Violence in international relations: The first and the last word

Introduction

The decisive means for politics is violence … He who seeks the salvation of the soul, of his own and of others, should not seek it along the avenue of politics, for the quite different tasks of politics can only be solved by violence. ¹

A deep concern about the prevalence of war and the search for peace played a significant role in the inception of the academic discipline of International Relations (IR). To use a much-loved feminist trope, International Relations was founded on the desire to control the masculine war and promote the feminist peace. ² The idea that feminist values promote peace is one of the factors Steven Pinker identifies in his magisterial work The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined. ³ Pinker’s book makes the audacious claim that violence in the world has declined and suggests explanations as to why this has occurred. Despite the protestations of his critics, I believe Pinker to be broadly correct if one focuses exclusively on the trends.

However, there are dimensions to continuity and change that Pinker’s purely quantitative analysis cannot help us unpack. In particular, his focus on trends cannot help us to understand the interplay of continuity and change when exploring the role, place, function and ethical judgement of violence in international society. Pinker’s analysis might tell us that incidences of violence have declined, but it cannot grasp the nuances of how violence has been reconfigured, or how our attitudes to it have changed. As this special edition of the journal marks the centenary of the academic study of International Relations, it is an opportune moment to reconsider the function, role and place of violence in international relations.

In this article, I aim to explore these qualitative dimensions and set them alongside Pinker’s more quantitative analysis to illuminate the mutually constitutive relationship between politics and violence, the nature of contemporary violence in the international system, ⁴ and to make several theoretical points about continuity and change in international relations. Change is a constant in social life. Rather than seeing continuity and change as opposites, we should think of them as inextricably linked. The two processes are not opposed but are co-dependent. Change can only be understood as change within a horizon of continuity. Outside of this horizon, what we consider to be change is only difference.

My conclusions will be mostly pessimistic if the aim is the complete eradication of political violence. The control of violence on the other hand and the ability to hold those who employ it to increasing moral and legal standards is perhaps one of the most significant transformations in international relations from 1919 to 2019. However, decreasing levels of violence and the increased ability to exercise control over violence will never lead to a political realm devoid of violence. Where there is politics, there is both actual violence and the possibility of violence. A world without violence would be a world without politics, and such a world is implausible. Politics is the terrain of competing ontologies. Politics is about competing visions of how the world is and how it should be. ⁵ If there were no ontological differences, there would be no politics. Every ontology is political. ⁶ What we are and whom we might become have always been the most fundamental of political questions. A world without politics would be a world in which there were no disagreements about these fundamental issues. Violence, or its possibility, accompanies politics, not as something additional to it but as the ultimate ground upon which otherwise intractable political disputes are resolved. In politics, violence always has the last word.

War is not a synonym for violence. War may indeed be the continuation of politics by other means, ⁷ but the reverse is also true: politics is the continuation of violence by other means. It did not have to be this way. The problem of politics could have been resolved through nonviolent means, but they were not. The political question was how to bring order to the state of nature. The chosen answer was to concentrate violence and its ownership in the state. Not all political violence is war. Terrorism is a form of political violence, but it is not war. Torture, revolutions and various forms of oppression can all involve forms of violence that are not war. That said, given word limits, I need to restrict my discussion in quite strict terms so my main focus will be on war. I make no apologies for this and given recent attempts to portray ‘speech as violence’, I believe a restricted definition of violence is appropriate.

In section ‘Theorising change’, I provide a brief outline of my approach to understanding change. Apart from a few exceptions, the discipline has a limited understanding of how to theorise change. Following Kalevi Holsti, I suggest some ways of thinking about change that might give some clarity, theoretical rigour and analytical purchase to our claims about change. ⁸ In section ‘The continuity of violence’, I briefly outline what I mean by violence and elaborate on why violence is a constitutive part of the political. Finally, in section ‘The change of violence’, I provide an account of what has changed when considering violence in international relations.

