violence may then sublimate into legitimate, objective social arrangements, distancing itself from the religious kernel originating it. The change it brings, however, is seen as an ‘event’, namely a revolutionary transformation which breaks with the past and makes any religious cult redundant. The description of such ‘events’ as quasi-­ miraculous occurrences, moments of pure rupture or primordial beginnings (Badiou, 2013), however, does not erase their religious constituents. Finally, taking one’s own life can be interpreted as an extreme act of freedom, particularly if one’s death only awaits the executioner. Think of a Jew who refuses to kill a fellow prisoner when commanded to do so by a Nazi officer. He will be beaten to death, no doubt, and his fellow will also be killed, but he does not die in some gratuitous act of defiance; ‘rather, he dies to affirm the truth that love and pity have not vanished from the world, and that the true catastrophe would be when such terms were no longer even intelligible’ (Eagleton, 2018: 74). Claiming ownerships of one’s death is among the motives of radical political action. The next chapter will discuss in more depth the relationship between social change and violence.

11 Violence and social change

Risking one’s life in the name of a cause may be seen as a fanatical as well as a noble sacrifice. Think of how, as we have seen in the previous chapter, religions embellish death: Christ is granted humanity and vulnerability and those surrounding him, while grieving, appear to be certain of his resurrection. His sacrifice will bring salvation, and everything of value is beyond death. Believers are all clasped in the arms of death, but their departure will bring regeneration. In the Apocalypse, the fall of Babylon is the result of its corruption and is accompanied by the destruction of pagan states and the triumph of the just. In a final showdown, the Anti-Christ will be defeated by the Parousia, the second coming of Christ. Death is exalted in Christian art, which offers luminous bodies alluding to the glory of the future through the glory of the sublime (Kristeva, 1989). Pain, suffering and sorrow cause immense jubilation and are marks of greatness. In the Old Testament, Jesus warns that he did not come to bring peace on earth, but to bring a sword: the son will fight his father and the daughter will be set against her mother. All great ideas and beliefs, after all, require the support of sacrifice, in philosophy and religion alike, as shown by Socrates who dies long before the prophet and savior of Nazareth (Walzer,  2002). True,

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Christian civilization has an embarrassment of choice in matters of ethnocide: from the massacres perpetrated during the Crusades to the destruction of the pre-Colombians first, and the Amerindians later. However, Christian civilizers are not unique in this: ‘civilizers with clean hands do not exist’ (Debray, 2017: 41). Perhaps our ‘biological inability’ to achieve cooperative human relations needs to be corrected through the cultivation of myths and inherited scripts. Religious views can provide structures of meaning and facilitate interactions; they can impose a façade of purpose that enables people to live together (Harari, 2014; Whitehead, 2018). In sum, it might be said that the history of human beings is the history of their misunderstanding of God: they don’t understand Him; He doesn’t understand them (Saramago, 2009). Political ideologies ennoble sacrifice and death, too, depicting violence as the lever that shakes social systems and triggers evolution. There is perhaps an explanation for this. Life entails physical as well as psychic wellbeing, and humans need a form of equilibrium to survive, which is often provided by a frame of moral orientation and political identity. Both give us a capacity to act and to control the outcomes of our actions. Threats to moral orientation and political identity are experienced as vital aggressions and reactions may take equally aggressive forms. Politics, therefore, offers a set of doctrines, explanations and historical interpretations that help rationalize such reactions by inscribing them in a meta-­ narrative that tempers individual responsibility. Threats, in brief, trigger antagonism inspired by the defence of objects of devotion. Values, ideals, and class are among such objects, which are perceived as sacred. Attacks by political adversaries may therefore be seen as attacks against life. Suffering and passion, in political action and in personal life, are intertwined in the following novel in what is described as the ‘malady of death’.

Hiroshima Mon Amour In 1959 a Japanese man and a French woman meet in Hiroshima. There, they spend hours talking about their past, the man about his

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direct experience of the effect of the nuclear bomb, the woman about the suffering of her personal life. Both are the victims of human madness, of the lethal outbursts that provide the base for personal and collective interactions. Hiroshima Mon Amour, written by M ­ arguerite Duras (1960), is a hymn to death and love, and later became a film ­directed by Alain Resnais. The names of the protagonists are never pronounced, as both remain identified with the names of their place of origin: Hiroshima and Nevers, respectively. Both have lived through atrocities, and war and love, in the respective stories, seem to be equally destructive, with violence permeating international politics as well as personal passion. In brief, individual and collective tragedies are linked, and both seem to be the cost humans are prepared to pay in order to achieve emotional or political fulfilment. Passion for death governs the military and economic realms, as well as political and social bonds, and while the monstrosity of violence challenges the collective mind, the ‘shattering of psychic identity, whose intensity is no less violent, remains hard to perceive’ (Kristeva, 1989: 222). It is true, in the presence of such horror silence would be appropriate, nevertheless Duras’ (1982) words hit more effectively than any images of destruction, such as exploded mushrooms or concentration camps. There is no purification beyond violence, no improvement is brought by massacre, harmony and happiness are not the final outcome of evil, as they are not the goal of violent confrontation: politics is part of human madness.

From the arms of critique to the critique of arms It is this human madness, however, that puts violence at the centre of social and institutional change. During the French Revolution, people felt that they were acting as tools of history, not as agents choosing their own fate. Their political engagement, in other words, amounted to the acceptance of the notion that only barricades and executions could guarantee a peaceful and prosperous future.Various political revolutionary theories posit the importance of insurrection and the ensuing formation of an army capable of leading a new organized counter-power. Friedrich Engels (1943), when analysing the 1848 uprisings in Germany, invoked the transformation of groups of

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insurgents into a revolutionary army. His writings in the military field outnumber those on all other subjects, running to over 2,000 pages (Gallie, 1978). These writings may not be clearly related to Marxist political doctrine but it is undeniable that the work of von Clausewitz exercised a subtle fascination among early socialists. Particularly after the suppression of the Commune of Paris, war became a subject of prime interest for the planners of working-class revolutions. The Marxist tradition provides confident interpretations of military events and the way these relate to revolutionary activity. In such tradition, however, we find competing arguments such as: war can catalyse revolutions but also forestall them, war is the expression of destructive competition between capitalist powers, but it is a test that the working class has to survive as it supplies energy and agency to overthrow the existing system. In general, however, war is not rejected as inherently irrational and at times is said to kindle popular liberation and radical change. But social change, ultimately, rests on new arrangements of the productive system, ‘and it is only in so far as war helps to expedite such changes that it can be regarded as a progressive agency in human affairs’ (Gallie, 1978: 74). Engels’s (1943) theory of force confirms this assumption, although his contention that capitalism means war denounces the inherent violence guiding the constant expansion of markets and the class system. War amounts to pillage in another key text ­( Engels, 2010), a regular practice of robbing the wealth of neighbours, to the point of becoming a permanent branch of industry. In the Grundrisse (Marx, 1993) war plays a revolutionary role in the violent removal of the social order of later antiquity and the fragmentation of the Roman Empire, while in The Communist Manifesto (Marx, 1976b) we read that there is already a more or less veiled civil war raging within society, and that this will break into open revolution and the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie. Optimism was particularly pinned to the transformation of professional armies into military conscription, suggesting that reactionary troops will soon be turned into socialist armies. In conclusion, it appears that successful revolutions, according to this tradition of thought, are likely to take place when the cooperation of the majority of conscripted soldiers is accomplished. Perhaps it is for this reason that

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Lenin was delighted in learning from von Clausewitz that wouldbe-­conquerors or aggressors always present themselves as lovers of peace and that the dispossessed have the right to wage war against them. He translated aggressors into capitalists and the dispossessed into proletarians joining the revolutionary army (Aron, 2009). Similarly, Trotsky and the generals of the Red Army encouraged the rural guerilla forces to unite under a central military command. Capitalism may mean war, but war can also destroy capitalism. But it is not just within the socialist tradition that notions of social change achieved thorough violence predominate. Violence as a political tool is found in classical political thought and in the literary tradition of the Western world, as well as in the works of great philosophers and writers. Hobbes (1972) does not condemn revolutions and violent action against the authorities, he only warns that they are unsuccessful unless the violence of the insurgent organizations trumps that of the system being attacked. Politics is the force that subjugates people, turning them into things. For this reason violence is connatural to political activity. Political battles and infinite duels describe a world of humans engaged in a cosmic conflict in which all believe in the salvific power of violence as a response to all concerns (Weil and Bespaloff, 2005; Boitani, 2017).

