This is a very readable discursive essay. In consequence, John Keane's many digressions are provocative and informative, for example, his meditation on death on page 40 or his short history of the British peace movement on pages 83–88. His method also adds greatly to the reader's pleasure: He identifies key authors in a wide range of related fields, summarizes their key works, links them together, one generous summary after another, and finally, criticizes the synthesis he has just created. For example, after summarizing and synthesizing Hans Mangus Enzensberger's, Martin van Creveld's, and Robert D. Kaplan's views on post–Cold War “uncivil wars,” Keane remarks: “The temptation to think of contemporary uncivil wars as ‘primitive’ is itself primitive. It should be resisted” (p. 115). He then resists the temptation by discussing primitive warfare among Muslim desert tribes and Native Americans, as described by Ernest Gellner and Pierre Clastres, respectively. The value of this method is that one learns in a critical manner what others think. The disadvantage is that the issues in hand are never addressed.

What, then, are the issues in hand? It is difficult to say. Keane is clearly upset about violence and sees democracy as the answer. Yet while the democratic peace is fine among “mature democracies,” what about the “surplus violence” found among the immature democracies, the many post–Cold War era “uncivil societies” with their “uncivil wars” (pp. 24–27, Chap. 6), and the “islands of violence” within even mature democracies? In the face of all this, the simplest summary of the essay is the following: “The East Europeans established democracy and vibrant civil societies in 1989 without resorting to ‘surplus violence’; should others not be able to do the same? And, oh, yes, do not forget Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others. Perhaps the nineteenth- and twentieth-century romance with violence of Marx, Georges Sorel, Frantz Fanon, and others was less than salubrious.” In sum, Keane is not really interested in democracy at all, or even violence. A better and more accurate title for Violence and Democracy would have been Civil and Incivil Societies.

A more extended summary might begin by identifying Keane's goal and means. The Goal: Because nurture (i.e., social context) accounts for violence to a greater degree than nature (pp. 8, 93f.), violence is contingent and removable, reducible and eradicable (i.e., it can be “denatured” and “democratised” [p. 3]). This means that “incivil violence” can be transformed into “civil violence” (pp. 138f.). The Means: “Civility Politics” (pp. 81–88) or “global civil society backed by representative government” (p. 136) is the primary engine for “denaturing” and “democritising” incivil violence. Social movements, especially peace movements, are the heart of civility politics; they thrive best in mature democracies. (Keane recognizes the importance of the structural or institutional aspects of modern representative constitutions, but focuses narrowly on the cultural aspects in this essay.)

In addition to tracing out a goal and a means, Keane also wrestles with a false dilemma: Democracy “implies opposition to violence in all its forms,” but at the same time, “violence may be required to put an end to violence” (p. 134). And he comes to an unhelpful resolution: “Democracy requires commitment to the rule that violence is only justified when it serves to reduce or eradicate violence…. This of course begs the question of when and where violence is legitimate under democratic conditions [where it can be denatured, democratised, and turned into civil violence]” (p. 161).

Keane probably feels that his struggles with this dilemma and his “rule” are the most important and innovative parts of the essay. And they would have been, had he not begged the question. To be sure, he does come tantalizing close to the end of Chapter 1. There, he introduces momentarily the concept of “just violence.” Had he elaborated this idea, his thought might have developed as follows: Because civil society and the just-violence criteria (also known as just-war criteria; pp. 11–13) are both grounded in a deep respect for the humanity and dignity of opponents (pp. 1, 42ff.), therefore the just-violence criteria provides a nonreligious, non-First Principle, contextually rich way for individuals and civil societies to judge (p. 162) when and where violence is civil or incivil.

The fundamental problem with the essay, then, is that Keane, like many others, equivocates when using the word violence: To say at one and the same time that “[v]iolence, civil society and democratic government cannot peacefully coexist…. But it is important to recognize that the simple ethical equation of non-violence and democracy does not always work” and then, to dismiss the contradiction as “the Paradox of Civil Violence” is only to fail to address the equivocation head-on (p. 139). Talking about denaturing violence by democratising it and transforming it from incivil into civil violence is perhaps ironic, certainly paradoxical, but inadequate.

Instead of defining violence narrowly as physical violence (Chap. 2), Keane should have recognized the need to move from the abstract to the concrete. For, violence, like murder, is a prejudgment upon an act. To say that “[f]rom a democratic perspective, violence is ‘bad,’ but not always so” (p. 161) is like saying that from a democratic perspective, murder is bad, but not always so. The abstract terms used prejudge the case, creating irony and paradox, but not understanding. For behind the prejudging abstraction is a concrete, context-rich act. As Gandhi's explanation of ahimsa illustrates (p. 35), for myriad contextual reasons, a surgeon cutting open a heart is not murder, while a thief doing the same thing is. Likewise, the 1939 Nazi invasion of Poland was violence (and, hence, aggression), while the 1945 Allied invasion of Nazi Germany was not. And this is true despite the fact that the surgeon, the thief, the Nazi, and the Allies engaged in physically violent acts.

The issue, therefore, is not physical violence but justification and legitimacy. Is the specific, concrete act justified or unjustified? If justified, it is legitimate; if not, it is illegitimate, and hence, violence. It follows, therefore, that surgery and war must be condemned, in general, in the abstract, because the presumption must always be against employing either. Yet in the particular, in the concrete, when the circumstances warrant, the general, abstract presumption can and ought to be overridden.

Needless to say, I have returned to the just-violence suggestion proffered by Keane at the end of Chapter 1. Not only do the criteria of the just war provide the template for judging when and where the presumption against surgery or war or any other act should be overridden, but by generalizing the criteria to all physical violence—wars and civil wars, homicide and rape, road rage and child abuse, bullying in schools and cruelty to animals, including the institutional violence of prisons, asylums, and hospitals—Keane would also have struck out into new territory. He was on the cusp of dragging the just-war criteria out of the international relations ghetto and making it available to civil society. The only caveat is, of course, his use of the equivocation, violence. For the criteria do not measure abstract violence; they judge concrete acts. Hence, the better term would have been “just act,” not just violence. Moreover, when the substitution is made, the full impact of many of Keane's sentences and digressions are realized. For example, by substituting “an act ” for “violence,” one illuminates the just cause that should motivate any political act: “An act can be deemed ‘good’ only when it serves as an effective means of creating or strengthening a peaceful civil society secured by publicly accountable political-legal institutions” (p. 161).