Theorising change

Given the centrality of change to social life, it is not surprising that it has become a subject of intense scrutiny in International Relations theory. For much of the discipline’s history, however, the concern with change has been implicit rather than explicit. Realism, for example, has always stressed the eternal verities of political life: what Nietzsche referred to as the ‘eternal recurrence’. ⁹ As Robert Gilpin puts it, ‘the fundamental nature of international relations has not changed over millennia’. ¹⁰ The commitment to the unchanging nature of world politics is endemic to all realist approaches, irrespective of whether they embed its source in an unchanging human nature ¹¹ or the anarchical structure of the international system. ¹²

Kenneth Waltz was explicit about his focus on continuity. ¹³ As John Ruggie puts it, the ‘most profound and perhaps the most perplexing outcome Waltz attempts to explain is the lack of fundamental change in the international polity’. ¹⁴ Despite this overt stress on continuity, however, the concern with change can be discerned in attempts to understand the myriad ways in which change flows from major events such as war. Key moments and events in international relations, what Barry Buzan and George Lawson call ‘benchmarks’, are important, and so contested precisely because they help us identify significant moments that are the causes of change. ¹⁵

The end of the Cold War made the focus on change explicit. What was the point of the discipline if it could not account for change as momentous as the end of the Cold War? ¹⁶ In 2019, increasing globalisation, technological change such as social media and the Internet, rising populism and the re-emergence of various authoritarian regimes have led to a situation where change might be now be considered to be the leitmotif of the contemporary world. There are, however, two potential problems with the contemporary fascination with change. First, change seems to be something new: before there was continuity, now there is change. However, change is constitutive of the social world; hence they cannot have been a (social) time that contained no change.

Second, the focus on change is prone to ignore what has not changed. For just as change is constitutive of the social world, so is continuity. That something is changing can only be understood relative to that which does not change. If everything were changing, then change could not be experienced as change. We identify change as a disruption of the non-changing. But the disruption is never total since what can be said to be changing – processes, events and things – requires that something related to the entity undergoing change does not change. Even in extreme instances of change – metamorphosis, for example – there is still a residue of the old such that we can identify a change from ‘this’ into ‘that’.

According to Ruggie, since ‘no shared vocabulary exists in the literature to depict change and continuity … we are not very good as a discipline at studying the possibility of fundamental discontinuity in the international system’. ¹⁷ We do not know what to make of the end of the Cold War because there is no consensus on what we mean by change, nor how to identify it. Theorising change is problematic without a way to differentiate between differing kinds of change: trends from transformations, major change from minor change and qualitative from quantitative change. ¹⁸ Unless we have a clear account of what we mean by change and the different forms it can take then claims of change are difficult, if not impossible, to substantiate.

This is why Pinker insists on a purely quantitative set of measures:

how can we soundly appraise the state of the world? The answer is to count … A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is, in fact, the morally enlightened one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. ¹⁹

While quantitative analysis has its place, it is a limited account of change. It cannot tell us how change is experienced, it cannot tell us how meanings are attached to change and it cannot tell us how and why people react to change in the ways they do.

For example, it is widely understood, and confirmed in multiple studies, that the risk of death from a terrorist attack for the ordinary individual is minute when competed to deaths per day in road accidents. ²⁰ Figures from 2013 indicate that the probability of dying from a terrorist attack in Europe was 0.0018 per 100,000. This compares with a figure of 265 per 100,000 for deaths by cancer, 5.9 per 100,000 for road deaths and 0.005 per 100,000 for deaths by lightning strikes. ²¹ Simply looking at quantitative death rates might imply that we should focus resources on road safety or stop driving. Yet people still travel and use their cars daily, and governments continue to spend fortunes conducting foreign wars and attacking civil liberties in ways that far exceed the proportional weight of the actual (quantitative) terrorist threat.

If the vast sums spent on the war on terror had been channelled into road safety, then considerably more lives could have been saved than were killed in the attacks of 9/11. And as the road deaths continue to mount, we should also consider the total number of deaths that have resulted in the vain attempt to eradicate terrorism, and in the wars associated with that attempt. ²² The events of 9/11 clearly changed global politics in significant ways, but was this a change for the better, or worse? And why did the relatively low number of deaths from international terrorism lead to such monumental changes, when the much higher ones from road deaths seems to alter nothing?