Social wars Long before the dissemination of Marxist ideas around violent social change, Giambattista Vico (1999) described the painful shifts accompanying the passage from the epoch of gods to the epoch of heroes and, finally, to the epoch of men. These shifts, in Vico, are reflected in the evolution of the human mind, understood not as a repository of individual ideas and norms, but as a collective receptacle of memory. Even when addressing Greek classics, Vico looks at the anonymous mass, humanity as a whole. His hypothesis on Homer, for instance, is that the protagonists the author depicts are not specific men and women but institutions, groups and social classes. The Iliad and The Odyssey are collective works of a people that transmitted, first in oral then in written form, its own history. This history, narrated with mythical and poetic voice, was eventually collected under the sole

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authorship of Homer, a fantastic or onomastic representative of several people. Epic, for Vico, tells the bloody story of the early epoch of the gods and of the heroes, the events of a long class struggle ending with democracy in the epoch of men. When the first thunder exploded, not everybody lifted their gaze upwards and, terrified, started to venerate the gods and practise religion and pietas. Some continued in their ‘feral’ life, therefore remaining exposed to all sorts of violence. Others had only their life left (homo sacer?) and, in order to preserve it, had to offer servile chores which then became the origin of long agrarian disputes.The rigid division among classes thus started: heroes versus volgo, patricians versus plebeians. All myths and Homeric poems, which are regarded as a summa and encyclopedia of ancient Greek social life, reflect these social wars. Harsh and terrible is the journey of humans as described by Vico, who sees people pushed not by rarified ethical philosophies but by bloody struggles for survival, elementary needs, necessities and utilities (Battistini, 2007). Žižek (2008) provides a contemporary example of social war, recalling the panic in Rio de Janeiro when the inhabitants of the favelas attacked the rich quarters of the city, burning and looting. This he terms divine violence, a form of punishment addressed to greedy and sinful ways of life. Divine violence is not immoral, but extra-moral. It is not law-making; it is beyond law. In Žižek’s analysis, the violence used in emancipatory struggle against oppression and exploitation retains a deep divine aspect. The violence, in this case, becomes an act of love, although hatred is more likely to defeat a brutal enemy. As Che Guevara said, ‘one must endure, become hard, toughen oneself, without losing tenderness’ (ibid.: 173). However, counter-violence exercised by the oppressed can be ­similar to the violence exerted by the oppressors, as the difference is supposed to stand in the goals pursued rather than the means put in place. But can the same acts have totally different meanings?

Lycurgus and Solon This question suggests a related one: are peaceful social transformations possible? The course taken by the French Revolution raised

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debates which were destined to be replicated until our current times. The successive revolutionary governments, according to some, failed to put the new principles into practice, granting the state excessive power to control citizens. Fearful commentators argued that not only France but Europe as a whole would plunge into a novel form of barbarism. Burke (1968) watched with horror the radical innovation, the confiscation of property, the destruction of the nobility, although he also remarked that England should look with astonishment at the wonderful spectacle of the French struggle for liberty. Paradoxical and mysterious were the adjectives used in England amid the uncertainty whether to admire or condemn what was going on in the neighbouring country. Fichte (1793) was unconcerned by the violent turn of events and supported the revolutionaries in a pamphlet that earned him the label of Jacobin and cost him his academic post. He outlined his own democratic views and reiterated the right of the people to revolution. His defence of the Jacobins was expressed in two central contentions: (1) that a nation has the right to change its constitution, and (2) that it has the right to defend its new constitution through force. The aged Kant (1970), having earlier denied the right of people to rebel, justified popular violence as a response to reactionary forces threatening a new obscurantism. He did not reject the actions of revolutionaries. If a revolution is successful, he argued, citizens have as much obligation to obey the new regime as they had to obey the old one. Since the new regime consisted in a precise state authority, it then possessed the right to rule. Further, in his theory of history, Kant argued that progress in the long run will come about in part through violent actions and wars. He also countered the argument that the French were not ripe for freedom with the axiom that humans only become ripe for freedom once they are set free. Only when we are free, he charged, can we learn how to use our freedom wisely. Marx (1968, 1976b, 1996), of course, scrutinized the French Revolution, seeking in its events the pattern of future revolutionary cycles in Europe. In brief, some observers studied the Revolution in order to stop it from spreading, while others did so in order to hasten a similar process elsewhere. The debate is nicely synthesized in the philosophical-literary work produced by Schiller (1967).

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In Kabale und Liebe, despite all the denunciation of the vices and brutality of princely power, Schiller seems to approve of social change only when this is promoted from above as a generous concession (Sharpe, 1991). Similarly, in Don Carlos the liberation struggle in what is today the Netherlands is only successful when reform is graciously conceded by the monarch, presented as an authentic tragic hero. Freedom extorted by force appears to be destined to reproduce arbitrary rule. Schiller uses historical drama to explore political themes through poetry and aesthetics. His early dramas present the rootlessness of a generation that has inherited the Enlightenment’s idea of liberation but is unable to turn it into concrete new social arrangements. For example, in the conspiracy of Fiesco in Genoa and in Mary Stuart Schiller depicts the failure of charismatic figures and highlights the contradiction between morality and politics (ibid.). The overthrow of a monarchy is never presented as a successful, or even desirable, solution: after the execution of Louis XVI, he writes: ‘I feel so sickened by these abominable butchers’ (Schiller, 1967: xviii). Yet, he describes human rights as sacred, realizing the historical importance of the Revolution, which brought pure reason in a social system. In revolutionary times, he announces, nobody has a right to remain indolent but must participate in invoking the law of the wise Solon. Comparing the constitution of Lycurgus with that of Solon, Schiller condemns the former and praises the latter, siding for the ideal liberal state promoted by his friend Wilhelm von Humboldt. Such state would interfere as little as possible with the freedom of individuals, but provide the protective framework within which all could flourish (Lutticken, 2017). Lycurgus the Spartan, in his view, by impeding the flourishing of citizens, confused ends with means: The State is never an end in itself. It is of importance only in being a necessary condition for the achievement of man’s proper end, which is nothing less than the cultivation of all his powers … If a Constitution prevents this, if it hinders the progress of man’s mind, it is to be rejected as harmful, however well thought out and perfect of its kind. (Schiller, 1988: xvi)

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Schiller delivered his essay on Lycurgus and Solon in the context of his lectures on universal history at Jena University in August 1789. The essay puts forth two alternative conceptions of government – a republican and an oligarchic form – which have existed since the time of the Greeks. The oligarchic government associated with L ­ ycurgus (ca. 800 BC) reduces people to beasts, denying them human creativity. Solon’s (d. 559 BC) republican government, on the contrary, is premised on a conception of human beings raised to the level of participation in the divine (Zepp-La Rouche and Wertz, 1988). In oligarchies, people have no rights, and wealth flows into the hands of a few families. Lack of public spirit and harmony, along with complete political destitution, spread social malaise. As a consequence, children have to steal food, and hard punishment and shame await whoever is caught. Slaves care for the land, and in Sparta they are respected less than cattle. They are called helots because the first slaves had been inhabitants of the island of Helos whom the Spartans had subdued in war and made their prisoners. To provide Spartans with deterrent examples of intemperance in drinking, the helots are forced to become drunk, and they are then displayed in this condition publicly. Sparta’s constitution is contemptible and its longevity is a prolonged evil. Lycurgus’s state can persist under but one condition, that the mind of the people stagnates. The elite makes no concession to the people, fearing that wealth would make them insolent and, ultimately, lead them to insurrection. On the other hand, violent insurrection, in such conditions, would be justified, although stagnating minds may hamper any such collective initiative. Solon’s democracy, instead, sets off with an edict called ‘the release’, whereby all debts are annulled. This violent assault upon property allows people to work for their own benefit instead of working for their creditors. All major concerns are examined by the national assembly, called the Ecclesia, which also elects magistrates, promulgates laws, deals with financial matters and decides on issues of war and peace. The constitution of Athens is therefore a complete democracy, where people are sovereign and rule not merely through representatives, but in a direct fashion. Citizens are asked to consider a wrong suffered by others as affecting themselves:

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Solon’s intent, in this respect, is ‘to imbue the citizens with a warm sympathy for all others, and to accustom all together to look upon each other as members of a cohesive whole’ (Schiller, 1988: 36). Finally, a law enacted by Solon declares dishonorable those individuals who remain neutral in an insurrection, as he wants to instil in everybody the most ardent interest in the collectivity. Schiller may make contradictory claims, arguing that concessions should be granted from above and that the violent fight against monarchies is destined to be unsuccessful. On the other hand, he argues that oligarchies push the tyrannized poor into understandable rebellion, while democracies impel citizens to rebel when tyrants threaten their existence.

