Legitimate Violence Research Articles

Nemzetközi Rendészeti Figyelő XV.

Aim: The international law enforcement literature focuses on the study of unlawful human behaviour that violates public order and threatens public security. Research focusing on the internal workings of law enforcement authorities and prosecution services is relatively rare. There are also few examples of academic work on crimes committed by law enforcement officials. The Observer now reports on such articles. Methodology: Attila Sümegh’s review gives an overview of the methods used by the Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation in the fight against corruption. In addition to the traditional methods of detecting official and economic bribery, the Prosecutor’s Office also performs tasks that reveal the shortcomings of inadequate legislation that can significantly increase the risk of corruption. Ronett Radvánszki’s summary outlines a methodology for investigating so-called ‘police crime’ in the United States. She points out that police officers who cross the line of legality in the possession of a monopoly on legitimate violence may think that their status makes them less accountable. Findings: Gábor Bélai’s work is exceptionally wide-ranging and professional in its approach, and provides us with an insight into the criminalistic practices of the former GDR (German Democratic Republic) and the former FRG (Federal Republic of Germany) and the differences in the procedural order of law enforcement. While we can be convinced that the former GDR’s training in criminology was of a high professional standard, we must also understand that prosecutorial control of law enforcement in the former GDR still offers considerably more guarantees than in a conception that did not follow the criteria of the rule of law. Value: From a publication dedicated to the study of domestic violence, Bíborka Horváth highlights that ‘current legislation focuses primarily on violence in individual, public places and does not pay enough attention to those who are victims of multifaceted abuse by intimate partners or family members.’ This research also goes far beyond the criminal justice dimensions of domestic violence to report on the moral values that can be the source of the outcomes of individual and social inclusion. Aura Vörös provides information on a study of the legitimacy of the state’s monopoly on violence, with a special focus on the interpretation of the police monopoly on violence, an inescapable task for any democratically functioning constitutional power.

A Sea of Households: Ordering Violence and Mobility in the 
Inter-Imperial Caribbean

Abstract Historians have paid more attention to the inner life of households than to their legal and political significance in early European overseas empires. This article analyses the legal role of households in the seventeenth century Caribbean, with an emphasis on Jamaica and Suriname. It argues that households were key to organising maritime violence and composing regional order. Imperial agents in the Caribbean—soldiers, sojourners, servants, and officials—drew selectively from European political and legal discourses about dominium to define households as essential to the constitution of colonial communities and governance. In imperial and colonial legal imagination, households were necessary for the constitution of political communities and their presence fortified arguments for interpolitical violence, especially maritime raiding. Affirming the rights of household heads to hold and command captives, imperial policies to foment household formation and regulate conflicts within households underpinned a regional regime of raiding, captive taking, and enslavement. The regional regime centred on legalities of violence. Demand for coerced labour in early plantation households fuelled a 
circum-Caribbean economy of captive taking and plunder, while settlers invoked the defence of households to authorise privateering and local warfare. As the primary legal framework for absorbing and commanding coerced labour, households became the object of inter-imperial competition and a vehicle for constructing enslavement as an institution. Contests over the rights of settlers to relocate to competing colonies at times pitted expansive understandings of the dominium of household heads—the exercise of private power over household subordinates—against the public authorities they nominally sustained. Such conflicts worked to reinforce the centrality of households to the expansion of plantation slavery. The politics of households made them an unstable underpinning for colonial governance and a site of resistance to the emerging plantocracy. Officials in Jamaica struggled to manage the volatile relation between raiding and planter household formation. In Suriname, Indigenous and African captives struggled to escape and subvert forms of slavery and coercion imposed under cover of household dominium. Examining the significance of households in colonial thought illuminates important and often overlooked continuities in the legal politics of nascent Caribbean colonies and the rise of a regional slave regime. Viewed from the colonial household, legal change across the Caribbean did not follow discrete stages of conquest, privateering, and plantation slavery. Instead, it evolved in relation to shifting accommodations between public and private claims to authority and legitimate violence. Authorising warfare and converting captives into property, households formed a legal fulcrum for balancing interdependent networks of raiding, slaving, and planting in emergent slave societies. This constellation of private rights and public authority, organised around captive taking ventures and slave-holding households, spanned the seventeenth-century Caribbean and produced an inter-imperial legal regime in which the rights of slave owners came to occupy the very centre of visions of regional order.