Of course, there are answers to these questions, but they will not be found in the trends or numbers. The bare numbers only tell us so much and cannot deal with why politicians and public react to some events and trends and not to others. The numbers only get meaning when we place them within a narrative that gives them meaning. We need a theoretical framework that allows us to specify what kinds of change are involved and this must necessarily be able to incorporate qualitative and well as quantitative change. Not least because it is often the interplay between the two that is most important. This means that we need a more nuanced account of the different forms that social change can take. Holsti suggests that we differentiate between (1) change as transformation, (2) change as replacement and (3) change quantification (addition/reduction). ²³ I add a further kind of change, which is change as displacement.

Transformative change can be the outcome or result of quantitative changes which, when accumulated over a period of time, bring new forms of social practice into being. Logically, the new forms must, in some way, derive from previous practices or patterns. A transformation can partly replace old forms of social activity, but by definition, transformations always involve the movement from one thing to another, and they must necessarily include aspects of the phenomenon/practice/process that has been transformed. A transformation cannot emerge ex nihilo. In the case of social and political institutions, when we talk about a transformation, it only makes sense to talk of transformation when we can point to that which is not subject to transformation. This requires us to identify features that have not changed. Hence, for example, when we talk of the transformation of the state under globalisation, we identify what has been transformed about the state alongside that which has not been transformed. There has been a transformation of the state as an institution, but not its replacement. In transformative change, the change and continuity nexus is clear.

Change as replacement, on the other hand, is the kind of change that represents the displacement of one thing with another. Monarchy provides a good example. Revolutionary social change led France to replace its monarchy with a republic. Likewise, after the revolution of 1917, Russia moved from a monarchy to a socialist regime. In Britain, however, the change was from one form of monarchy to another. In France and Russia, we had change as replacement; in Britain, it was change as transformation. Likewise, how are we to understand claims about ‘postmodernity’, post-Westphalian or the post-international? ²⁴ Much depends on how the term ‘post’ is interpreted here. Does ‘post’ simply imply an intensification what preceded it or a rejection of it? Does postmodernity mean that the modern has not merely been transformed, it has been replaced? Post-modern can imply an era after, or beyond modernity, or it can imply a form of continuity with the modern. It can also imply a complete rejection of the modern. Yes, there may be residues of the past that endure in the new, but for the prefix to have any meaning, it must be that identifiable qualitative changes have taken place in the form of social organisation under consideration, and that will require us to identify transformative change from replacement.

Change can also be merely additive or reductive without necessarily involving qualitative change. Do increasing levels and rates of exchange in the global economy mean that the state will disappear? Is inter-state war necessarily obsolete just because the number of internal conflicts within states is increasing? Things are indeed changing in each of these domains, but is the change simply quantitative, not transformative. Quantitative change can be additive, or reductive. Additive change can mean increased complexity. Reductive change may decrease complexity. Equally, while levels of conflict may be increasing in certain parts of the globe, relations of cooperation can also be increasing at the same time elsewhere. Hence, just as growing levels of activity at the level of global ‘civil society’ do not necessarily replace national-level political activity, nor does the increasing level of peaceful inter-state relations within Europe mean that conflict has disappeared everywhere. Indeed, given that levels of inter-state war conflict have decreased over the last 60 years, while levels of intra-state conflict have risen over the same period, it might be necessary to think of displacement as a distinct form of change. ²⁵

In addition to different kinds of change, we need to consider the indicators of change. From the perspective of everyday life, the events that make the headlines in today’s media represent change because they are not the same as yesterday’s news. Technological developments in global communications now mean that the global media run on an uninterrupted sequence that is structurally predisposed to stress change over continuity. For most international historians, however, the micro events that fascinate the media would only be worthy of interest if they could be shown to be critical moments in the production of change at the macro level. Somewhere between these extremes, it may be possible to note specific indicators where things appear to have changed in some significant way. It is challenging, however, to identify objective markers that suggest one type of change is more evident than the other.

