Political Violence and States

Violence is an essentially contested concept,Footnote ² and state use of political violence is perennially controversial. Moreover, misuse of political violence by the state can lead to it or its rulers being deemed illegitimate. On this view, the sovereign “and the magistrates, police and prison authorities, as well as the citizens, are all bound to obey the laws. . . . If the sovereign violates the sovereign trust, political power . . . effectively ceases to operate” (p. 42). Frazer and Hutchings present a useful guide to the various views on the scope and justification of political violence—ranging from those who offer consequentialist and rights-based discussions to those who explore its expressive and postcolonial discussions. Their book covers scholars such as Hannah Arendt, who sought to show how violence is the antithesis to politics, and Johan Galtung, whose work on structural violence argues that violence is not just physical force but is woven into the very fabric of state institutions. The authors show how the international realm is typically presented as an anarchic zone, akin to Hobbes's state of nature. This then justifies state institutions of violence, such as militaries, as necessary for survival in this anarchic zone. And, following Locke, they suggest that in “political societies, governed by lawful sovereignty . . . we give up our natural right to punish. Instead we agree to obey the law ourselves, and that we or others who disobey it should be judged and punished by those with the relevant offices” (p. 41). When thinking of state-state relations at the international level, and citizen-state relations at the domestic level, the orthodox view contends that states must hold the reigns on the institutions of political violence.

The notion that the MOV is essential for the existence and survival of states draws from a realist tradition stretching back to the ancient Greeks. In the work of Thucydides, this realism is exemplified by the idea that when states have to choose “between a concrete gain in power or fidelity to interstate agreements, states inevitably choose power. . . . [Thucydides] argues that almost regardless of their internal character, states define their interests in terms of power and fear for their security.”Footnote ³ Power here relies on the MOV, and persuasion by high-minded moral arguments is largely irrelevant—what matters is force. This idea of force does not just apply to state-state relations but internally as well. Frazer and Hutchings note that “for Machiavelli . . . states are built on violence—that is to say on the domination by a group, of a territory, and the people and material resources within it; and violence continues to be the main means of political rule” (p. 55). So, when seen as arising out of the state of nature, it is considered natural for states to control institutions of violence—natural in the international realm, as this is seen to be a lawless zone, akin to the state of nature; and natural in the domestic realm, as individuals’ natural rights to punishment and self-defense are willingly forfeited to the state in order to secure other natural rights.

This notion of the state maintaining and controlling institutions of violence finds its apotheosis in the work of Max Weber. On Weber's account, violence is essential for the state. If “the only social institutions which existed did not know the use of violence, the concept of the state would be eliminated.”Footnote ⁴ Note that this is even stronger than the claim that the MOV is needed for the state's survival. On the Weberian account, the MOV is constitutive of states: “Compulsory political association with continuous organization will be called a ‘state’ if and in so far as its administrative staff successfully upholds a claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order. . . . The claim of the modern state to monopolize the use of force is as essential to it as its character of compulsory jurisdiction and of continuous organization.”Footnote ⁵ On this view, states do not just have the MOV due to the tension in the international arena or as a result of the social contract between citizens and the state. The MOV is an essential feature that constitutes the very basis of what a state is. However, if we reconsider this view of the MOV, we are forced to rethink the very nature of the state. Frazer and Hutchings's book is a lucid overview of historical and modern accounts of political violence, and provides useful insights into the relation between states and violence.

Arguments against the State's Monopoly on Violence

So, we have two fairly pervasive positions on political violence and the state. First, states need the MOV to survive—without a military as the institutionalized capacity to project force in the anarchical international realm, a state will be overrun by those other states that do have such institutions, and, second, without a police force as the institutionalized capacity to project force in the domestic realm, a state is failing to discharge its duties as per the social contract. The question, however, is, Are these positions persuasive? While the MOV is widely accepted as necessary for the survival and constitution of the state, the books currently under consideration put significant pressure on these claims.

Underpinning the MOV is a normative claim about the nature of violence. On this, there is a distinction made “between the political-legal ‘force’ reserved to and deployed by states, and the illegal . . . ‘violence’ that is used by citizens, denizens, aliens and other people” (Frazer and Hutchings, p. 9). States have the monopoly on political violence, as they are the only legitimate actors to have that power. Private institutions and actors that conduct violence with the state's approval are only legitimate insofar as the state is legitimate and the state has extended the monopoly to them. Implicit in this distinction is that nonstate actors, and those that operate against the state, lack legitimacy to use political violence. The MOV is derived from the notion that not only can states and their agents legitimately wield political violence, but they are the only ones that can do so. Nonstate actors are illegitimate.