Class warfare Claims emerging from the political sphere, if not equally contradictory, display nuanced qualifications of the type of violence that might be used for social change to take place. Are revolutions necessarily violence? What are the conditions under which peaceful transformation will take place, if at all? Lenin did believe in insurrection, but was opposed to terrorism, which he deemed ineffective. Rather, he advocated a form of armed struggle (see Chapter 3) as a transitory prelude to insurrection and the seizure of power. Terrorism, in fact, was what had brought the bourgeoisie to power, in his view. In ‘Letter to the American Workers’, Lenin argued that the imperialist bourgeoisie had killed 10 million people and maimed 20 million. This was their war, one that decided whether the English or the German robbers had to rule the world. If the war of the oppressed and exploited against oppressors and exploiters results in half a million or a million victims, he contended, the bourgeoisie will say that the sacrifice of the former is justified while the latter is criminal (Lenin, 1918). It is perhaps the origin of this military conception that turns revolutionary victories into totalitarian regimes (Di Cesare, 2017), but it is also the belief that, after the Soviet Revolution, only war could create the conditions for radical social change. This view was also held by George Orwell (1968), who warned of a coming

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bitter political struggle and maintained that at some point it might be necessary to use violence. The bankers and the larger businesses, ‘the dividend-drawers, the officials with their prehensile bottoms’ will hardly give up (ibid.: 95). Fundamental changes, in his view, could not be realized without causing a sharp clash between classes: the elite could defend itself but could not defend the country by mobilizing the people to win the war. Revolution, with its radical shift of power, was a prerequisite of victory. ‘Here Orwell was wrong. England won the war without dislodging the prehensile bottoms of the old elite’ (Walzer, 2002: 128). But can the reverse be the case: in other words, can insurrectional violence lead to war?

Jack Cade In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, the dynamic by which a society becomes ripe for despotism is described. Competing power groups and families, greedy and ambitious warriors, through all violent means possible, aim to create totalitarian conditions. At the beginning of the tragedy we are offered very few glimpses of the disadvantaged classes, the political sphere being represented as the exclusive domain of the powerful manoeuvring against one another. All of a sudden, the anonymous masses occupy the scene: messengers, servants, soldiers, guards, artisans and peasants.The new cast of characters appears when powerful individuals see an opportunity to forge an alliance with the miserable, neglected and ignorant lower classes. The poor become visible and vocal, and they look very angry, engaged in class warfare that is spreading like wildfire. An alliance with the toughest groups or leaders appears to be promising.Those who promote such an alliance, in reality, intend to create chaos, namely an ideal condition for the establishment of tyranny (Greenblatt, 2018). Those who want to stir up a storm find the perfect person in Jack Cade, the leader of a bloody rebellion that hits those in power in 1450. Jack Cade’s political philosophy is expressed through the new pieces of legislation he intends to introduce: drinking small amounts of beer will be made a felony, money will be abolished and all property will be held in common. But first, he promises to kill all the lawyers, urging his followers to attacks all London’s law schools

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and the Inns of Court: ‘The mob apprehends a clerk and levels an accusation against him: “He can write and read”… he is a villain: hang him with his pen and ink-horn about his neck’ (ibid.: 41). Jack Cade also promises to make England great again, by attacking education and treating all those who speak French as traitors. The rebellious violence, eventually, is redirected towards France, so the English can get back what they have lost. What follows is a complex tangle of events. The war in France mingles with domestic conspiracy and vendettas, and a full-scale conflict explodes between the two parties: the red and the white roses, Lancastrians and Yorkists. Finally, violence leads to the breakdown of basic values and paves the way to tyranny (Cohen, 1993). The imperialist war, as Lenin would have prophesized, does not turn into social revolution, it is the latter that leads to the former.

Violence, accidents, chance Shakespeare’s elite shows a compulsive desire to dominate and displays a grotesque sense of entitlement. The physiognomic traits of those in power appear to allude to their criminality: for example, Richard III was born with teeth, and Lombroso would evince that he came to bite the world. He barks and snarls and his bodily disfigurement signifies moral deformity. How can one renounce violence when faced with such impersonations of power? In some formulations, violence does not create social order but defends it. It does not initiate transformation but concludes a revolutionary process that has already taken place within social relationships. Such process creates new circuits of communication and collaboration and new modes of interaction (Gramsci, 1971). Political revolution, in sum, does not necessarily mean terror and beheading, and it does not simply derive from awareness or consciousness. In fact, it may entail a degree of unawareness in the sense that social interactions have ‘unintentionally’ changed so deeply that people only slowly begin to appreciate that a system is withering away while a new one is taking shape. Lenin’s and Gramsci’s ideas of political revolution bring to mind a similar debate occurring between Auden and Orwell.

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Necessary murder In Auden’s (1950) poem ‘Spain’, the following lines are found: To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death, The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder. Orwell comments that the poet uses those words because he has never committed a murder, perhaps never had one of his friends murdered, possibly never even seen a murdered man’s corpse. He adds that he would not speak of murder so lightly, and that only the Hitlers and the Stalins find murder necessary, which they term elimination or liquidation. Auden’s brand of amoralism, in Orwell’s opinion, is only possible if one is the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. In his response, Auden clarifies that he does not support ­totalitarian crimes and that to kill another human being is always murder and should never be called anything else. However, in a war, the members of two rival groups try to murder their opponents, and if there is such a thing as a just war, then murder can be necessary for the sake of justice. At the end, he does nevertheless amend his poem and in the new version the lines read: To-day the inevitable increase in the chances of death; The conscious acceptance of guilt in the fact of murder. (Healy, 2007) In subsequent discussions, violence is seen as an accidental occurrence in the revolutionary process, an unpredictable event that contradicts the Aristotelian view that the end of a process is already contained in its origin. From this point of view, therefore, political philosophy should learn to incorporate a notion of ‘accidentality’ (Stiegler, 2017). This notion echoes what in social theory is described as the ‘complexity turn’, namely a vision of social processes as non-linear, adaptive, guided by contingent openness that leads to multiple futures (Urry, 2003, 2005). In other words, social change may take place in unpredictable fashions, and the specific tools provoking such change

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will be similarly unpredictable. Action is likened to walking through a maze whose walls rearrange themselves as one walks through; new footsteps have to be taken in order to adjust to the walls that, in turn, adapt to our footsteps: ‘systems are irreducible to elementary laws or simple processes’ (Urry, 2005: 3). There is no universal law ruling that social change takes place through violence, as relationships between contending agents and groups are non-linear and subject to abrupt switches. Moreover, the causes determining contention or even hostility between groups are likely, in different contexts and circumstances, to produce different effects. In brief, there are no ideal means or structures for achieving social change: socio-political action is not governed by science, so the nature of future interactions cannot be totally predicted. Hence, the failure of evolutionist paradigms positing that collective violence is necessary for change to occur. A critique of such paradigms is found in the elaborations of Robert Musil (2016) that predate those offered by social theory.

The Man without Qualities History does not proceed through acts of heroism or foundational events, but is the product of anti-heroes of ‘no quality’ who are unaware of the change they are producing. Robert Musil writes after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose culture forms him, and is forced to grasp the new social reality following that collapse. He develops a radical conception of history, proposing that change is capricious and the future indefinite: disorder may well be the permanent state of social systems. The elements of disorder can be neutralized, but can also be accepted as features of an altogether different order: symptoms of the future (Collins, 2017). The Man without Qualities rejects catastrophic views around the imminent end of civilization while also discarding the salvific role of ‘quality men’ rescuing the world from decay (Musil, 2016). Collective action investing enormous degrees of energy, including violent determination and concerted counter-power, often leads to minimal results. On the contrary, quotidian changes in conduct and development of new values that inspire social interactions can produce radical innovation.

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Musil offers the example of women’s emancipation, which he interprets as the outcome of varied factors such as slow revision of roles in domestic activity, declining fertility, new family legislation, new conceptions of love relationships and waning deference to masculinity. A decisive role, in his view, was also played by tailors, ‘thanks to whom women stepped free of their folded, puffed, frilled and layered masses of nineteenth-­century clothing’ (Collins, 2017: 60). Recourse to violence may be a choice in specific, unpredictable circumstances, but most times choice ends up following the law of probability, and chance characterizes conduct in mass societies. Against the idea of Leibniz that ours is the best possible world, Musil retorts that the world would not be very different if we left its course to mere chance (Vigliani, 2012). History, in conclusion, is led by little causes, small changes and modest progress, and its protagonists are not men of great quality, but ‘probable men’ (Bouveresse, 1993).

Old and new dilemmas Chance and unpredictability do not play a role in other interpretations. In fact, the use of violence in pursuit of social change is deemed totally predictable: it leads to catastrophic defeat. This is the opinion of a celebrated member of the Frankfurt School, whose office was destroyed because he preferred to work rather than take part in student protests. Someone even scrawled on his wall: ‘Whoever occupies himself with theory without acting practically is a traitor to socialism’ (­Jeffries, 2016: 3). Theodor Adorno (1964), the victim of this act, detected in the perpetrator the rise of a new form of authoritarian personality that thrived in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. ‘Left fascism’ was the expression used, a phrase that enraged Adorno’s colleague, Herbert Marcuse. Adorno remarked that their theoretical model of thought could not be realized with Molotov cocktails, while Marcuse stated that their theory had a clear political content that compelled them to take concrete political positions (Adorno and Marcuse, 1999). Once the necessity for social change is recognized, added Marcuse, powerless and oppressed groups must also be recognized as the legitimate bearers of the right to resistance. But for Adorno, ultimately, barricades were ridiculous against enemies who possess the bomb.