Trends, which are the focus of Pinker’s work, record a quantitative form of change. ²⁶ Populations seem to be on an incessant upwards trajectory, but violence seems to be declining, people under the age of 30 are having less sex, ²⁷ the number of international organisations continues to increase, ²⁸ global communications increase exponentially, ²⁹ the volume of international trade and finance grows ³⁰ and the numbers of people travelling across national boundaries increases every year. ³¹

The mere existence of these trends, no matter how well documented, does not make them significant, or transformative. The changes must have verifiable and significant consequences; otherwise, they are merely the quantitative statement that things are not the same as they used to be. If the European Union doubles its membership by 2030, is it the same organisation or have its functions changed and in what way? Trends can be important indicators, but they are not, of themselves, indicative of either transformative or replacement change in a qualitative sense.

The cataloguing of ‘significant events’ constitutes another much-used indicator of social change. ³² According to this approach, change is not merely the accumulation of many acts, which, when aggregated, can be analysed as trends. Significant events are singular, not cumulative; they represent system transforming moments in and of themselves. Of course, significant events can emerge out of trends, but when they do so, they are best understood as tipping points that arise when the accumulation of a trend acts as a catalyst for some significant event. What matters is not only the accumulation but also a great departure from the normal modes of social practice, resulting from the accumulation, which is often dramatic and transformative over a short period of time. This approach is endemic to international relations, with the Westphalian treaties of 1648, the First World War, the Second World War, the Cold War and 9/11 serving as clear markers of great upheaval and change. These events, however, are meaningless in the absence of a narrative that provides them with a structure and meaning. Equally, although an era or period can be demarcated by significant events that seemingly caused major disruptions to previous practices, their enduring import is not always clear. Thus, the identification and meaning of great events are not always immediately apparent.

In many respects, while technological innovations could be considered under the rubric of ‘significant events’, they are best considered as a separate category of developments as opposed to events. The twentieth century, in particular, has seen technological innovations that are claimed to be radically altering social life. ³³ For example, after 1945 theories were advanced, which suggested the ‘nuclear revolution’ had made major war obsolete. ³⁴ Although the relatively limited time frame, since the advent of nuclear weapons means that the nuclear obsolescence theory could still be refuted, the idea of a ‘nuclear age’ does have some significance. There can be no doubt that the development of the atomic bomb, and its eventual use in 1945, did usher in new dynamics to international politics. Undoubtedly, nuclear weapons altered traditional security thinking, prioritising deterrence, and it is possible that a catastrophic nuclear conflict could occur.

The continuity of violence

The problems of violence still remain very obscure. ³⁵

What do we mean by violence? The answer is not as straightforward as it might seem. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), violence is

the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, which either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation. ³⁶

This is, as the WHO admits, an expansive definition. The inclusion of power in addition to physical force means that violence now includes any act that involves the intentional use of power. Thus, threats and intimidation would be considered to be violence, as would neglect or acts of omission, and all types of ‘physical, sexual and psychological abuse, as well as suicide, and other self-abusive acts’. ³⁷

The WHO has a clear reason for using such a broad definition. It wishes to make the production of violence a public health issue. Beyond the WHO, recent scholarship and public debate has likewise tended to expand the meaning of violence to such an extent that now speech can now be considered to be violence. ³⁸ Clearly, the harms produced by hate speech and structural violence as articulated by Johan Galtung ³⁹ should be subject to scrutiny and research in the Discipline, but are they violence? The easy option here would be to go along with the broad academic consensus that they are violence, but claim that in an article of this length, not all forms of violence can be covered. Alternatively, to claim that since this is a piece focussed on international relations only war and associated concepts will only be considered. But the issue goes deeper than that.

