Violence and Politics

I have seen and heard and listened to the very intellectual, academic and disconnected calls for a reconsideration of the tactics used by marginalized and oppressed groups, especially in South Africa and especially in response to the recent altercations between institutional power and students.

All of these calls recognise the institutional and structural violence imposed by the system but fail to foreground it in their analyses. Instead relegating it to a secondary concern. (let me stick to a collective description for the status quo rather than singling out specifically universities as most commentators seem to make the general case for the inappropriateness of the response by those on the side of the oppressed and marginalised who argue that the responses are necessary and inevitable).

Let me say firstly. That as much as academia and the middle classes wish for this to be a debate about intellectual concepts, the debate is fundamentally one which cannot be separated from the lived realities of the vast majority of dispossessed, marginalised and exploited. This debate is also as much about understanding and knowledge as it is about concepts of catharsis and utopias.

But it is not the dry removed understanding and knowledge of academia or suburbia; it is ultimately about the understanding and knowledge of poverty and exclusion. It is about the amazingly insulated demand by academia, suburbia and the institutional bureaucracy that excluded people living in poverty should be rational in their acceptance of their position within the system.

Perhaps this call for rationality harks back to Colonial ideas of who are valid contenders for humanity and consideration and who should be excluded. But without trying to box the critique of the poverty of violence into purely a colonial exclusion of the other, let me say that it is nonetheless an important consideration in how the discourse is framed.

For in locating the discourse of violence, it is assumed that state and institutional violence is rational and given, and concomitantly legitimate, and that therefore the responses to institutional and state violence cannot itself be violent. For if it is, then it is irrational. On what basis is such a conclusion reached one wonders.

In an era where revolutions have become the replacement of one elite for another and where elite pacts, both formal and informal, both institutional and sociological, have become entrenched as the new absolutism, the notion that the state and its institutional use of power should be met with non-violent responses seems to be not only accepting and submissive of the new absolutism but also defeatist in what is possible and irrational in a world where situatedness and multidisciplinary considerations should long have surpassed universalist rationality.

Rationalism aside, for now I will assume that all violence, whether from the state and its institutions or whether from resisting groups have moral consequences and that all groups that engage in violent responses whether it is to oppress or whether it is for liberation, inevitably carries with it moral consequences. 

But is all violence equal?

The UN has accepted that violence in certain instances is acceptable. United Nations General Assembly Resolution A/RES/33/24 of 29 November 1978:

“Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, particularly armed struggle;”

Morally then, then the case has already been made, after years of struggle and effort, that force can be used legitimately and the need to debate its merits or demerits will not be further considered here. Instead in trying to move towards finding answers to its prevalence, legitimate or not, I will look to empirical considerations of why and how intra state violence persists.

In a study in 2009 of various Resistance and Liberation Movements (RLM) around the world Veronique Dudouet, in her report From War To Politics, in which she develops a comparative study of six intra state conflicts and which incidentally included the ANC and the South African liberation struggle, notes that “All six case study reports support the classical thesis that armed action was adopted as a last resort (“the only alternative”), in response to violent repression of nonviolent protest by the state. Negotiation and conventional politics were never ruled out as a matter of principle, but simply deemed impossible or ineffective under given circumstances”.

Here the key element for our current considerations is the efficacy of our political system in allowing marginalised groups to achieve more just outcomes. There is ample evidence (not least of which is the ferment of violence in local and national protests) to suggest that those affected most by the unequal and unjust outcomes within society feel marginalised, unheard and more importantly cannot equate being heard to their lived reality.

Elsewhere in the report she states that: “All six authors (of the case studies) identify the emergence of RLMs as a political response to a complex set of historical circumstances, dating back to a distant past (e.g. colonialism and its legacy) or more recent political events (e.g. the legalisation of inequality, fraudulent elections, etc.), primarily centred around the role of the state. Although most of the six movements emerged in a context of formal democracy (with a constitution and a competitive electoral system of government), they argue that there was only a pretence of democracy, and that the closed nature of the political system or highly unequal power structures had prompted the formation of opposition movements representing an oppressed constituency”.

To hold then, a purely moral argument on the use of force to claim ones political space and to defend ones human`s rights ignores the empirical evidence which suggests that every system of oppression and exclusion eventually reaches the limits of human patience and is then inevitably formulated as a Manichean choice between Freedom or Death. We can of course theorise and debate the veracity, necessity and outcomes of such choices, but the empirical basis of its claim to constancy in the face of inequality, can very seldom be ignored.  

Thus reports such as the one by Dudouet, should highlight for us the importance of open political spaces, especially in constitutional states and foreground for us, the centrality of the state in either creating the conditions for open political contest and expression by marginalised groups and consequently more just outcomes, or for creating the fermenting environment of violence and resistance.

To blame the victims of such abuse for reacting to such closure and oppression is to speak to the symptoms and not the cause and to deny the rationality of the marganilised and oppressed. To foreground in our critique the violence of the oppressed is to invisiblise the violence of the state and to place the violence of the state and its institutions onto a pedestal of legitimacy while relegating the response of the oppressed to the illegitimacy of irrationality.

Such an inverted dichotomy serves then only to entrench the very conditions which empirical evidence suggests, are instead its causes.