The Trias Violentiae

Abstract

Three main ideal-typical forms or types of violence have throughout this book been discerned: private violence, state violence and structural violence. The term ‘private violence’ has been meant to denote both individual and collective forms of personal violence. This category is called ‘private’, especially with reference to its opposition to state violence. In this chapter, these three forms of violence are discussed in their varying empirical forms of appearance, their self-reproducing powers, and their mutual influences. In each of these aspects, comprehensiveness cannot be claimed, but the relations between the three types need to be highlighted, albeit only in a preliminary sense. Next to reviewing existing knowledge concerning the three main forms of violence, it is now crucial to see how these are linked together — it is crucial to unravel the web of connections that exist between them. For the exclusive focus on private or personal violence so often entails a blindness for the workings of state violence and structural violence. And the theory of the state usually loses sight of structural violence and of the active side (other than the mere reactive side) of the state in its violence — political theory here in fact reveals its own political being. In the trias violentiae, the state plays a key role, and ample attention will therefore be devoted to it. For the state is the mediator between private violence and structural violence. At the same time, however, it may be the medium of private violence set off as a result of structural violence, and of structural violence directed against the private sphere. This central place of the state will be further discussed in the following paragraphs.