We are in danger of conceptual expansion in all areas. Definitions of terrorism, for example, are now so broad as to make the concept almost meaningless. ⁴⁰ Much the same is happening with terms such as socialism, racism, fascism, liberal or right-wing. This is all part of post-truth politics and leads to a situation when reasoned debate becomes impossible because the parties to the debate are using the same words, but not in the same way. ⁴¹ In public life, particularly when combined with identity politics, this conceptual stretching means that we are losing the ability to disagree well. ⁴²

In a social science environment, conceptual stretching means that the fundamental nature of science is undermined. Science is a competitive environment in which ideas are tested against other ideas to ascertain which provide us with the closest approximation to reality. If our conceptual terms are unclear, then judgement about the veracity of our claims become impossible to make. As social scientists, we have a duty to use terms in as clear and a consistent way as is possible.

An additional problem is that much of the discussion surrounding structural violence, speech as violence, and linguistic violence, confuses violence with harm. Harm can be caused or produced by many things and not always violence. Harm can be the product of unintentional, or even well-intentioned behaviour. Andrew Linklater brilliantly surveys the myriad ways in which harm is produced in world politics, but he also carefully distinguishes between violent and non-violent harm. ⁴³

I define violence as the intentional use of physical force to injure, abuse, damage or destroy something or someone. Both intentionality and the physical are necessary elements of this definition. Doubtless, many will claim this definition is too narrow and privileges a particular liberal conception of politics. Perhaps it does, but my response would be to ask what we gain by applying to the term violence in ways that can be equally accommodated, discussed and dissected by using alternative terms? Language is infinitely malleable, hence why flatten out important practical distinctions by using one term when another functions equally well? The answer to this question is both political and moral but also tells us something important about violence itself.

Consider, for example, terrorism, which is a particular form of political violence. Indeed, many consider it to be the most heinous form of political violence. Because terrorism denotes a particularly morally bankrupt form of violence, there is a tendency to use the term to apply to all kinds of practices that are not typically terrorist acts. ⁴⁴ The aim of such attempts is not to deliberately flatten out the differences between different acts, but to bring certain acts into the same moral and political universe as terrorism. Once within that universe, and if the term terrorism can be made to stick, the now redescribed act can be subject to all of the sanctions, opprobrium and critique generally associated with terrorism. This happens from all sides of the political spectrum. States leaders see great benefit in labelling particular acts as terrorism because it allows them more latitude in their responses to them. Radical critics of state practices likewise have much to gain by claiming that forms of state violence themselves constitute terrorism. It allows them to claim that those state practices are outside of what might be considered acceptable state violence. The irony of this, of course, is that it highlights the fact that some forms of state violence are considered acceptable, unless, of course, we define all forms of state violence as terrorism.

The debate about terrorism gained genuine impetus in the discipline after 9/11. Prior to that tragic event, terrorism had been a minor issue in international relations. As a form of violence typically carried out by non-state actors, it was deemed beyond the central focus of the field, which was state-based relations. Also, terrorism was not thought to be a form of violence that could radically reshape the structure and conduct of the international system. 9/11 changed this way of thinking not only in the practice of international relations but also in the discipline. From the vantage point of 2019, the changes wrought by international terrorism and the over reactions to it have been significant. But in one hundred years time that response to terrorism may well seem to be a form of collective madness, albeit an understandable one, that had no significant effects on the international system.

The reaction to terrorism underscores something important about political violence. Apart from the most radical pacifist, we distinguish acceptable political violence from non-acceptable political violence. What is ‘just war’ theory if it is not the attempt to demarcate legitimate political violence from illegitimate political violence? ⁴⁵ The notion of violence being a legitimate part of state practice is never questioned, even if specific instances of it are. In fact, state violence presents us with particular problems because it is the very means by which other forms of violence were denied legitimacy. State violence did not just defeat other forms of violence it laid claim to the sole ownership of violence.