However, as both Dobos and Vitale argue in their respective books, there are a series of arguments as to why we ought to reject, or at the very least reconsider, the state's claims to having a legitimate MOV. Dobos's book proposes an elegant and convincing set of arguments that, in the author's words, aims to “persuade the reader that whether a military is worth having ought always to be treated as an open question” (pp. 12–13). While Dobos's overall point runs parallel to the idea that we ought to abolish militaries, his claims are much more nuanced. As he explains, “Each of the costs discussed in this book is a consideration pulling in favour of military abolition; each identifies a respect in which a political community is better off without a military” (p. 12, emphasis in original). Vitale's book focuses on policing, and holds that given the individual and social harms of policing, we ought to reconsider whether policing can be justified. As he summarizes his argument: “Communities deserve protection from crime and even disorder, but we must always demand those without reliance on the coercion, violence, and humiliation that undergird our criminal justice system. . . . We should demand safety and security—but not at the hands of the police” (p. 228). Like Dobos, his account encourages us to see the maintenance of policing institutions in their current forms as an open question.

Dobos's overall argument is a simple one. We typically assume that a military is necessary for a state and an overall good for its people. Upon reflection, however, it turns out that there are a range of costs associated with having and maintaining a standing military, and as such, we ought to reconsider the very idea of them. His arguments cover a broad terrain. He details the cost to soldiers in terms of moral injury as a result of military conditioning; the domestic risk that a standing military poses to a state, as it is one of the most likely sources of a coup; and the international risk that having a standing military poses to a state, as it can drive other states to attack or invade out of fear-induced self-defense and aggression. He also argues that standing militaries are necessarily commanded by people who suffer from a range of cognitive biases that result in poor decision-making and, finally, that the culture of militaries bleeds into civilian life, leading to the militarization of police, of businesses, and of education. As someone who was initially skeptical about the positions Dobos was arguing, I was ultimately largely convinced of his arguments. They are compelling and his presentation of them is both nuanced and elegant. While I have some remaining doubts (see below), I found it hard to reject each of his arguments. A further interesting aspect of Dobos's approach is that his arguments against the military do not rely on pacifism or skepticism about the just war tradition. In this sense, the book is a clear-eyed and novel contribution to discussions around just war, adding a much needed discussion on the ethics of the military as an institution, and it deepens ongoing debates in the just war tradition.

As noted above, what the book shows is that there are significant costs to having a standing military—to individuals, to the state itself, to leaders, and to other institutions that are vital to the health and survival of citizens and the state. In the first case, Dobos argues that we ought to acknowledge the cost to those individuals who serve in the military. In order to make an individual a useful part of fighting force, he or she must be trained and conditioned to the demands of military practice. The worry here is that “military training is morally injurious, not by accident, but by design. One kind of moral injury (moral trauma) happens primarily during combat. The other kind (moral degradation) is pre-inflicted on soldiers in preparing them for combat” (p. 25). Parallel with this moral injury to those who train and serve, the presence of a military can negatively impact the decision-making capacity of a state's leaders. Here, Dobos describes the “the law of the hammer”: As the old adage goes, if you give someone a hammer, they see everything as a nail. This law suggests “a tendency to use things just because we possess them, and have invested time, energy, or resources in their acquisition. . . . [This impairs] the agent's ability to make a clear-eyed, impartial assessment of what is feasible and likely to work. [The] effect is to distort the appraisal of competing solutions to a problem, unbeknownst to the user” (pp. 89–90). Add to this the “security dilemma” where “our military can unintentionally provoke the very behaviour [in other states] that it is meant to forestall” (p. 63). If an adversary state is not only in fear of a state because of its military but also has its own military and—as per the law of the hammer—sees military action as a first resort, the very argument that a military is there to keep the state and its citizens safe is significantly undermined.

A further argument against having a standing military is that it poses the most potent domestic security risk as the most likely source of a coup. On Dobos's analysis, in contrast to the idea that liberal democracies are somewhat insulated from coups, “the chances of a coup being attempted are roughly the same [as with an authoritarian state] and the chances of a coup succeeding are actually higher in a democracy—twice as likely in fact” (p. 58, emphasis in original). Militaries have the capacity for organized use of violence, and their training and conditioning can lead to splits between them and the citizenry. Dobos argues that from the military perspective, “not only are civilians seen as having detestable values; they are accused of interfering with the military and endangering its members by trying to impose those values on the armed forces” (p. 53). For example, more information is coming out that in the attempted coup that took place in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, a number of those involved in the attempt to seize the Capitol Building were ex-military and ex-police. This gives credence to the argument that those encultured by the state's institutional MOV feel not just special privileges toward the use of violence but also a sense of justification to use that violence against their fellow citizens.