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Violence in pursuit of social change persists in theory and practice as imitation of past heroes, or as celebration of historical victories. Struggles often leap into the past, appropriating principles and concrete modalities of action that can give the optimistic impression of political continuity (Benjamin, 1992). The leap into the past is meant to keep the collective memory alive and to revive a repertoire of action that proved effective, although the imitation of that repertoire in a totally different context may prove disastrous. Echoes of Adorno’s warnings emerge in more recent analysis focused on the development of weapons of mass destruction, which compels activists to opt either for complete annihilation or for fearful inaction: ‘a rifle is of little use against an atom bomb’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 354). For this reason, while on the one hand contentious politics can never be totally peaceful and conciliatory, on the other hand, the use of violence is seen as serving pure defence purposes. Subordinated to a general political strategy, violence poses new but also old dilemmas: to what extent should revolutionary violence mirror the violence of a system one intends to change? Discussing the events of the Algerian liberation struggle, Camus (2013) starts with the description of the French army as criminal. He condemns the reprisal perpetrated against the civilian population, irrespective of its effectiveness, noting that the army cannot justify the very crimes that it seeks to fight. Does this echo contemporary events? Reprisals, moreover, may dissuade some from fighting back but at the same time encourage many to do so. Dishonourable methods are to be rejected and condemnation should address with equal force the terror of the rebel organizations and the terror of those fighting them. It is indecent to justify one’s crime by pointing at the crimes of the enemy, unless interminable destruction is the goal being pursued. Revolutionaries may have the supreme dignity of the risk-­takers and describe themselves with benevolence: theirs is a ­d isinterested desire for the wellbeing of humanity. In this, they may echo ­Hamlet: ‘I must be cruel only to be kind.’ Alternatively, those pursuing ­social change may subscribe to a principle of non-­v iolence, ­understood not as a matter of holding a principle in mind, but ‘letting a principle fashion one’s comportment, even one’s desire’

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(Butler, 2015: 187). Non-violence seeks to create a world ­d ifferent from the one it fights; it means to face violence without reproducing it. Moreover, revolutionary expectations prefiguring a ­messianic social order and the birth of a ‘new’ human being cannot be accompanied by the ‘old’ array of tools used by the adversary. For this reason, perhaps, it is becoming extremely hard to claim the legitimacy of the use of violence ‘after two world wars and ­episodes of mass extermination in the fascist and communist countries’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2018: xxviii). In this sense, reform may be as radical as revolution, particularly when a change in social relations would make the shift to a new system relatively easy: a short political (or even military) engagement would confirm the outcome of a long cultural struggle. ‘The French Revolution was won in the years of Enlightenment, not in the more exciting days of insurrection. The process was crucial, not the events’ (Walzer, 2002: 83).

12 Conclusion

Political violence is engrained in clashes around interests and values; it incorporates crime and punishment at the same time. Its intensity increases with the distance separating social groups and with fluctuations in the distribution of roles, resources and status: ‘nothing static causes conflict or crime’ (Black, 2011: 160). This book has presented a typology of different forms of political violence, linking them in a continuum and in an interdependent field of forces. Systemic and institutional violence have been described as expressions, respectively, of social, political and economic arrangements, and of illegality perpetrated by powerful agents. Group violence, manifested through crowd outbursts and riots, has been linked with rage and dissatisfaction, although not with general political programmes. With armed struggle we have entered the domain of politically organized violence, a type of violence whose efficacy and duration rest on strong relationships with large social movements. Finally, terrorism and war have been characterized as random political violence targeting non-combatants or entire populations. That identities are formed through violence, as stated at the beginning of this book, does not imply the ineluctable necessity that interactions are to remain connoted by violence. On the

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contrary, the typology proposed in the previous chapters aims to provide a preliminary orientation in a process that might reduce rather than justify the use of violence. In this sense, it is possible to ­operate a crucial ‘breakage’ between our original constitution as social beings and the behaviour we adopt in our current context. As ­Butler (2009: 167) contends: ‘It may be that precisely because one is formed through violence, the responsibility not to repeat the ­v iolence of one’s formation is all the more pressing and important.’

Aesthetics and vengeance in reverse Of all the types of political violence examined in this book, one keeps receiving exclusive (or obsessive) attention, as if it could be addressed in isolation. I am thinking of terrorism, whose possible decline has been linked with the implementation of clearly defined strategic intervention. As the end point of a funnelling process, terrorism is said to find its inception in dispossessing or depriving conditions, which brew dissatisfaction that then turns into an ideology. Motivations arise, followed by mobilization and propaganda, accompanied by the accumulation of resources such as financial means, weapons and technology (Smelser, 2007). Terrorism withers, it is argued, when a process formed of the following stages is instigated. First, pre-­emption is enacted through target hardening, imprisonment or killing of leaders. Second, deterrence is increased through harsher antiterrorist legislation. Third, burnout follows as one of the outcomes of harsher laws, which cause conflict among members and ultimately defections. Finally, backlash is experienced, resulting in the withering away of the support or complicity the terrorist groups enjoy (Ross and Gurr, 1989). Against violence, from a totally different perspective, aesthetic education is encouraged as a way to elevate the moral character of humankind such that social conflict is assuaged. Spanning the Kantian divide between reason and sensory capability, aesthetic experience imposes order on the world, having the power to imbue formal laws and moral precepts with emotional resonance. Art, in other words, can humanize the supposedly cold and inhuman ­K antian moral precepts. Schiller (1967), for instance, presents

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aesthetic education as the most effective manner of implementing ideal, just societies. However, education itself is not exempt from criticism. The ­fi nest university education, according to Woolf (2005), does not teach students to hate force, but to use it, in the form of competition and pointless achievement. Education, in her view, far from teaching generosity and magnanimity, makes young people ­anxious to keep their possessions, and isn’t ‘possessiveness very closely connected with war?’ (ibid.: 804). In a critique that could be launched today against the senseless expansion of business schools in universities, Woolf intimates that colleges should stop teaching the art of dominating other people through the acquisition of capital, and that, rather, medicine, mathematics, music, painting and literature should be the main teaching subjects. Universities ‘should teach the art of human intercourse: the art of understanding other people’s lives and minds … not our splendid empire’ (ibid.: 807). University libraries are full of biographies, mostly concerning the heroic lives of great fighters, men of war. When badges, medals and honours are offered, these should be flung back in the giver’s face, claiming freedom from unreal loyalties: ‘you must rid yourself of pride of nationality in the first place; also religious pride, college pride’ (ibid.: 841). Finally, Woolf advocates denigration as a form of ­aesthetic criticism. After stating that women should increase the difficulty of war-making by refusing to produce weapons, she picks on the clothes worn by soldiers. The red and gold, the brass and feathers of those clothes, she says, are made to impress the public with the majesty of military office and to stimulate the vanity of young men. Those clothes, she concludes, should instead elicit laughter because those who wear them are ‘on the contrary a ridiculous, a barbarous, a displeasing spectacle’ (ibid.: 798). War and nationalism can also be fought with performing art, for instance the ‘actionism’ described by Marina Abramovic (2017), where actors spread faeces over their bodies while singing a national anthem. Anti-aesthetics education could be an appropriate description of such ‘actionism’, such as that performed in ‘Balkan Baroque’, where Abramovic sat on an enormous pile of cow bones: 500 clean bones underneath; 2,000 bloody, meaty, gristly bones on top.

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For four days, seven hours a day. I sat scrubbing the bloody bones while […] the bloody, meaty, gristly bones rotted and filled with maggots as I scrubbed them: the stench was unholy, like the stench of bodies of the battlefield. The public filed in and stared, repulsed by the odour but transfixed by the spectacle. (Ibid.: 237) There are those who say ‘no’, that is, refuse to carry out orders to kill. History offers examples of members of execution squads who drop the gun and of ordinary people who recoil from the violent injunctions of power (Cottino, 2017). In some cultures, such refusal takes the form of gift exchange or non-violent reciprocity, also described as vengeance in reverse. There is a link, a continuity, between hostile relations and the provision of reciprocal offerings, the latter being peaceful resolutions of war, which in turn are the result of unsuccessful transactions (Lévi-Strauss, 1971). Everything is exchange, and war is an exchange gone wrong (Anspach, 2017). On the other hand, the use of substitutes can deflect violence, as for example giving the ogre of a fairy tale a stone to swallow rather than a child.Vengeance in reverse can be exemplified by a group killing one of its own members after killing the member of an inimical group. Sacrificial offering, finally, can also be enacted if one party to the conflict kills oneself while the other party does likewise. In this way, reciprocal murder is replaced by the simultaneous self-sacrifice of those involved: some readers may wish this had occurred during the conflict between Saddam Hussein and Tony Blair.

