Challenging Monopolies of Violence and Movement

Change.org Criminal Justice guest blogger Brian Sullivan got right to the core of the contradictions inherent in the ways the U.S. perpetrates and regulates violence in a post he put up over the weekend.  I'd extend his analysis to national governments more generally, but the incongruities are highlighted in the U.S. case.

What these two stories reveal to me is the deep link between "illegitimate" criminal violence and "legitimate" state violence. The United States is an incredibly violent country. We are constantly at war, we aggresivley police minority communities, we torture "enemy combatants", we love violent action on TV and in movies, and we execute individuals who break certain laws. In the midst of all this violence the armed forces works to legitimate the violence it commits while other parts of the US government delegitimizes other forms of violence.

It isn't just that the state wants a monopoly on violence. It does, but it also wants state violence to be righteous while all other forms of violence are corrupt. Anti-US violence is terrorism and is grotesque. Criminal violence is the result of personal or moral weakness.

Lt. Col. Brian Pearl's quote from the LA Times story is particularly revealing. Pearl told the times:

"If those guys were not in 2-12 infantry, they would have done the same thing....People will say, 'In the U.S. Army, they're trained to kill people.' But we're trained to make ethical decisions."

For Pearl it would be ethical to kill an enemy at war, but not a civilian at home. This makes it clear that ethics is defined by what is politically expedient.

The fact is, military violence bleeds over into the rest of life. It is good to know that many of the officers interviewed for the NY Times piece recognize this. All the same, I doubt that those officers would call anti-US or criminal violence legitimate.

This leaves an open question as to whether or not anti-US or criminal violence can be legitimate. I don't want to get into that here, but I will in a future post. For now it is just worth noting the connection between US state-sponsored violence and criminal violence here at home. We aren't dealing with two completely different species. They are variants of the same species, and they work together to make the US a violent culture.

This is great stuff, though I'm curious as to Sullivan's conclusions.  I lean towards a very restrictive definition of legitimate violence.  Violence begets violence, and my feeling is the more it can be avoided by state actors using methods like diplomacy or alternatives to incarceration, the less of it there will be by nonstate actors.

I'd also analogize "violence" to "freedom of movement."  The U.S. government claims nearly unlimited right to move people, capital, goods, or munitions to any space in the world, so long as there is some threat to U.S. interests, as defined by U.S. leaders.  It is a hegemonic claim we impose even on purported allies like Pakistan.  Movement of people includes U.S. soldiers and "enemy combatants" who have disappeared into a network of secret prisons.

Yet we restrict the freedom of movement of poor farmers, asylum-seekers, and immediate family members of U.S. citizens by arresting, imprisoning, and deporting them.  The monopoly over movement of people claimed by the U.S. government is comparable to the monopoly over (and power to define) legitimate violence--both are efforts to exert control over as wide a sphere as possible in an effort to provide security for a select group, U.S. citizens.

Many U.S. citizens feel those efforts are justified (surprise!), but I believe they are not when they come at the expense of the security of others.

Again, this analysis applies to national governments more generally, with the U.S. as a prominent case (and the country I happen to live in).  If democracy as practiced were more democratic--if subjects of national governments exercised the level of control over those governments that the politicians and bureaucrats claim they do, and if national governments operated on a more even global playing field--then I would be more supportive of the monopolies of violence and movement which national governments claim.

But that is a world in which we do not yet live.