Disjointing state and war: defence policy as hauntology

ABSTRACT This paper examines the relationship between state and war in defence policy. To do so it develops a hauntological vocabulary of spectrality, conjuring, and the messianic in close conversation with Derrida’s Specters of Marx. This allows for paying attention to the tensions of statehood and state–war relations, and to how they are determined. Specifically, the paper identifies three aporias signalled in Max Weber’s definition of the state—legitimate violence, community, and territory—and traces how they are addressed in two post-Cold War defence policy paradigms—expeditionary force and territorial deterrence—through two Swedish Defence Bills (2009 and 2020). The main claim concerns how these paradigms, despite their differences, disjointed the state from war by transposing questions of force and violence to the limits of the international order and by subordinating defence to instrumentalism. Traditional spectres of society, state, and the international were dislocated to domains outside statist conceptions of politics. Thus, the paper complements conventional understandings of security and defence as central to statehood by indicating a different function of defence policy and what is at stake in inheriting received political imaginations.

Deinstitutionalization as a way of corrosion of the state's claim to a monopoly on legitimate violence: an approach based on Pierre Bourdieu, François Dubet and Danilo Martuccelli

Resumo O presente artigo pretende discutir o impacto da desinstitucionalização sobre a pretensão de monopólio da violência legítima, física e simbólica, por parte do Estado. Assim, em primeiro lugar, partindo de uma concisa abordagem dos conceitos de campo, de capital e de habitus, apresenta, sem pretensão a um distanciamento crítico (que seria incompatível com as suas dimensões e propósitos), os aspectos gerais da reflexão de Pierre Bourdieu acerca do Estado. Em seguida, examina a tese proposta pelo autor acerca do Estado como instituição responsável pela (re)produção e canonização das formas de classificação social. Após esse exame, enfoca aspectos fundamentais da análise empreendida por François Dubet e Danilo Martuccelli acerca do processo de desinstitucionalização para, a partir dela, indicar alguns dos seus efeitos sobre o Estado.

Loss of autonomy, legitimization of violence, transgression of intimacy, and fear of abuse: A thematic analysis of stories of gynecological violence and its consequences

Previous research indicates the presence of deeply ingrained gender biases within the health system, resulting in instances of mistreatment and violence against women and sexual dissidents. This study aimed to explore the stories of people assigned female at birth about their experiences of gynecological violence in Chile. Twenty-one women were recruited as participants, and semistructured interviews were conducted. Thematic analysis of the transcribed dialogs was performed, and four themes were developed: legitimization of violence, objectivation and loss of autonomy, transgression of intimacy and fear of abuse, and consequences of violence over time. This article sheds light on the impact and aftermath of gynecological violence among those seeking gynecological services, highlighting the convergence of cultural, institutional, and interpersonal factors that perpetuate this issue.

Legislative Initiatives in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the Late Sixteenth - Early Seventeenth Century as Strengthening the State Monopoly on Legitimate Violence

Legislative Initiatives in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the Late Sixteenth - Early Seventeenth Century as Strengthening the State Monopoly on Legitimate Violence

State’s Legitimisation of Violence through Strategic Narration: How the Kremlin Justified the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

ABSTRACT The use of violence by state actors in political conflicts is often legitimised through the development of strategic narratives. The social construction of such narratives arguably relies on polarised storytelling centred on notions such as national heroism on one side and ‘perpetration against the nation’ on the other. The Kremlin’s official justification of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine since February 2022 provides an illuminating example of this process of strategic narration. Relying on widely accepted cultural templates, Russia’s state institutions and officials put forward a narrative focused on Russia’s alleged heroic mission in Ukraine and the delegitimisation of the Ukrainian government and its external supporters as ‘ultimate perpetrators’. This highlights the proactive framing role that state actors may have in developing a discourse legitimising violence.