Part and parcel to that, Dobos argues, is the militarization of domestic institutions. Following Peter B. Kraska, Dobos states that militarization “can be broken down into component parts: material, operational, and cultural. . . . Material militarization happens when police start using weapons and equipment that were designed for soldiers in combat” (p. 109, emphasis in original). In the United States, at least, much of the blame for this comes from the 1033 Program, which “allows the Department of Defense to donate surplus equipment to domestic law enforcement agencies,” totaling $1.5 billion of equipment between 2006 and 2014 (p. 109). At the operational level, police are also increasingly trained in military-like tactics. SWAT teams, for instance, were originally intended to be used for exceptional events like “violent civil unrest, hostage situations, shoot-outs, and the like” (p. 110). However, this exceptionalism has been degraded to the point where the terms are now “used more liberally: for routine patrols in high crime areas, to execute drug-related search warrants, to break up illegal poker games, and to raid bars suspected of serving under-age drinkers” (p. 110). What was once an irregular and exceptional use of violence has become normalized through the increased training of police in militaristic tactics. Finally, and perhaps most subtly, institutions have been militarized. This is a cultural shift, one that “involves the adoption of a particular mindset. It happens when police start to think of themselves as combatants fighting a domestic enemy, rather than as public servants” (p. 110). We see here not only that the mindsets of those engaged with protecting citizens shift to seeing them as an adversary and enemy but also that citizens, when faced with militarized policing, now see the police as an enemy, as an occupying force. Dobos goes on to show how other domestic institutions such as those of business and education are equally at risk of becoming militarized. Having a military, he argues, taints domestic institutions of all kinds.

Here we find considerable overlap between Dobos's and Vitale's books. For instance, on the integration of the MOV into domestic institutions, Vitale details the “school-to-prison pipeline” in the United States, in which police play an increasing role in education. As he reports, “Over 40 percent of all schools now have police officers assigned to them, 69 percent of whom engage in school discipline enforcement rather than just maintaining security and enforcing the law” (p. 55). This parallels Dobos's concerns about the militarization of domestic institutions. Vitale quotes a report by Annette Fuentes on a trade convention that has “military contractors trying to sell schools new security systems, train officers in paramilitary techniques, and [making] the case that students are at constant risk from themselves and outsiders” (p. 64). Vitale gives an example of just how deep the integration of political violence into U.S. schools has become: One speaker at the convention reportedly said, “You should be walking around in school every day in complete tactical equipment, with semi-automatic weapons and five rounds of ammo . . . You can no longer think of yourselves as peace officers . . . You must think of yourselves as soldiers at war, because we're going to ask you to act like soldiers” (p. 65). Vitale holds that this normalization of the MOV for school-aged children has deeply pernicious aspects. He argues that “the implicit goal is to establish the importance and legitimacy of the police in the eyes of students; by virtue of being a formal authority figure, police in schools are valuable” (p. 68). The worry here is threefold. First, it is about the normalization of the MOV for citizens starting from the time they are in school. Second, the MOV is a way for the state to begin enculturating citizens into the idea that it is the legitimate source of the political violence and power. And third, the MOV helps nurture the mindset in citizens at a young age that they are at war with the state. Or, at very least, that domestic institutions of political violence are adversaries to be scared of, mistrusted, and resisted.

Much like Dobos's account, Vitale's book is a collection of related reasons to be skeptical about whether the state, through the institution of the police, should have the MOV. The use of police in schools is but one of a litany of examples Vitale uses to get the reader to critically engage with whether the police deserve to wield the power of state violence. He details the ways that using the police to respond to people suffering from mental illness has resulted in their deaths, the deleterious results of using the police to deal with marginalized groups such as the homeless and sex workers, the failures of the “war on drugs” and border policing, the ongoing degradation of police-community relations resulting from police efforts at gang suppression, and the delegitimization of the police due to their roles in targeting political opposition rather than criminals. The pattern displayed by these various examples, Vitale suggests, is that “policing will never be a just or effective tool for community empowerment, much less racial justice” (p. 30).

Core to Vitale's argument is a deep concern with the way that the police have been granted access to, and use, the MOV. He draws on the history of the police as a set of institutions around the world to show that the basis for the legitimate invocation of the domestic MOV by the police is largely a myth. Sir Robert Peel's London Metropolitan Police, typically considered the point of origin of modern policing, “despite their claims of political neutrality, were [used] to protect property, quell riots, put down strikes and other industrial actions, and produce a disciplined industrial work force” (p. 36). Thus, according to Vitale, from their very inception, police were engaged with a range of actions that belie the claim that they are there to provide security for citizens. He argues that “the transition from the use of militias and military troops to civilian police was a process of engineering greater public acceptance of the social-control functions of the state, whether abroad or at home” (p. 52). For Vitale, the ethical foundation of policing and the MOV is questionable. Moreover, the impacts of the misuse of political violence in the domestic realm are deeply injurious to individuals, communities, and liberal democratic societies.