Reducing political violence Living beings appeared later that non-living beings, which led Freud (2003) to think that a specific death drive pushes humans to return to an earlier, inorganic state. This book has argued, instead, that humans drive other humans to violent action. Political violence has been described as a form of joint action in that it cannot be broken down into the separate acts composing it: for example, terrorism cannot be separated from anti-terrorism. The different types of violence listed

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and discussed in this book affect each other and determine the respective evolutions, shapes and intensity. If as we said above, fluctuations determine the intensity of violence, it is worth identifying the ways in which such fluctuations can be influenced. More systemic or structural violence makes people more vulnerable and, at the same time, opens up novel opportunities for growing institutional violence. When social, economic and political arrangements cause increasing harm, those victimized experience a decline in their ability to react: their vulnerability, in other words, follows a cumulative trajectory. By vulnerability, here, it should be understood a mélange of lack of material resources, lack of communication tools and lack of political representation that would be necessary for collective demands to be put forward. A deficit of political representation causes a reduction of the space for opposition, and this in turn determines an expansion of the space for institutional violence. This type of political violence, as suggested in Chapter 3, consists of violations perpetrated by individuals and groups against their own official principles and philosophies, and belongs to the family of the crimes of the powerful. With the consequent widening of the illegality of the powerful, the space for dissent becomes yet more restricted, with the dangerous result that political opponents may be led to adopt illicit means of contention. In this way, the illegality of institutional violence will be mimicked by the illegality of aggrieved groups. The form of political violence identified as group violence will spread in the guise of outbursts and riots. But, as outbursts and riots will inevitably prove unsuccessful in bringing social change, a circular mechanism may then be triggered, whereby repression will select activists and protesters, pushing the most resolute towards armed struggle and, ultimately, terrorism. This process, in turn, will find scarce reactive energies among the ordinary population, which is made impotent by lack of political representation and led to apathy and disinterest. Consensus and support for state agencies, as a consequence, may decline, leaving the field open to an increasing deployment of violence by state as well as non-state entities. Society will then act as a sheer spectator.

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State and non-state agents may be emboldened by their success, and therefore intensify their violence as a way of achieving increasing power. On the other hand, they may radicalize their action by a reversal of fortunes, for example a temporary defeat. This, in effect, might act as a warning that yet more radical forms of action are required. In both cases, however, what is strengthened is not their capacity to mobilize individual and collective forces, or sympathy and support for their violence; it is their military capacity and the general volume of warfare that might increase, leading state and non-state agents to distance themselves even more from the majority of social actors, their needs and hopes. A general reduction of all types of political violence, ­t herefore, could be produced, to start with, by limiting systemic violence, refocusing on the vulnerability of ordinary citizens and attempting to minimize their deprivation and precariousness. The release of resources would make life possible for an increasing number of persons, which is not only an ethical requirement, but also a civic obligation, and ultimately a political necessity. Individuals and groups who flourish in a political sense constitute aggregations, express views that enrich the democratic process and ultimately they formulate demands. Rather than limiting their action to the periodical electoral choice, they will engage in a dialogue with other forces, and indirectly exercise a form of control or vigilance over institutional decisions affecting all. These aggregations include independent media and professionals, pressure groups, non-governmental organizations and social movements. Traditionally, these have played an important role as vehicles for the expression of collective needs and sentiments, but also as umpires endowed with the critical faculty to articulate judgements. Social movements, for instance, express implicit judgements over issues and policies, creating boundaries between the goals and procedures that pursue the collective good and those that cause divisions and exclusion. Boundaries are also drawn on the ways in which demands are formulated and collective action is carried out. Most social movements may use force as a means of self-defence, but would condemn the planning and organization

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of group violence, which would be likely to be assimilated to the military culture against which they fight. Social movements that mistrust leaderships and vanguards are reluctant to be represented by, or complicit with, armed minorities who purport to provide them with strategic guidance. Moreover, social movements may abstain from violent practices so that the other types of political violence exercised by state actors, including war, can be more clearly exposed. The decline of armed struggle and terrorism is simultaneous with the decline of systemic and institutional violence, and ultimately with the growth of social movements opposing all forms of political violence. The last decades have shown that armed organizations begin to collapse when some of their members feel that movements active in the civil society are no longer prepared to express their sympathy or complicity (Ruggiero, 2010). They collapse when the political violence they express becomes too similar to the institutional violence against which social movements fight. Activists and militants can hardly be regarded as revolutionaries if they resemble their enemy and do what the power they want to replace does. Nor can one claim that the violence one expresses will eradicate violence from society, as this claim can too easily be enunciated by all factions, namely all representatives of the different types of political violence discussed here. Resources granted to citizens would make them able to act politically, and as such to set up peaceful protest and negotiation, establish dialogue and pursue deliberative forms of democracy. These forms encourage the perception of public life as based on the interdependency of persons, but also entail the possibility of accessing the political realm and elaborating collective demands. Expanding the opportunity structure for groups devoid of representation can only be beneficial as conduits for the expression of their grievances may develop along with less lethal means of expressing them. A strategy for the reduction of all forms of political violence, therefore, implies the creation of a reformed political arena, one in which social movements thrive and where interactions among individuals and groups are guided by the awareness of their interdependency.

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Responses to political violence also include the use of forms of restorative justice that, here, deserve to be briefly discussed and qualified.

Restoring equality Mainly post-facto interventions, restorative measures aim at the unveiling of truth and reconciliation, as in the experience of South Africa. Here, the encounter between the conflicting factions of the apartheid years led those involved to rediscover the Ubuntu philosophy, which defines the essence of being human as the awareness of our interconnectedness. We cannot be human by ourselves, Archbishop Desmond Tutu remarked: what good or bad we do affects others and spreads out (Cornell and Muvangua, 2012; Mazzucato, 2017). Reconciliatory meetings between members of armed groups and relatives of their victims have taken place in Italy, where participants have tried to understand their history and begin a collective healing trajectory (Bertagna et al., 2015). Peacebuilding in South Asia relies, among other things, on the understanding of how, through the modelling of military imaginaries, violence ‘cascades’ can be turned into a non-violent resistance cascade (Braithwaite and D’Costa, 2018). In Burma/Myanmar, a process of national reconciliation is underway involving government forces and armed groups. Efforts have been made to persuade the Buddhist majority and the sizeable Muslim minority (including the Kaman and the Rohingya) to initiate a process of mutual recognition, truth telling, reciprocity and reparation (Weber and Stanford, 2017). These and other experiences, one could demur, cannot limit their effect to the restoring of the conditions that led to the conflict in the first place. Hence the suggestion that restorative justice applied to situations of political violence should attempt to ‘repair the future’ rather than the past (Pali and Aertsen, 2018). By the same token, we cannot restore equality because equality has probably never existed, and this awareness leads to the desire for transformation rather than restoration. Transformation, in turn, relates less to the end of conflict than to its beginning as there will always

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be forces that try to stop the ‘repair of the future’. Therefore, restorative justice, ultimately, coincides with the right to participate in social conflicts. It does not entail ‘restitution’, in the sense that it does not aim at reuniting persons with things, but at establishing how persons should interact. Conflict in the political arena pertains to the capability possessed by individuals and groups to influence what types of ‘things’ are important for humans, whether or not they should be produced and how. This is a qualitative concern aimed at defining the role social groups occupy in decision-making mechanisms. Participation in political conflict as a form of restorative justice is consistent with the fact that in the political sphere the victims are majorities not minorities or individuals, and this type of victimization is possible because inequality is viewed as natural. However, if we view inequality as ‘natural disaster’, we are forced to conclude that such an event requires solidarity mobilization in favour of those affected and efforts to prevent similar events from reoccurring. Most restorative justice programmes controlled by the state reproduce the status quo, while those concerned take on a subservient role. Social problems are transferred onto professionals, who are expected to respond to the failings of economic, political and social systems, which consequently can remain untouched and unreformed. Shaming offenders is often an aspect of such programmes. Restorative justice as opportunity for change, instead, entails a strategy of shaming that totally differs from that employed in other spheres. In political communities, shaming should be understood as the growing ability of the community to express value judgements about inequality, identify a sphere of justice in which the values of inequality can be shamed, and where the targets of shaming are those who regard inequality as natural, unavoidable, a product of divine irascibility or personal inadequacy. In politics someone must get hurt, in the sense that someone must give up part of their deliberative resources, of their decision-­ making capacity. Social movements play a crucial role in this process, which may simultaneously bring a general decline in political violence. Those who dislike this conclusion might object that social

Conclusion  203

movements convey ideas of protest, dissent, contentious politics. On the other hand, as we have seen, what distinguishes democratic systems is their specific capacity to respond to dissent and to deal with contentious politics. Ultimately, democracy distinguishes itself from other regimes in that its elected political agents should be able to interact with challengers, with new political entities and their innovative collective action (Tilly, 2004, 2007). Democracies, in brief, can be classified on the basis of the elasticity of their structures and the degree to which they encourage political processes and social dynamism leading to change.