Max Weber’s definition of the state not only makes the acceptance of political violence explicit but also limits its exercise to the state alone. It is worth quoting in its entirety:

‘Every state is founded on force’, said Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk. That is indeed right. If no social institutions existed which knew the use of violence, then the concept of ‘state’ would be eliminated, and a condition would emerge that could be designated as ‘anarchy’, in the specific sense of this word. Of course, force is certainly not the normal or the only means of the state – nobody says that – but force is a means specific to the state. Today the relation between the state and violence is an especially intimate one. In the past, the most varied institutions – beginning with the sib – have known the use of physical force as quite normal. Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Note that ‘territory’ is one of the characteristics of the state. Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence. ⁴⁶

Weber’s account of the constitutive relationship between the state and violence also illuminates his view of politics. Politics, for Weber, is about domination, and the ultimate source of that domination is violence. In politics, violence always has the last word:

Like the political institutions historically preceding it, the state is a relation of men dominating men, a relation supported by means of legitimate (i.e. considered to be legitimate) violence. If the state is to exist, the dominated must obey the authority claimed by the powers that be. When and why do men obey? Upon what inner justifications and upon what external means does this domination rest? ⁴⁷

To be sure, Weber notes that this legitimacy derives from three sources of legitimacy: the ‘external yesterday’, by which he means customs, conventions and mores; charisma and legality. But important as these are, he rightly acknowledges that ‘organized domination requires the control of those material goods which in a given case are necessary for the use of physical violence’. ⁴⁸

Weber’s view of the relationship between politics and violence is, of course, prefigured in Thomas Hobbes’ claim that ‘covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all’. ⁴⁹ It is repeated in Mao Zedong’s aphorism that political power ‘grows out of the barrel of a gun’. Violence, in other words, is the ultimate decision-making mechanism in politics. Violence and the threat of violence are the most potent forces in political life. Our modern-day liberal enlightenment sentiment rails against this thought. Ethically, we want to believe that violence cannot solve problems. This depends on the problem.

Ultimately, our ability to solve problems through non-violent means is only made possible through legal structures and modes of dialogue that are dependent on the threat of violence if they are not followed. The possibility of violence is always there and ready to be deployed by the state when all other means have failed. This is why all major states, despite the all too obvious horrors of the two World Wars, continue to invest heavily in the instruments of violence.

It also explains why global institutions such as the United Nations (UN), which emerged out of the desire to control inter-state violence, are ultimately impotent when faced with states determined to use violence to pursue their perceived national interests. The US led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 are two clear examples. The UN simply lacks the means of violence to impose its political will, and states will be extremely reluctant to give up their monopoly on the legitimate use of violence to a supra-national organisation such as the UN or the International Criminal Court. This does not mean that these institutions are completely ineffectual, but it does mean that when faced with the ultimate political decision-making mechanism of violence, and states intent on using it, they remain bit part players.

Thus, violence can never be removed from politics; it has simply been concentrated in the institution of the state. This is what Walter Benjamin called ‘law-making violence’. ⁵⁰ Moreover, the development of the nation-state system was achieved through violence. In many respects, the state can be considered to be a machine that has used and continues to use violence to appropriate resources, people and territory. ⁵¹ How else are we to understand empires and processes of colonisation. ⁵² Virtually every piece of territory on the planet is occupied by states that forcibly dispossessed the land’s previous claimants. Over time, the powerful states have transposed this inherent propensity to violence into an international legal order that in many respects is beginning to replicate the ‘law-making violence’ Benjamin identified as operating at the domestic level. But if the contemporary system was built on the use of violence, and if that system has winners and losers, what is the ethical justification for denying those losers to access to violence to overturn the system? Yes, non-violent means should always be the first resort, and in many instances, they may succeed. ⁵³ However, given the role of violence in forming the contemporary international system, it would be a conservative position to deny the losers a similar recourse to violence to change it when all else has failed.

At this point, it is worth considering an alternative view, the best articulation of which is that of Hannah Arendt’s in On Violence. ⁵⁴ According to Arendt, ‘power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent … violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it’. ⁵⁵ This view stands in stark contrast to Weber and Benjamin. For Benjamin, violence makes the law, and for Weber, the bearers of legitimate power are those that control the means of physical violence. Arendt arrives at her position out of the understandable desire to distinguish power from violence. While it is clear that theoretically this is a necessary and important distinction in separating them so sharply, she neglects to see how they interact in significant ways.