Vitale's argument has two main narrative threads. The first is that antisocial behavior such as crime; social issues such as mental health and homelessness; and supposedly immoral activities such as drug use, sex work, gang membership, and illegal immigration all have social determinants at their foundation. As such, societies ought to focus attention, resources, and, indeed, care on the social causes of such behavior and issues. He notes that “police argue that residents in high-crime communities often demand police action. What is left out is that these communities also ask for better schools, parks, libraries, and jobs, but these services are rarely provided. They lack the political power to obtain real services and support to make their communities safer and healthier. . . . The tools that police have for solving these problems, however, are generally limited to punitive enforcement actions such as arrests and ticketing” (pp. 2, 16). This, it seems, is the law of the hammer in play: because police have typically been used, and are a well-established institution, the standard is to keep using them and to overlook other better ways to respond to these issues.

The second thread is that the use of an institution of political violence like policing is a poor use of resources. The money, skills, and human labor involved in policing—which is, at its core, tied to the MOV—would be far better used on social responses to these challenges. Even a more benign form of policing, such as community policing, on Vitale's analysis “does not empower communities in meaningful ways. It expands police power but does nothing to reduce the burden of overpolicing on people of color and the poor. It is time to invest in communities instead” (p. 17). This argument is consonant with Dobos's argument that there are significant costs to having standing institutions for political violence, and those resources would be better spent elsewhere.

The problem is not just that maintaining institutions to embody the state's MOV is costly in itself but also that there are significant opportunity costs to doing so. Costa Rica abolished its military in the mid-twentieth century, and “the defence budget was repurposed for education, healthcare, and environmental protection” (Dobos, p. 4). Not only has Costa Rica never been invaded by an adversary's military but it “leads Latin America and the Caribbean in primary education, has one of the region's lowest infant mortality rates, one of the highest literacy rates, the best healthcare system in Central America, and its citizens are ranked the happiest in the world” (p. 4). Likewise, Vitale points out that a “task force in New York found that schools with less punitive disciplinary systems were able to achieve a greater sense of safety for students, lower arrest and suspension rates, and fewer crimes, even in poor and high-crime neighborhoods” (p. 70). This is a point often made by the “defund the police” movements: that not all police forces must necessarily be shut down immediately but rather that so much of policing is concerned with psychological, social, and institutional injustice issues, and thus, we ought to use the resources granted to the institutions of political violence to attend to those issues instead.

Can the State Survive the Abolition of Its Military and Police?

Each of the books considered here faces a considerable challenge: while their arguments might be fine in principle, how realistic are they? I am convinced of the notion that using institutions of political violence like the police to attend to problems that are psychological, social, and institutional in their origin is problematic. Moreover, I am convinced that much of the resources dedicated to the institutions of political violence can be better spent elsewhere. Indeed, according to Vitale, “There are growing numbers of disgruntled police officers across the [United States] who are deeply frustrated about the mission they've been given and the tools they've been told to use. They are sick and tired of being of a system of mass criminalization and punishment” (p. 29). This idea has been echoed by many police officers and other domestic security agents and leaders in the United States in voicing their support for BLM and the movement to defund the police. My concern is that of the realist—how to deal with the fact that states and people will continue to use violence against each other.

Parallel to this are the somewhat utopian views espoused in both Frazer and Hutchings's book and in Vitale's. Frazer and Hutchings, for instance, write that “non-violence is much more likely to leave all political protagonists able to try again in case of failure, as opposed to tactics that will annihilate political opponents, yet are still likely to fail” (p. 118). Vitale writes, “What's needed is a process in which the very struggle for change produces cultural shifts. By working together for social, economic, and racial justice, we must also create new value systems that call into question the greed and indifference that allow the current system to flourish” (p. 226). My worry with both views is that they are unrealistically utopian. While Frazer and Hutchings direct their point to the international realm, my worry is more about domestic violence. I mean that both in terms of the domestic realm of citizen-state relations and the violence conducted in the home. In both cases, what happens when the victim is annihilated by the aggressor? We have recently witnessed a coup attempt in the United States, where disgruntled citizens, incited by the outgoing president, used violence in an attempt to seize control over the mechanisms of the state.