The Nature of War

The traditional definition of war given by classical authors is, that war is a violent conflict between sovereigns. This means that war cannot be outlawed by any higher authority, since the sovereign is the uppermost authority upon the lives of the persons that are subject to them. Only the sovereign has the right and the power to forbid the violent resolution of conflicts among their subjects, and as sovereign they are not subject to any higher worldly power, but only to the power of God. The obligations to God are for the most classical authors not of legal nature but constitute the realm of morality. Thus, the main question for the classical authors on war theory is the clarification of the moral conditions that justify a sovereign to wage war against another sovereign, the so-called theory of just war. Since the classical authors subordinate the concept of war under the concept of justice, the theory of just war includes reflections about the proper means of conducting a war from the point of view of justice. In other words, the theory of just war also formulates criteria for such acts that are considered as war crimes. In this essay I will not challenge the theory of just war itself, but the traditional definition of war in terms of exertion of legitimate violence. My alternative definition will be given in the third section of the essay, and relies on the Platonic concept of peace, and on the Aristotelian concepts of privation and analogy. I think that violence is not a constitutive characteristic of war, but the conceptual, i.e., logical consequence of its definition. In other words, the state of war can be declared and persist without any acts of violence. The use of violence is justified by the manifestation of the state of war.

The Legal Scopes of Liberty and the State in Light of the Utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill

In modern democracies the liberty of the individual is ensured and protected by the state or the government. But it is well-known that restrictions on liberty are institutionalized and the individual is responsible for obeying them. The liberty of the individual and its protection is provided through restrictions. On the other hand, the legal system and the government are the institutions that threaten the liberty of the individual. Mill’s thesis on individual liberty implies the primacy of it and sets out the social conditions in which it will be possible to realize and protect individual liberty. The main theme of his treatise On Liberty is the nature and boundaries of individual liberty, the scope of legitimate interference with individual liberty. In other words, the principle establishes a sufficient basis for the legitimate protection of the individual liberty, i.e. what is a restriction of a right, on the one hand, is at the same time a protection of it. An individual must be free from all forms of violence, if his/her actions do not harm others [Riley 2001, 46]. The purpose of the paper On Liberty is to provide one very simple principle. Main point of it is that the method of societies’ relations with the individual should not be coercion and control. No matter is it a case of physical violence as a form of punishment or as a form of moral coercion by society. Power over a member of a civilized community can only be exercised for the sole purpose of preventing harm to others. Thus, the liberty principle establishes a necessary condition for legitimate violence against any individual: his/her liberty of action must be restricted by law or opinion if there is a reasonable expectation that it will harm others.

Political implications of the activities of TNCs: Current trends and impact on the concepts of power, legitimacy and sovereignty

Amidst dramatic transformation of international relations, both traditional and new actors are undergoing major changes. The multinational corporations (MNCs), which have dramatically strengthened their positions in the world economy and politics since the middle of the 20th century due to favorable economic environment, as well as their ability to quickly convert considerable material, financial, intellectual and institutional resources into political clout, are no exception. All this points to the need to address MNCs as full-fledged political entities and examine their impact on traditional actors in a changing international context. The first section examines various approaches to conceptualization of the evolution of MNCs as actors of world politics. It also identifies the specifics of their position within the framework of the contemporary international relations system. The author focuses on such trends as digitalization, growing influence of companies with a platform business model, increasing engagement of corporations in addressing global issues, scaling up investments in the host countries’ infrastructure through new formats of public-private partnership, as well as growth in the number of state-owned TNCs. The second section examines the activities of TNCs as political actors in contemporary international relations from two angles. On the one hand, it considers the TNCs’ operations in terms of power, legitimacy and sovereignty that is how these categories manifest themselves in the activities of corporations and their interactions with other actors and society. On the other hand, it poses the question about how various trends in the development of TNCs, in turn, affect the content and essence of these categories. The author concludes that cooperation with TNCs offers national states new economic, social and political opportunities. At the same time, corporations are becoming increasingly autonomous, which can have a serious impact on conventional ideas of power, legitimacy and sovereignty, up to the erosion of the state monopoly on legitimate violence. The latter may have a serious impact on conventional ideas of power, legitimacy and sovereignty, up to the erosion of the state monopoly on legitimate violence. There is thus a pressing need to further study various types of TNCs, their functioning and interactions with individual countries, as well as the impact of new technologies, in particular, artificial intelligence on corporate activities.