Deliberative democracy and transgression Does repression reduce participation in social movements and/or in violent action? A study investigating the effect of different types of repression found that closing off non-violent avenues of dissent boosts group grievances and increases participation in violence. Targeting specific violent groups, on the other hand, proved to yield no discernible effect on violence. The study focused on ‘patterns of terrorism’ in 149 countries for the period 1981–2006 (Piazza, 2017). The argument presented in Chapter 7 is that, as forms of government become increasingly elitist, and circles and networks of power grow impervious to external needs and demands, they are led to dismiss negotiation and resort to systematic, random repression. Similarly, contentious politics becomes hidden, oblivious to deliberative interactions, and in its turn widens the range of its targets randomly. While the dangers posed by the radicalization of democracy have been briefly expounded, those posed by the radicalization of the other may materialize in atrocities which exceed those we have so far witnessed. This is because the types of network being set up are based on weak links between central organizations and independent cells, so that violent acts become hard to control in terms of typology and intensity. This happens when affiliation is open, leaving to every component the opportunity to open up participation even more to allies and accomplices who are further and further removed from the core organization. Strong

204 Conclusion

ties characterize limited affiliation, whereas the ‘strength of weak ties’ will cause a widening of the network and produce unpredictable human costs (Granovetter, 1973, 1982). The revitalization of social movements could reverse this trend. It would raise the density of communication among individuals and groups, leading to the development of cosmopolitan identities (Della Porta, 2013). Most social movements are averse to organized violence, be this exercised by state or non-state agents, and even when expressing themselves through ‘tumults’, as Machiavelli contended, they can bring social change, fight corruption and benefit democracy. To avoid unwarranted optimism, however, a short final discussion of deliberative democracy and its practices is in order. Advocates of this school of thought claim that political decisions should be the outcome of fair and reasonable discussion among citizens, who have the opportunity to exchange arguments and consider different views aimed at improving the public good. Conversation, therefore, is meant to establish actions and procedures, bring agreement on the decisions to make and, simultaneously, strengthen democracy through collective participation. The legitimacy of democratic political decisions rests on such collective participation, which includes ‘contained’ as well as ‘transgressive’ social movements. Decisions, in their turn, are not the aggregate of competing pre-established interests, but the result of contrasting opinions formed through discussion. With respect to individual and collective decision-making, in sum, deliberative democracy shifts the emphasis from the outcome of the decision to the quality of the process leading to it. Discussion should be public and communication clear, as the early proponents of this model would stress (Rawls, 1972; Habermas, 1984), and even if the process does not produce consensus, the remaining differences and the possibility of discussing them further will still enhance democracy. Looking critically at this theory, it could be contended that only skilled individuals and groups may be capable of making reasonable arguments and shaping them in stylistically approved fashion. Further, deliberation assumes that participants in a dialogue are rational, cooperative and that their arguments are persuasive and unifying, a circumstance that may leave out the majority of

Conclusion  205

citizens. Social biases and structural inequalities determine, after all, such skills. The deliberation model, moreover, leaves aside the role played by passions and collective forms of identification in the field of politics. A more realistic model of deliberative democracy would posit conflict as a permanent feature of social systems and encourage constant mobilization, a never-ending process towards tolerance and equality. This type of ‘agonistic pluralism’ (Mouffe, 2013) acknowledges that power is constitutive of social relations and that the political order is the expression of a specific hegemony. Agonistic pluralism forges identities in a precarious and always vulnerable terrain as it takes place in ‘the political’, namely an arena that reflects the antagonism inherent in human relations. This type of deliberative democracy assumes not the existence of ‘enemies’ but ‘adversaries’, whose ideas we combat but whose right to defend them we do not call into question. Radicalized democracies strive to turn all dissent into the radicalized other, while dissent has an opposite goal, that of distancing itself from terror, including state terror. In this sense, states fighting the radicalization of the other should promote and encourage the revitalization and growth of dissent.

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Index

abduction 141–2, 144 Abramovic, Marina 196–7 Abu Ghraib prison 154–7 actionism 196 activism 40, 72, 88; environmental 42–3 Adorno, Theodor 191–2 aesthetic education 195–6 affect 87–8 Afghanistan 39, 146 Africa 39, 43, 54; see also Algeria; Democratic Republic of Congo; Nigeria; Rwanda; South Africa African Americans 14, 56, 122–3 African National Congress (ANC) 7, 95–7; Spear of the Nation (Umkhonto we Sizwe) 89–91, 92 ageism 11 agonistic pluralism 205 Algeria 192 Amazon river 42 ambition 132 Amnesty International 41 anomie theory 34, 60 anthropocentrism 11 anti-­Semitism 148, 152

Anti-­Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) 59 anti-­war novels 127–8 Arendt, Hannah 102–3, 163 Aristotle 2–3, 127–8, 189 armed struggle 7–8, 85–103, 194, 200; affect and dramaturgy of 87–91; controversial outcomes 91–5; see also civil war ataraxia 78 Auden, W.H. 143; ‘Spain’ 189 austerity 24–6, 40 Austria 39 authoritarian centralism 119 Azuela, Marino, The Underdogs 102–3 Badiou, A. 111 Bakunin, M. 174 Balibar, E. 5 Basque Country, armed struggle in 91, 93 Beauvoir, Simone de 46, 146 behaviourism 1–2, 12 Belgium 39, 143 belief and armed struggle 85, 86, 93, 101; see also religion

234 Index

benign aggression 61–2 Benjamin, Walter 59 Bergson, Henri-­Louis 70 betrayal 69, 72, 79–82, 83, 84 Bible 141–2 Black Lives Matter, Freedom Rides 56–7 Black Panther Party 122 Blair, Tony 111, 197 bodies, women’s 146–8 Boko Haram 144 Bonger, W.A. 131 Borges, Jorge Luis, The Gospel According to Mark 164–5 Borodino, Battle of 137 Bosnia 143–4 Bouazizi, Mohamed 170 Bourdieu, Pierre 21, 27 Brazil 42 Brecht, Bertolt 159 Brown, Michael 56 Buddhism 162 Burke, E. 183 Burma/Myanmar 201 Bush, George W. 111 business and conflict/warfare 132–3 Butler, J. 195 Caesar, J. 98 Calais Jungle 16–17, 19 Camus, Albert 105, 192; L’Exil et le Royame 80 capital 20–2 capitalism 69, 180, 181 Catalonia 41 chaos and warfare 127, 129, 132–4 Chibok kidnappings, Nigeria 144 Chicago 122 China 13, 98–9, 142, 161–2; Taiping Rebellion 99

Christianity 161, 162, 164–6, 168–70, 172, 174, 177–8; Bible 141–2 civilian populations 143 civil war 7–8, 97–100; avoiding 95–7; and chaos 100–3 class, social 11, 72, 73, 79, 180; warfare 186–8 Clement, M. 55 coercion 18–19, 20, 35, 36, 38, 45 collective action 75, 92 collective identity 75, 83 Collective of Stolen Lives 40 Colombia 43 colonialism 16, 17, 22, 69, 70, 111, 155, 167–8 commentators on group violence 48, 58 Commune of Paris (1871) 50, 180 communism 69, 79, 82–3 competition 39 conflict 69–71; theory 34 conformism 82 consensual violence 27–8, 38–9 conspiracy see contemplation of crime; Nizan, Paul, The Conspiracy consumerism 56; shopping 58–60 contemplation of crime 7, 68–84, 87; active and passive nihilism 75–8; betrayal and desistance 69, 72, 79–82, 83, 84; conflict 69–71; conspiracy 71–5; suicide 78–9 corporate crime 132; see also state-­ corporate crime corporate violence 30–4, 37–8 corruption 25, 29, 114 crime and power 34–9 criminalization of war 137–40 Critchley, S. 159 Croatia 39, 143–4 crowds see group violence culture 83