At the household level, the figures around family and intimate partner violence and the disproportionate cost borne by women are cold reminders of how dangerous it can be to hope for peace when dealing with individuals who are untethered to reality and not amenable to reason. There are good reasons to be concerned about whether the police force is the best institution for responding to and resolving issues of domestic violence.Footnote ⁶ However, the point here is that while it seems reasonable to push for systemic change that “creates new value systems,” such wholesale change would take a long time. And in the meantime, we will likely need policing institutions, or something similar, to respond to domestic violence. We do not want to put vulnerable people at risk of domestic violence, waiting on us to pursue deeper structural and social changes.

Frazer and Hutchings, and Vitale, would likely counter that we can overcome these domestic challenges, and Dobos would say that the threat of invasion and domination by foreign adversaries is overblown. But these views both have to contend with a second utopian challenge to their views. The argument can be found in Allen Buchanan's work,Footnote ⁷ and goes something like this: We are currently in condition A and want to get to condition B. Condition B is objectively better than condition A, and all reasonable people would agree that we ought to move to condition B. However, the transition phase in going from condition A to condition B is much worse than either condition A or B on its own. It is like wanting to cross from mountain A to mountain B, a better mountain, by traveling through a deep valley that has a treacherous river that you must get over. Is the promise of the better life on mountain B worth the risk of being drowned in the treacherous river? The concern here is that, though we might agree that a world without political violence is both better than our current world and stable and sustainable, some, most likely the most vulnerable, might have to suffer significantly before we can get to that better world.

So, while I agree with both Frazer and Hutchings and Vitale that many of the root causes of political violence are found in our existing norms, social structures, and political institutions, these things are incredibly hard to change. If we seek to jettison the institutions of political violence, then we are at risk that those who are unwilling to give up their greed; who are unreasonable; and who are very invested in the current norms, structures, and institutions will act as spoilers, ensuring that the better world of condition B will not be attained. The realist in me worries not so much that the utopia is a fantasy, but that the cost of getting to that utopia is going to be high, and that there will be those who seek to block our path to that better world.

That said, this is where the empirical work in Dobos's and Vitale's books provides some hope. Dobos's epilogue, “Towards ‘Post-Military Defence’?,” suggests that civilian defense systems can and do work to protect a state against foreign adversaries. These are “formal state institutions devoted to national defence using only . . . non-violent means and methods” (p. 143). Perhaps surprisingly, he writes that “non-violent resistance outperformed violent resistance by a ratio of almost 2:1. . . . in cases where the target regime used violence in an attempt to suppress the resistance, non-violence fared even better comparatively: it was six times likelier to achieve full success than violent campaigns that also faced regime suppression” (p. 144, emphasis in original). Vitale points to the historical role of police in overseeing gambling and how divesting police of that role led to better outcomes: “By creating state lotteries, regulating casinos, and only minimally enforcing sports betting, the state has limited police power without sacrificing public safety. There is no reason the same couldn't be done for sex and drugs today. The billions saved in policing and prisons could be much better used putting people to work and improving public health” (p. 222). The point here is twofold: first, that states can survive with vastly reduced militaries and police; and second, that the ideas of defunding the military and police need nuance. It is not that the problems that they attend to can be wished away. Rather, many of the issues they deal with can be equally or better dealt with by nonviolent institutions.

With all that in mind, I think we can see that the argument that the MOV is constitutive of states is mistaken. States such as Costa Rica can and do show that a state can exist without a military. And a deep commitment to attending to the psychological, social, and institutional injustices that drive much antisocial behavior can go a significant way toward reducing the need to use police for noncriminal activities. That is, we do not have to imagine states that exist without the MOV; Costa Rica is still a state, and the institutions of political and social control are better able to achieve the ends of domestic security without relying on violence. Combining both of these arguments together, we can see that a state can be a state without having a MOV.

Similarly, many of the realist worries about the survival of the state being pegged to the state's MOV are also seen to be limited. Countries such as Costa Rica and Japan show that they can survive without standing armies. Skeptics may respond that both of these countries have benefited from the protection offered by allies such as the United States and larger multinational groups like the United Nations. This, however, would still not be a state's monopoly on violence—the state is sharing the capacity for political violence with other states and organizations. In addition, nuanced arguments around defunding the police typically do not suggest that we should entirely abolish the police. Like Dobos's civilian defense systems, we can maintain individual and state security with a range of approaches that retain some capacity for political violence, but political violence should be a small and limited part of a comprehensive response, rather than the first and only resort. The hard part, I suggest, is whether we have the commitment to endure the challenges of moving to a better condition than the one we are in now.