Activity of Neo-Pagan Organizations in Ukraine in 2014–2021

This article examines the phenomenon of neo-paganism, which manifested itself during the socio-political confl ict in Ukraine in 2014. Neo-paganism is a heterogeneous and dynamic phenomenon that takes many forms in interaction with right-wing radical and extremist organizations. Its inherent opposition to universalist religions and, accordingly, to the established social order would lead to the exploitation of neo-pagan ideas and symbols in protests and violent actions by right-wing radical organizations. The legitimization of violence in such organizations was based precisely on romanticized images of pagans represented as fearless and ruthless fi ghters. We also present a classifi cation of neo-pagan organizations operating on the territory of Ukraine in 2014–2022. This classifi cation assumes the division of neo-pagan organizations into groups based on the cultural layer reproduced by them, i.e. Slavic pre-Christian culture, ancient “knowledge” of the Cossacks, Western European forms of paganism and neo-pagan ideological choices (musicians, poets, etc.). Forms of interaction between right-wing radical organizations and neo-pagans during the Euromaidan and in the subsequent so-called anti-terrorist operation are also investigated. Examples of the participation of neopagans in political actions and cult practices adopted by them during Euromaidan are provided. The number of persons who consider themselves to be neo-pagans increased in 2000, 2013, 2018 and 2021. The peak of the development of neo-paganism falls on 2021, when the percentage of neo-pagans amounted to 0.2 per cent for the fi rst time. Ukrainian statistical studies see an infl ux of young people aged 18–29 years to these groups. We touch upon the problem of changes in neo-pagan ideas during the socio-political confl ict in Ukraine and their integration into nationalist and neoNazi rhetoric. The factors that caused the popularity, social recognition and attractiveness of neo-paganism in diff erent social groups of Ukraine in 2021 are outlined. The most recognizable Ukrainian organization exploiting neo-pagan practices, ideas, and symbols is the Azov Regiment (recognized by the court as a terrorist organization and banned on the territory of the Russian Federation).

Existential Sources of School Shootings and Columbine

Manifestations of school shooting or ‘columbine’, constituted by armed mass attacks and murders in educational institutions perpetrated by adolescents, have proliferated in recent years. They are marked by their unpredictability, spontaneity and cruelty. This phenomenon has been subject to scholarly examination from various perspectives, enabling the elucidation of its multifarious traits and characteristics as a means of diagnosis and prevention. This study surveys established academic approaches to the study of school shootings (psychological, legal, sociological, semiotic, existential) and delineates their specificity and scope. Drawing on analysis of incidents of school shootings in Russia from 2014-2022, key signs and tendencies in the occurrence of mass attacks on educational institutions are delineated. Adopting existential approaches in philosophy and psychology, notably the works of A. Camus, E. Fromm, M. Boss, V. Frankl and L. Berkowitz, the semantic stages and constituents of school shootings as existential crimes and subsequent suicides are elucidated. The present study aims to identify and characterise the roots and essence of school shootings ('columbine') as an existential crime type, in order to comprehend the semantic motivational origins of school shootings and analyse the ‘boundary situation’ engendering individual destructive rebellion against the world. The nexus between unresolved existential needs and quandaries of the individual and the factors triggering self-destructive personality mechanisms is expounded, whereby the individual enacts an ‘escape’ from reality against the backdrop of media-disseminated aggressiveness and legitimation of violence as a means of overcoming problems and self-presentation. The existential analysis and modelling of school shooters’ actions offered here has enabled conclusions to be drawn regarding potential countermeasures to such crimes.

