Monday 12th August - Friday 16th August 2002
Prague, Czech Republic

Session 2: Dogma, Legitimacy and Violence

Asher Idan - Ethnicity, Nationalism and Globalisation: Three Modes of Technologies of Violence
The Open University of Israel

In this paper I will discuss three modes of violence. The first mode was the physical mode, which was the central mode of violence in traditional-agricultural-ethnic civilization. Between the 16th.-18th. century emerged the new symbolic mode of violence in modern-industrial-national civilization. The question is, can we see the beginning of the virtual mode of violence since the end of the 20th. century which is a central mode of the postmodern-digital-global civilization?

The differences between modes of violence were analyzed by Foucault (1966,1977). The differences between the three modes of civilization were analyzed by Gellner , Anderson, Lyotard and Toffler.

In (1977) Foucault writes: “It was time when, in Europe and in the United State, the entire economy of punishment was redistributed…Among so many changes, I shall consider one: the disappearance of torture as a public spectacle…The body as the major target of penal repression disappeared” (page 6). The above discussed shift, has a parallel shift in the domain of institutional semiotics, from presentational semiotics to re-presentational one. In (1966) Foucault writes: “This inquiry has revealed two great discontinuities in the episteme of Western culture: the first inaugurate the Classical age and the second at the beginning of the nineteenth century, mark the beginning of the modern age” (page xxii).

Chris Macallister - The (Re)Legitimisation of State Violence in Britain and the USA
Department of Politics and IR, University of Kent at Canterbury.

The Anglo Saxon state has retained an ‘option’ on violence and cruelty. The ‘rebranding’ of violence Foucault identified in “Discipline and Punish” has happened again. This time it’s the violence of ‘Modernity’ that has been repacked in a kinder, gentler, ‘post modern’ wrapping. Thus the state’s use of violence is (re)legitimated.

Instead of renouncing cruelty (as Rorty hopes), the UK and USA have ‘repackaged’ violence to suit their own liberal sensibilities. They are no less violent or cruel they simply apply their violence differently. I will illustrate this by looking at the role of violence and cruelty in: the punishment of criminals, child rearing and waging war.

Richard Rorty argued for a society that empathises with the ‘other’ and as a result of this understanding steps back from inflicting pain and suffering. From one perspective this kind of liberalism has triumphed, as any right wing newspaper columnist will rant.

The death penalty is used sparingly (the execution rate before the moratorium in the 1970’s bears this out) and as ‘gently’ (via lethal injection) as possible. Corporal punishment in school is no longer the norm. Finally, when Britain and the USA go to war the emphasis is on care. ‘Smart’ weapons are used to avoid the suffering of the innocent.

However, Rorty’s triumph is illusory. Cruelty has not been removed. Into the ‘spaces’ left vacant has come ‘compassionate’ violence that society can live with.

Death by lethal injection lacks hanging or electrocution’s violence. Children are spared a beating only to suffer the structural violence of tranquillisers and a police record. While, the use of precision weapons did not save thousands of the innocent ‘other’ in Iraq, or Afghanistan.

Richard Jackson - The Social Construction of Internal War: Towards a Framework of Understanding
Dept of Political Science, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

Understanding the causes of internal wars has become one of the most pressing concerns of the post-cold war, for without effective diagnosis there can be little hope of meaningful remedial action.

Research on internal wars has so far produced few systematic models or cumulative results. Conducted almost exclusively from within a positivist methodology, studies have focused mainly on the structural characteristics of societies in conflict, finding correlations between poverty, political instability, corruption, identity politics and civil violence. A second strand of research has focused on the political strategies of elites in these 'weak states' - the processes of identity and exclusionary politics, patronage and clientelism, democratic manipulation, and the construction of so-called 'war economies' where entrepreneurs exploit situations of conflict for material gain. In these conceptions, internal war is the result of inherently risky strategies by political elites in the broader state construction project. The problem with these approaches - apart from ignoring questions of ontology and epistemology - is that empirically they fail to explain why weak states which display the same structural characteristics (poverty, ethnic divisions, political instability) and the same political processes (identity manipulation, exclusionary politics), do not experience internal war.

The answer to this puzzle lies in the pivotal role of 'conflict discourses' in generating internal war. This is a third level of explanation that brings agency back into the study of war. Internal wars are after all, social constructions instigated by political entrepreneurs, but rooted in the social continuities of weak state structures and processes and reproduced through the violence itself. In other words, it is the rise of certain kinds of conflict discourses (and not simply the presence of certain structural features or processes of political conflict) that turns a weak state into a society at war. In this paper, I argue that it is only through a careful examination of all three levels - structure, process, and discourse - that a more complete understanding of internal war is possible. Research into the causes of internal war needs to examine how conflict discourses arise, what distinguishes them from other non-violent discourses, and how they can be de-constructed and replaced with democratic and inclusive discourses.

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