The concept of violence in international theory: a Double-Intent Account

Abstract

The ability of international ethics and political theory to establish a genuinely critical standpoint from which to evaluate uses of armed force has been challenged by various lines of argument. On one, theorists question the narrow conception of violence on which analysis relies. Were they right, it would overturn two key assumptions: first, that violence is sufficiently distinctive to merit attention as a category separate from other modes of human harming; second, that it is troubling in a special way that makes acts of violence peculiarly hard to justify. This paper defends a narrow understanding of violence and a special ethics governing its use by arguing that a distinctive form of ‘Violent Agency’ is the factor uniting the category while partly accounting for the fearful connotations of the term. Violent Agency is defined first by a double intention (1) to inflict harm using a technique chosen (2) to eliminate or evade the target’s means of escaping it or defending against it. Second, the harms it aims at aredestructive(as opposed toappropriative). The analysis offered connects the concept of violence to themes in international theory such as vulnerability, security, and domination, as well as the ethics of war.

Understanding Context and Contradiction in the Concept of Violence: Frantz Fanon, Stokely Carmichael and the Long 1960s

“…For this reason, proponents of the stricter account of violence mistrust expansive definitions of violence. There is something about the ‘harmful agency’ entailed by interpersonal acts of force, about the ‘forceful intrusion’ into our lives by those wishing to do us harm, argue proponents of the stricter account, which makes violence a special phenomenon requiring special justification in a way that unequal social conditions are not and do not (see especially Bufacchi, 2007; Coady, 1989; Finlay, 2017).…”

“…The force of these condemnations is for the fact that the word ‘violence’ carries what Finlay calls ‘presumptive disapprobation’. Something described as ‘violence’ is something deserving prima facie moral censure (Finlay, 2017: 9:70). Violence therefore belongs to that class of socio-political terms that function as much as to evaluate as to describe.…”

“….'. The legitimist conception has lost much of its salience in recent years due to the increasing predominance of Just War Theory in the applied ethics of violence and the preponderance it affords questions of justification over legitimacy (see 2007;Finlay, 2017Finlay, , 2018. That is to say, the reasons for using violence towards some end (justification) are now taken to be more important than whether or not that violence originated from a 'right' source (legitimacy).…”

Just War, Cyber War, and the Concept of Violence

“…According to the 'Double-Intent Conception of Violence' (Finlay 2017), the range of cases that we associate paradigmatically with violence in ordinary speech as well as in ethics corresponds to a definition as follows: VIOLENCE i : is defined by the presence of Violent Agency consisting of the intentional infliction of [1] destructive harm by human agents on targets using a technique chosen with the further intention [2] of eliminating or evading the target's means of escaping it or defending against it. In paradigm cases of violence by single-minded attackers, [2] will be realized as far as is necessary to secure [1] or, failing that, as far as possible to maximize the chance of doing so (Finlay 2017, 73).…”

“…In common with sanctions, they might be interpreted as refusing further benefits of different kinds rather than depriving their target of present goods in such a way as to cause anything that could be interpreted as 'destructive harm' as I define it below in 4.2. 8 There is not space to defend this part of the definition fully and I have responded to a variety of possible objections elsewhere (Finlay 2017). But I will mention one, which is the worry that defining violence in this way appears to render death and injury caused as a collateral effect of warfare non-violent insofar as it is, by definition, unintended.…”