Socio-demographic Variables and Impulsivity Can Affect the Decision to Use Legitimate Violence Amongst French Gendarmes

Socio-demographic Variables and Impulsivity Can Affect the Decision to Use Legitimate Violence Amongst French Gendarmes

Examining real-world legitimization of cross-party violence through two explanatory frameworks: Affective polarization and low group efficacy

Cross-party violence – violence between opposing partisans – is a growing concern worldwide. Understanding the predictors of the legitimization of violence against political opponents is thus becoming a vital goal. In this work, we propose two potential explanatory frameworks: affective polarization and low non-violent group efficacy. The first reflects an affective motivation to harm the out-party, while the latter reflects an instrumental motivation to deploy violence. Furthermore, while the former is frequently suggested in scholarly work as a cause for such violence, it has so far been backed only by limited empirical support. On the other hand, the latter is hardly examined in the context of interactions between opposing partisans. We tested the relationship of the two explanatory frameworks with the legitimization of cross-party violence using public opinion surveys in two real-world contexts: in 2020, in Israel (N = 500) and in the US (N = 631). Results from a regression analysis provide support for the instrumental explanation but not for the affective one. We discuss the theoretical implications of our findings for the research of affective polarization, and potential practical implications for attempts to reduce cross-party violence.

The Violent Shepherd: Constructing Legitimate Violence in Pre-Nicene Christianity

Summary In the present article, I analyze Greek and Latin sources of pre-Nicene Christianity and argue that violence, although generally overlooked, constitutes an intrinsic and significant aspect of the early Christian model of pastoral rule. I premise my argument on an understanding of violence that rejects so-called ‘legitimist’ definitions, which subordinate the judgment on violence to a judgment on legitimacy and reserve the label of violence for illegitimate actions alone. Congenitally embedded in a network of conflictual relations, the shepherd of early Christian imagery is primarily tasked with the salvation of the sheep from enemies whose ambiguous identity, I argue, often betrays their provenance from within the flock. The shepherd is also engaged in disciplining his animals through measures that include severe physical punishments and exclusion from the herd. To conclude, I argue that the pastoral metaphor is itself an especially powerful instrument in the discursive construction of legitimate violence. For a relevant strand of ancient thought, to frame a particular institution in terms of the shepherd-flock relationship is, I argue, to conceive of it as replicative of the natural and normative order of reality, while also making certain acts of violence appear as the preferable course of action to be sought in the government of the community.

Violence, Conflict and Order in Medieval Norway

ABSTRACT Juxtaposing violence and order sounds like a contradiction in terms. Our modern concept of violence is intrinsically linked to illegitimacy and the disruption of order. This concept is succinctly expressed in the definition of a state by Max Weber, as the instance that has a monopoly on the exercise of legitimate violence, thus making all forms of private violence illegitimate. However, the antithesis between violence and order goes much further back in time. According to the historian David Armitage, the Western notion of civil war builds closely upon Roman ideas of a breakdown of order – a theory which was promulgated in the early empire and served as an ideological justification of the Empire and a correspondingly harsh attack on the republic as a political system.

A process-sociology analysis of religious practices and Japanese martial arts

This paper uses primary and secondary sources to provide a process-sociological analysis of the relationship between religious practices and Japanese martial arts. It problematises the taken for granted role of Zen Buddhism as the sole influence on the development of Japanese martial arts. Such essential connection is inaccurate and anachronistic. Religious and martial practices developed as part of processes of sociogenesis (state formation) and psychogenesis (habitus) during three different key stages: (1) Medieval Japan (1185-1600): during this stage, warriors (bushi) progressively became the predominant rulers across the country, enforcing law by sheer force. Warriors seasoned in combat used esoteric practices (spells, magic rituals) as part of their psychological arsenal for warfare, as practical means of action. The cult of the Buddhist deity Marishiten held special interest for the bushi originating martial traditions (ryu). (2) Tokugawa shogunate (1600-1848): the pacification of the country by the central military court implied a more detached approach to martial arts by samurai. Within this milieu, the samurai acted as a retainer/bureaucrat whose main mission was to keep order in a stratified society and to serve his lord, something that Zen practices helped to incorporate in the samurai ethos. (3) Early Showa period (1926-1945): this stage featured a progressive militarisation of people and the instigation of a strong involvement towards the Japanese nation, considered as the main (symbolic) survival unit. Budo (martial arts) was connected to shinto (functioning as a ‘state religion’) and embodied the imperial bushido message. Zen provided a legitimation of violence for citizen-soldiers with a personality structure that presented self-doubts on killing someone and fear of being killed.