Index  235

death: premature 11, 12–17; work-­related 30–4, 37; see also martyrdom; sacrifice; suicide deception 128–31 deculturation and terrorism 109–12 deep states 117 defection 84 democracy 42, 66, 185–6, 199, 203; deliberative 203–5; democratic missions 42–6; radicalization of 113–17, 203, 205 Democratic Republic of Congo 43 desistance 79–82, 84 Dewey, John 36–7 dignity 12 disability 11, 12–17 diseases: infectious 13; work-­related 31 disorder, physical and social 58–9 dissent 64, 86, 92, 114, 121, 198, 203, 205 divine violence 161–5, 182 domestic violence 11 domination 36–9, 73 Dostoevsky, F.: Crime and Punishment 148; The Devils 80 doxa 21 Duggan, Mark 55 Duras, Marguerite, Hiroshima Mon Amour 178–9 Durkheim, E. 23–4, 34, 47–8, 70, 79 economic crises 20, 22; and the Greece bailout programme 24–6, 40 economic decline 55 economic systems 11–12, 20–2, 30, 33–8, 42–3; see also institutional violence economy, crimes of the 22–4; see also markets

Elias, N. 20 emotions 2, 87–8 empathy 127, 138–9 employment 38–9 Engels, Friedrich 179–80 England 14–15 England, Lynndie 155 environmental activism 42–3 Epicurus 78 equality 66, 201–3, 205 ethnicity 14, 39, 41 ethnocentrism 11 Europe 91–2, 95, 116–18, 120; see also specific countries European Commission against Racism and Intolerance 39 European Committee for the Prevention of Torture 40 European Court of Human Rights 39, 40 European Union 15 excitement 75–6, 84, 132 exploitation 18, 35 extremism 105–6; see also Islamic fundamentalism; radicalization faith see religious violence Fanon, F. 112 fear 39, 42, 61 Ferguson riots, Missouri (2014) 56–7 fiction 4–5, 126, 127, 139–40 firms see corporate violence Foucault, Michel 8, 100, 101 foxes (opportunist entrepreneur type) 30–4 frame alignment 92 France 39–40, 45–6, 120, 143, 188; Commune of Paris (1871) 50, 180; French Revolution 155, 165, 179, 182–4, 193; Paris riots

236 Index

(2005) 54–5; Popular Front 50, 82–3 Frankfurt School 191 freedom 38, 61, 66, 116–18, 174–6 Freedom House 108; Anxious Dictators and Wavering Democracies (2016) 116 Freedom Rides 56–7 Freud, Sigmund 156, 197 Fromm, Erich 61–2 fundraising 115 Gaddafi, Muammar 108 Galtung, Johan 11 Gandhi, Mahatma 168 genocide, gender-­selective 9, 143–4, 148–50, 151 Germany 40, 91, 93, 143, 146–7, 179–80; Berlin 120 Giambologna, ‘The Kidnapping of the Sabine Women’ 141 Global Issues 13–14 globalization, crimes of 25 Golden Dawn 40 Goncharov, Ivan, Oblomov 76–7 Gordimer, Nadine, Burger’s Daughters 95–6 Gramsci, Antonio 19, 27, 38, 188 Greece 40; bailout programme 24–6, 40 Greece, ancient 7, 78, 97, 182, 185–6 group violence 2, 6–7, 47–67, 194, 198, 200; benign and malignant aggression 61–2; classification of 52–7; honesty of crowds and plebian culture 50–1; hostile outbursts 51–2; looting and shopping 58–60; masses as stupid and mediocre 48–50; and the multitude 65–7; and social movements 63–5 Guantanamo Bay 156

guerrilla warfare 89–90 Guevara, Che 182 Habyarimana, Agatha 151 Hamza Al-­Kateeb 169–70 hate crime 11, 105 hedonism 75, 79 Hegel, G.W.F 10 hegemony 27, 36, 38–9, 117 Hemingway, Ernest, To Have and Have Not 21–2 heroism 129, 130, 132, 136–7, 140, 169, 171 Hezbollah 107 hierarchies 45, 151 himpathy 151–2 Hinduism 162, 172 historical conflicts 105 Hobbes, T. 45, 65, 66, 100, 181 Homer, The Iliad 127, 140, 181–2 homo duplex 34–5 Honduras 42–3 hostile outbursts 51–2 humanitarianism 73; see also democratic missions humanity 10, 16 human rights 15, 184; law 43; violations 39 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 184 Hungary 40 Hussein, Saddam 197 Husserl, E. 83 Hutus 148–50, 151 identities 1, 59, 66, 77, 83, 194–5 ideology 19, 35–6, 100, 101, 162–3, 195 immigrants see migrants inaction 76–8, 84 India 13, 43 inequality 3, 5, 14, 15, 18, 35, 106, 202

Index  237

injustice 11, 17, 72, 92, 106, 107 institutional violence 5, 29–46, 194, 198, 200; corporate violence 30–4, 37–8; democratic missions 42–6; and environmental activism 42–3; police violence 2, 11, 39–43, 52–4, 56; power and criminality 34–9; work-­related deaths 30–4, 37 intellectuals 48, 70–1 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) 145 International Labour Organization (ILO) 30–1 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 25 international relations 43–4 Iphigenia (myth) 9, 160–1 Iran 122, 170 Iraq 39, 100, 107, 109, 120–1, 122, 132, 144, 154, 155, 157 Ireland 40 Irish Republican Army (IRA) 107, 118 Islam 162, 167, 172 Islamic fundamentalism 8, 108, 109–10, 118–19, 121, 153–4, 171 Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) 108–10, 112, 120–1, 144 Israel 106–7, 152–3 Italy 40, 91, 93, 201 Japan 32–4, 142 Jefferson, Thomas 23 Jesus Christ 177; imitators of 168–70 Jews 148, 152 Joan d’Arc 169–70 Judaism 162, 172 justification 37, 161 Kaldor, M. 131–2 Kalyvas, S.N. 101

Kaman people 201 Kant, Immanuel 183, 195 karojisatsu (suicide from overwork) 32–4 karoshi (death from overwork) 32–4 Katz, J. 75–6 Keynes, John Maynard 23 kidnapping see abduction Kristeva, J. 124 land activism 42–3 law 29, 30, 35, 37, 42–6, 156 learning 71 Le Bon, Gustave 48–9, 55 Lefebvre, H. 60 Left, the 50; see also socialism Left fascism 191 legitimacy 35, 36, 44 Lenin,Vladimir Ilich 63, 73, 181, 186, 188 Le Pen, Jean-­Marie 54–5 Levi, Primo 140 Lévinas, Emmanuel 79, 127, 139 liberation 111–12 Libya 100, 108, 151 lions (opportunist entrepreneur type) 30–4 literature see fiction living memory 88 Livy 114, 141 lobbying 115 Locke, John 22–3 London 17, 120; riots (2011) 55–6 looting 53, 55–6, 57, 58–60 Lucan 95 Lukacs, G. 134 Lycurgus 182–6 Macdonald, Andrew (William Luther Pierce), The Turner Diaries 173 Machiavelli, Niccolò 114, 204 male rape 150

238 Index

malignant aggression 61–2 Malthus, T.R. 23 Mandela, Nelson 89–90, 95, 96–7 Manne, K. 151 Marcuse, Herbert 191 marginalization 55 marginal utility theory 23 markets 21, 29, 35, 37–8, 59–60 martyrdom 8, 111–12, 154, 160–1, 169–72 Marx, Karl 73, 78, 180, 183 Marxism 18, 35–6, 38, 84, 180 masculinities and sexual violence 142–6, 156–7 meaning systems 37 media 48, 55–6, 57 mediocrity of the crowd 48–50 Medusa 152 Merton, R. 35 metapolitics 3 Mexican Revolution 8, 102–3 Michel, Louise 50 micro-­situational theory 2–3 migrants 15, 16, 39, 40, 41, 54–5 militainment 133 minorities 15, 39, 40, 41, 54 misogyny 151–2 monopolies 36 morality 26, 44, 69, 105, 165 Morrison, Toni 15, 17 Mukasonga, Scholastique, Our Lady of the Nile 149–50 multitude, the 65–7 murder 148; necessary 189–90 murderous fantasies 68 murderous martyrdom 171 Musil, Robert, The Man without Qualities 190–1 Myanmar/Burma 201 mysticism 122, 169, 173 myths 178, 182

Napoleon Bonaparte 129–30, 135–6 narcissism 127 nationalism 11, 37–8, 112, 196 nation building 156–8 nature 168 Nazism 50, 69, 82, 143, 147, 152, 173, 191 Negri, Antonio 78, 84 neoliberalism 23, 124–5 Netherlands 41, 184 Newton, H.P. 122 New York Times,The 22 Nicaragua 43 Nietzsche, Friedrich 160 Nigeria, Chibok kidnappings 144 nihilism 69, 75–8, 79, 84, 111, 134 Nizan, Paul 68–72, 76, 82–3; The Conspiracy 69–82, 84; The Watchdogs 70 non-­violence 192–3 non-­violent violence 5 Northern Ireland 91, 93, 101, 118 Nyiramadsuhuko, Pauline 151 oaths 6, 7 ‘objective’ violence 11–12 oblomovism 76–7 off-­shore democracies 115, 117 Oklahoma City bombing 172–3 oligarchies 185 Oliver, Kelly 154 omission strategies 26 opportunism (foxes and lions) 30–4 oppression 18, 69, 78, 89–90, 104, 111, 182, 191 organizations 6, 7 Ortega y Gassett, J. 49–50 Orwell, George 186–7, 189 Palestine 106–7, 152–4 Pareto,V. 30