Hence, for example, she argues that to

substitute violence for power can bring victory, but the price is very high; for it is not only paid by the vanquished, it is also paid by the victor in terms of his power. This is especially true when the victor happens to enjoy domestically the blessings of constitutional government. ⁵⁶

This is true and the unconstrained exercise of violence by a government can lead to the collapse of that government. But the Weberian response would be that the power of that constitutional government is itself derived through the use of violence. History seems to confirm this, and constitutional government rests on the possibility of violence. Even for Arendt, ‘In a head-on clash between violence and power, the outcome is hardly in doubt’. ⁵⁷

Although after the First and Second World Wars there have been increasing efforts to construct a liberal order that in many ways replicates the domestic liberal order of the major states, with institutions, courts, international law and organisations whose aim is to resolve disputes, we should always remember that this was an order constructed through the use of violence, and it is an order that ultimately depends on violence to police the voices of dissent within it. Nowhere does Benjamin’s notion of ‘law-making violence’ have as much visibility and resonance than in international order.

In most domestic societies’, violence has largely receded into the background and is made visible only in the most extreme cases. In international society, on the other hand, and despite all the advances made in terms of international institutions, we have witnessed from 1919 to 2019, the possibility of violence to resolve disputes remains a distinct possibility. That is why the main issue in contemporary debates about the rise of China are so fixated on the problem of war. ⁵⁸

This does not mean that no changes have taken place in how we think about the place of violence is international politics. It is certainly true that violence is no longer the first resort and that states must go to significant lengths to justify their use of violence in ways that were never required in 1914. This is a significant change in the normative environment surrounding the use of violence, and it is an argument pushed to extremes by Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro. ⁵⁹ I say pushed to extremes, because Hathaway and Shapiro suggest that the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which aimed at the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy, was one of the most ‘transformative events of human history’. ⁶⁰ As they put it, the pact

reshaped the world map, catalyzed the human rights revolution, enabled the use of economic sanctions as a tool of law enforcement, and ignited the explosion in the number of international organizations that regulate so many aspects of our daily lives. ⁶¹

This is quite a catalogue of claims for a treaty that has normally not even been critiqued, but dismissed as irrelevant. Hathaway and Shapiro construct a valiant, although historically dubious argument, but ultimately their thesis is paradigmatic example of a significant event as transformative argument pushed too far.

Perhaps they simply let the desire to prove the importance of the Pact blind them to some of the dubious and inflated claims they make. For example, they claim that the reason contemporary scepticism about the Pact is so prevalent is because we live in a ‘world in which war has already been outlawed’. ⁶² The sheer number of examples one could use to refute this claim since the signing of the Pact suggest otherwise. Of course, this might also be an uncharitable reading and perhaps this is not exactly what they mean, but they repeat the claim later, ‘outlawing war did work. If anything, it worked too well’. ⁶³

Hathaway and Shapiro accept that conflicts still happen and that the Pact did not bring peace, but still insist that it was a moment in international history that marked the transformation of the Old World Order into the New World Order. A transformation they claim represents a tectonic shift and that the Old World Order ‘came to an end on August 27, 1928’. ⁶⁴ This is not just empirically wrong in terms of the incidences of war after that date, it is also wrong in understanding what has actually been outlawed. War has not been outlawed, but some reasons the states might use to justify it have been. However, even here, ‘outlawed’ might be too strong. International law is shot through with purposeful ambiguity and powerful states will manipulate it to follow the course of action they feel necessary to protect their national interests (however defined). The 2003 invasion of Iraq is just the most glaring example, but pre-emptive war was clearly on the agenda during that war and remains so precisely because ‘self-defence’ remains a legitimate reason for a recourse to war under Article 51 of the UN Charter.

