The Monopoly of Violence: From Affect Control to Biopower

Abstract

The monopolization of violence has long been accepted as defining the modern State, building on the European story outlined in the previous chapter. That chapter argued that the monopolization process was, at its heart, a process of violence ‘ordering’, which begins with the ‘military monopoly’ established through violent ‘elimination contests’, enabling in turn the taxation required to strengthen the state’s armed capacity. Evidence shows that as the state centralized and concentrated the use of violence, interpersonal male on male public violence began to decline. The capacity of the state to monopolize all violences remained incomplete, however. And Weber acknowledged the dangers of the ‘particularly intimate’ relation between the State and violence (Weber, The Profession and Vocation of Politics. In P. Lassman & R. Speirs (Eds.), Weber: Political Writings (pp. 309–369). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010: 310), while insisting that violence is intrinsic to any political association or state. The State has to use violence to enforce its claims to monopoly over a given territory. It also expands this territory through violence. War and collective violence have played a significant role in establishing and defining ‘territory’, who does and does not belong to it. In this chapter, we aim to go beyond the ‘military’ aspects of monopolization and explore theories of how monopolization contributes to violence decline, through unintended effects and new technologies of power. The first of these connects monopolization to the transformation of elite behaviours in Europe and sensibilities towards violence, gradually rolling out a process of what Norberto Elias calls ‘affect control’ to other sectors of society. Secondly, it will discuss how Michel Foucault provides an alternative set of tools for bringing into view the historical violences of the monopolization process and the foundation of the state. He then provides his own explanation of violence decline by tracing the shifting repertoire of the power of the modern state away from death and towards the administration of life or biopower. In both theories, violence itself is treated rather selectively and fades into the background. Giorgio Agamben brings sovereign power as violence back into the biopower discussion. He argues that the inclusion of life as an exclusion (or bare life), is foundational to (bio)sovereignty and not an evolution of the modern state. Whereas, Hannah Arendt understood politics as a realm which is not reducible to the biological (and violent) survival of humans, Agamben argues these were never separated. As a result, politics has suffered ‘a lasting eclipse’. Sovereign power bound law and thus violence to life, through the inclusion by exclusion of life that is not worthy of politics, or ‘bare life’. From the global South, Achille Mbembe (2003) coined the term ‘necropolitics’, to show how sovereignty in post colonial Africa resides in the power and capacity to decide who can live and who must die. Thus violence reducing affect control is juxtaposed to arguments about the violent and non-violent forms of control of the body with the emergence of the violence monopolizing sovereign State.