Liberal Pacification and the Phenomenology of Violence

Abstract

While international relations scholars make many claims about violence, they rarely define the concept. This article develops a typology of three distinct kinds of violence: direct, indirect, and pacification. Direct violence occurs when a person or agent inflicts harm on another. Indirect violence manifests through the structures of society. We propose a third understanding of violence: pacification. Using a phenomenological methodology, and drawing on anarchist and postcolonial thought, we show that the violence of pacification is diffuse, inconspicuous, intersubjective, and structured into the fabric of society. This understanding of violence matters for the study of international relations in general and research on the liberal peace in particular. We argue that the spread of liberal institutions does not necessarily decrease violence but instead transforms it. Our phenomenological analysis captures empirical trends in human domination and suffering that liberal peace theories cannot account for. It reveals how a decline in direct violence may coincide with the transformation of violence in ways that are concealed, monopolized, and structured into the liberal order. We call this process liberal pacification.

Context-specificity of violence: Physical, psychological, and social dimensions of harm during the Taliban’s insurgency (2007–2009) in Pakistan

“…While agreeing with Arendt and thereby with Georges Sorel, one still finds it obscure . Indeed, there is an unresolved disagreement about what violence is (Baron et al, 2019; Bufacchi, 2005).…”

Violent International Relations

“…To clarify, the type of violence we are talking about is not merely the direct violence of physical and material force or the indirect violence of the aggregate actions of social groups or institutions, such as a refugee crisis or the concentration of wealth. Rather, it is the violence of pacification: a form of domination that (re)structures the political order and ensures that violent resistance against it is infrequent (Baron et al, 2019: 203). The violence of pacification is often inconspicuous, yet it operates through means of coercion that are rendered visible whenever they are resisted.…”

“…Yet liberal pacification is still violent, as ‘it coerces a specific type of liberal docility, while also preventing types of resistance that might be understood as violent, including riots, insurrections, civil wars, and inter-state wars. Pacification reveals the ongoing violence at the heart of a political project that imagines itself to be against violence’ (Baron et al, 2019: 207). As it concerns the shaping and maintaining of a political order that seeks to hide its apparatus of violent coercion, the violence of pacification also intersects with the epistemic violence that is distributed through a colonial epistemology.…”

Taking the state back out: bringing anarchism back in

“…Indeed, rising literacy, declining poverty and violent death rates, as well as advances in medical science, suggest, as Lawson puts it, that liberalism may be the past 100 years’ most revolutionary movement (Lawson, 2019 : 227). But as I have argued elsewhere (Baron et al, 2019 ), to understand the scale and scope of violence in modern society we have to look to the phenomenology of liberal pacification more broadly, and doing so makes revolution, understood as contesting dual sovereignty, even more unrealistic and unlikely.…”