Appropriating the civil sphere: the construction of German collective identity by right-wing populist actors during the Covid-19 pandemic

This paper considers the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on right-wing populists’ constructions of German collective identity. In their “Covid-19 crisis” narratives, German populists attempted to rearrange the discursive and institutional space of the German civil sphere through a symbolic inversion of the heroic signifier and legitimization of violence against perceived enemies. To analyze such discursive dynamics, this paper utilizes multilayered narrative analysis, drawing on the synthesis of civil sphere theory, the anthropological conceptualization of the relationship between mimetic crisis and symbolic substitution of violence and the sociological narrative theory of the sacralization and desacralization of heroism. This analysis structures the investigation of positive and negative symbolic constructions of German collective identity by German right-wing populist narratives. The analysis shows that although German right-wing populists are politically peripheral, their affective, antagonistic and anti-elite narratives contribute to the semantic erosion of the liberal democratic core of the German civil sphere. This in turn reduces the ability of democratic institutions to control violence and leads to the restriction of civil solidarity.

«МЫ УБЬЕМ КЛАССЫ»: ПРАЗДНОВАНИЯ ГОДОВЩИН РЕВОЛЮЦИОННОГО ОКТЯБРЯ И ЛЕГИТИМАЦИЯ НАСИЛИЯ В ПЕРИОД ГРАЖДАНСКОЙ ВОЙНЫ

The problem of cultural mechanisms of legitimization of violence during the period of the Russian Civil War is central for the author. The article, based on the materials of the history of the festivals of the Day of the Proletarian Revolution, examines how the culture of revolutionary violence manifested itself in the festive culture of the Civil War period. Based on the study of festive telegrams to Soviet leaders, newspapers, visual materials, the author shows how the theme of violence was reflected in the rhetoric, symbolism, in the elements of the emerging festive ritual (first of all, in the rites of symbolic executions of the revolution enemies). It is concluded that the festival was an important tool for legitimizing revolutionary violence. The article investigates symbols, ceremonies, rituals aestheticizing the phenomenon of violence, making it visible and comprehensible for the masses of the people. It also examines how the class discourse manifested itself in the celebrations (in particular, anti-bourgeois rhetoric), analyzes the features of the romanticization and sacralization of terror, which was especially important in the situation of the discussion about the red terror and the powers of the Cheka. At the same time, it concludes that the rhetoric and elements of the festive ritual were largely inherited by the organizers of the celebrations, who were in the field of influence of the culture of violence that developed before October 1917. Further study is needed into the cultural background, specific psychological atmosphere, and political culture which made the Civil War possible and which was not always directly linked to the Bolsheviks’ actions.

Sympathy-Empathy and the Radicalization of Young People.

The sympathy-empathy (SE) system is commonly considered a key faculty implied in prosocial behaviors, and SE deficits (also called callous-unemotional traits, CUTs) are associated with nonprosocial and even violent behaviors. Thus, the first intuitive considerations considered a lack of SE among young people who undergo radicalization. Yet, their identification with a cause, their underlying feelings of injustice and grievance, and the other ways in which they may help communities, suggest that they may actually have a lot of empathy, even an excess of it. As a consequence, the links between SE and radicalization remain to be specified. This critical review aims to discuss whether and how SE is associated with developmental trajectories that lead young people to radicalization. We first recall the most recent findings about SE development, based on an interdisciplinary perspective informed by social neuroscience. Then, we review sociological and psychological studies that address radicalization. We will critically examine the intersections between SE and radicalization, including neuroscientific bases and anthropologic modulation of SE by social factors involved in radicalization. This critical review indicates that the SE model should clearly distinguish between sympathy and empathy within the SE system. Using this model, we identified three possible trajectories in young radicalized individuals. In individuals with SE deficit, the legitimization of violence is enough to engage in radicalization. Concerning individuals with normal SE, we hypothesize two trajectories. First, based on SE inhibition/desensitization, individuals can temporarily join youths who lack empathy. Second, based on an SE dissociation, combining emotional sympathy increases for the in-group and cognitive empathy decreases toward the out-group. While confirming that a lack of empathy can favor radicalization, the counterintuitive hypothesis of a favorable SE development trajectory also needs to be considered to better specify the cognitive and affective aspects of this complex phenomenon.