VIOLENCE AND AMBIVALENCE Dr. Elizabeth Frazer ISRF Academic Advisor
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he thought that ‘violence’ is ‘force out of place’ (Louise Braddock’s formulation, as cited by Andrew Robertson) makes of violence a normative concept—that is, calling an action, an event, a process, or a relationship violent is evaluative, it already implies wrongfulness, badness, deviance. Many thinkers and actors go along with that. State authorities have traditionally called the actions of their military and civil personnel ‘force’, claiming the legitimacy, by legal authorisation, of powers of arrest, imprisonment, physical injury, and the like by officers. But legitimacy is claimed here also by the rhetorical device of differentiation and distinction. The selfsame actions or events that are violent if perpetrated by an ordinary person are force if perpetrated by a police officer. Perhaps more strikingly, activists and critical thinkers also go along with this distinction, insofar as they are concerned to re-classify some allegedly violent actions and events as force. The resistance of protesting groups and classes to the authority and domination that oppresses, exploits and injures should properly be seen as political power and effort, it can be argued. To be sure, sometimes the dynamics of state, authoritative, force in conflict with civil, resistant, force mean an escalation to violence. To understand this as a conflict between state force on the one hand, and social violence on the other, though—which is how disorder in the context of demonstrations or strikes is frequently represented by state authorities and by conventional and social media alike—is unjustly to deny the legitimacy of social force for political purposes. It is also wrongly to allocate responsibility and blame for violence to deviant social actors, rather than to violent state officers and institutions. So this idea that force can be justified and legitimate, but that perpetrated by the wrong persons, or for the wrong purposes, or in the wrong—excessive, uncontrolled, overly injurious—manner it is violence, and wrongful or bad, has plausibility. A difficulty with such analysis, 33
