How the normative resistance of anarchism shaped the state monopoly on violence

Abstract

Rather than an assumption of statehood, the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force is better understood as a normative ideal that regulates behavior, and constitutes states as the sole legitimate authority on violence. Existing literature on this norm has explored its development in response to piracy in the early to mid-1800s, but it has overlooked significant developments that occurred in response to the violence of transnational anarchist terrorism. Anarchist philosophers in the late 1800s resisted the normative basis of the state monopoly on violence and articulated their own competing claims. While their normative ideas failed to gain widespread acceptance, they elicited significant responses by states. In the Rome Conference of 1898 and the St. Petersburg Protocol, states reiterated the constitutive aspects of the state monopoly norm, and articulated new, deeper obligations to coordinate anti-anarchist policies. State officials considered a protean form of collective security against the anarchists, and applied the state monopoly norm to the control of the violence of individual, rather than corporate, non-state actors for the first time. Similar to trends identified in existing literature on the state monopoly norm, this article notes that the response to the anarchists was bolstered by their perception as “outsiders of authority,” or violators of core constitutive norms of state authority. This trend and these broader historical dynamics are explained with reference to theoretical literature on normative resistance.