Index  239

Paris riots (2005) 54–5 partisans 86 peace 66, 181 peaceful revolution 182–3, 186; see also non-­violence peacekeeping missions 43–4 Philippines 43 philosophy 69–71 Pierce, William Luther (Andrew Macdonald), The Turner Diaries 173 Plato 77, 78 playfulness 76, 79 plebian culture 50–1 Poland 41 polemos 97 police violence 2, 11, 39–43, 52–4, 56 political institutions see institutional violence political systems 11–12, 17–20, 26, 29, 34, 35, 44 political violence 194–205; overview 3–10; reducing 197–203; see also armed struggle; civil war; group violence; institutional violence; religious violence; social change; systemic violence; terrorism; war pollution 31 Popular Front, France 50, 82–3 pornographic gaze 144, 154–6 Portugal 41 poverty 12–17, 24, 66, 105–7 power 4, 5, 42, 44, 198–9; and civil war 101; and criminality, and institutional violence 34–9; and crowd violence 53, 62; organized 17–20; and social change 188; and systemic violence 12, 17–21,

26, 27–8; and terrorism 107, 112, 117, 119, 124 prejudice 39 profit 37 propaganda, armed 93–4 property ownership 22–3 protest 40, 41, 48, 51, 57, 87, 91–2; see also activism; social movements psychology and radicalization 107 Quinney, R. 52 race 14, 16 racism 15–16, 39, 40, 53–5, 57 radicalization 68, 87, 106, 107; of democracy 113–17, 203, 205 rape see sexual violence rational choice 5–6, 172 refugees 16, 39, 116, 145, 146, 150 refusal 197 religious violence 9–10, 159–76; divine justification of 161–5; imitators of Jesus 168–70; Iphigenia (myth) 9, 160–1; martyrdom 8, 111–12, 154, 160–1, 169–72; and political ideology 167–8, 174–6, 178; religion as a resource 172–3; and secularism 163, 165–7; and terrorism 109–12, 163 repression 87, 89, 92, 117 restorative justice 202 revenge 68, 111 revolution see social change Ricardo, David 23 riots 48, 51–3, 55, 58, 98, 154–5 Rohingya people 201 Roma 39, 40, 41 Rome, ancient 7, 97–8, 141 Rousseau, J.-J. 174

240 Index

Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) 14 Russell, Bertrand 35 Russia 41, 98 Rwandan genocide 148–50, 151 sabotage 89, 90 sacrifice 28, 161, 175, 178, 197; self169, 171, 176; see also martyrdom Sade, Marquis de 6, 45–6 sadism 156 Sageman, M. 108 Salafi jihad 108 sanitation deficits 13 Sarkozy, Nicolas 54 Sartre, Jean-­Paul 6, 69, 72, 76, 79–80, 83 Schiller, Friedrich 183–6, 195–6 Schmitt, Carl 7, 86, 100–1 Schutz, A. 83 secession 78 secularism 163, 165–8, 172 self, the 81 self-­injury 79 self-­sacrifice 169, 171, 176 Sen, A. 106 Serbia 39 series 6 sexism 11 sexual violence 9, 40–1, 141–58; female warriors 152–4; gender-­ selective genocide 9, 143–4, 148–50, 151; male fantasies and abject bodies 146–8; male rape 150–2; nation building 156–8; pornographic gaze 154–6; and the production of masculinities 142–6 Shakespeare, William: Hamlet 192; Henry V 157–8; Henry VI 187–8; Richard III 188

Shaw, George Bernard, Saint Joan 170 shopping 58–60 Sikhism 162 slavery 17, 23 Smelser, N.J. 51 Smith, Adam 23 Snow, D.A. 92 social change and violence 10, 175–6, 177–93, 198; class warfare 186–8; Hiroshima Mon Amour 178–9; Lycurgus and Solon 182–6; old and new dilemmas 191–3; and socialism 179–81; social wars 181–2; violence, accidents, chance 188–91 social contract 45 socialism 179–81 social media 51, 55 social movements 63–5, 75, 85–8, 94–5, 113–14, 199–200, 202–4 social networks 108 social wars 180, 181–2 Socrates 169, 177 Solon 182–6 Sophocles 128 South Africa 201; see also African National Congress (ANC) sovereignty 5, 50 Soviet Revolution 186–7 Soviet Union 143 Spain 41 Spinoza, Baruch de 27, 73 Sri Lanka 107, 171 Stahl, R. 133 stasis 97 state, the 1–2, 4, 10, 11, 198–9; and armed struggle 86, 87, 92, 94; and institutional violence 29, 30, 42–3; and the multitude 66; and social change 184–5; and systemic

Index  241

violence 17, 19–21; and war, and criminology 132, 133, 137; see also police violence; sovereignty state-­corporate crime 25, 30 Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma 8–9, 126–32, 134, 140 strain 51–2 stress 32–3 stupidity of the crowd 48–50 ‘subjective’ violence 12 subjectivity and sexual violence 150–2 suicide 8, 69, 78–9, 84; missions 111, 117, 122–5, 152–4, 171–2; from overwork (karojisatsu) 32–4; see also self-­sacrifice Sun Tzu 8 surveillance 114 survival 44–5 Sweden 41 Swift, Jonathan 23 symbolic violence 27–8 Syria 39, 150, 170 systemic violence 5, 11–28, 194, 198, 199, 200; Calais Jungle 16–17; and consent 27–8; and the economy 22–6; Greece bailout programme 24–6, 40; and institutional violence 46; omission strategies 26; organized power and political community 17–20; poverty, disability and death 12–17; taxation, capital and markets 20–2 Tamil Tigers 107, 171 taxation 20–1 terrorism 8, 11, 89–91, 104–25, 194, 197, 198, 200; deculturation and faith 109–12; organizations and networks 118–22; and poverty, and wealth 105–7; radicalization

of democracy 113–17, 203, 205; role of Western democracies 116–18; and sexual violence 152–3; and a significance quest 107–9; and social change 186; see also martyrdom; suicide missions Theweleit, Klaus, Male Fantasies 146–8 Thompson, E.P. 51 thoughts 36–7 threat 27–8, 30, 37, 39 thrill 69, 75, 76, 78–82, 84 Thucydides 8, 100 Tilly, C. 5, 21 Tóibín, Colm 160 tolerance 205 Tolstoy, Lev, War and Peace 8–9, 126, 128, 129, 134–40 torture 40, 41, 44–5 trade unionism, armed 93 tragedy, classical 79 transgression 203–5 truth 19–20, 36, 38 Tunisia 170 Tutsis 148–50, 151 Tutu, Desmond 96, 201 Ubuntu 201 ultra-­objective violence 5 uncanny, the 156 unemployment 23, 55 United Kingdom (UK) 14–15, 17, 41, 120, 143; Independent Police Complaints Committee 41; London riots (2011) 55–6 United Nations (UN) 16, 106, 144; Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights 43; Security Council 145 United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) 13

242 Index

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 150 United States of America (US) 14, 22–3, 111, 116–18, 143, 144, 156, 170, 172–3; Abu Ghraib prison 154–7; Ferguson riots (2014) 56–7; Guantanamo Bay 156; Oklahoma City bombing 172–3 university education 196 Vargas Llosa, M. 4–5 vengeance in reverse 197 Vico, Giambattista 181 Vietnam War 143 violence, overview 1–3 von Clausewitz, K. 8, 133, 180, 181 vulnerability 198, 199 Wacquant, L. 27 Walzer, Michael 104 war 2, 8–9, 11, 42, 45, 66, 126– 40, 194, 196; criminalizing 137–40; criminology of 131–4; deception 128–31; democratic missions 43–4; and religion 162, 167; social wars 180, 181–2;

spiritualized rationalism 134–6; see also armed struggle; civil war; genocide; sexual violence warriors: female 152–4; male 141–2 water problems 13 wealth and terrorism 106 Weber, Max 4, 19, 21, 35, 36, 37, 83 Weil, Simone 50 Western Alliance (World War II) 143 Wilde, Oscar 174 women 15, 32; bodies 146–8; female warriors 152–4; see also sexual violence Woolf,Virginia 196 work-­related deaths 30–4, 37 World Bank 25 World War I 3 World War II 3, 143 Wright, Richard, Fire and Cloud 57 xenophobia 40, 116 Yezidi women 144 Yugoslavia, former 143–4 Žižek, S. 182 Zola, Émile 155 Zurich 68