But there are also three theoretical reasons why the claims of Hathaway and Shapiro are flawed. First, the Second World War is only referred to today as a war of aggression because Germany was defeated. Had Germany won the war no doubt the history books would provide a very different account of the causes of that conflict, and its legality and moral legitimacy. This is not to embrace a relativist view of historical circumstances, but it is a recognition that it is anachronistic to look back and read our current understanding of events and to place their ultimate causal origins in a Pact that had so little effect of the immediate period following it.

Second, it is also the case that since the signing of the Pact, there have been other major events that can equally lay claim to be transformational: the Second World War, the post-war order, the Cold War, the end of the Cold War and the War on Terror. This is not say that the Pact played no role, but it is to warn against the making of overblown claims about singular events as being the source of fundamental transformative change. History, since the signing of the Pact, could have turned out very differently, and unless we embrace a form of historical determinism there is no direct causal trajectory from the Pact of 1928 to the world today. The social world is an open system, where multiple events, processes and mechanisms interact, and there is rarely any singular event, if any, that we can identify as the fundamental origin of a long process of ideational and normative change.

Third, and as lawyers and not political scientists, Hathaway and Shapiro might be excused for this, but they misunderstand the nature of the relationship between politics and law, particularly in the international realm. Politics only bends to the will of the law until the law no longer serves the interests of the political. When this happens the sovereign always has the ability to declare the exception and change the law. This highlights that the ultimate source of law is the political and the political as we have seen is constituted by violence and its possibility. ⁶⁵

Understood this way, not only does violence have the last word in politics, but in terms of international order, it was also the first word. As Nietzsche puts it, ‘the state lies in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it says it lies; and whatever it has it has stolen. False is everything in it; with stolen teeth it bites, the biting one’. ⁶⁶

One of the great lessons in international politics is that those predisposed to use violence can only be vanquished by competitors prepared to use overwhelming force against them. The two world wars provide clear examples of this, but this fact drives the balance of power as well as playing a significant role in the security dilemma. ⁶⁷ There are, however, clearly some exceptions to this, but in all these, the threat of violence formed a background horizon within which the non-violent course of action could succeed.

The Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia (1988–1991) is a good example, as was the collapse of the East German regime in 1989. The Gandhi-led decolonisation of India and the end of Apartheid are perhaps other examples. ⁶⁸ And of course, more recently, the Arab Spring. ⁶⁹ In all of these cases, however, violence or the threat of it was never absent. In the Czechoslovakian and East German examples, it was the Soviet refusal to countenance the use of military force that led to the collapse of the regimes.

Civil disobedience and non-violent revolutions work precisely because the threat of violence and total state collapse represents the next stage if the non-violent activity fails to achieve its aims. Hence even here the fear of violence plays a significant role in the calculations of leaders. State leaders facing non-violent protest calculate these options, and if they had enough violent capacity that could (all things being equal) achieve their ends, then there is little reason to suggest they would not use it. The peaceful protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989 provide just one example of how a state can quell non-violent protest with the capacity and the will to use violence against its own people to enforce its will.

States unable to project the possibility of violent retaliation on aggressors almost always inevitably suffer. The ability of the Soviet Union to control its Eastern European buffer zone post the Second World War depended on the threat of violence. Likewise, the Gulf War of 1991 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 demonstrated that violence remains the ultimate recourse for states when diplomatic efforts fail. The Vietnam War provides another example and the failure of the United States to impose its will in that conflict depended upon the willingness and the ability of the North Vietnamese to use violence.

Peaceful protesters in Libya and Syria quickly learnt that violence was the only option against regimes prepared to unleash the full violent force of the state against them. This lesson has also not been lost in regimes such as North Korea and Iran, where the desire to increase their violence capacity through the acquisition of nuclear weapons is driven by the recognition that violence is the last word when all else has failed. We may tell our children that violence never pays, but we have built our political edifices on the belief that it does.

This is a lesson terrorist of all kinds have learnt only too well. Without violence would the Palestinian cause have gained such prominence? Without violence would the Irish Republican Army (IRA) have been able to drag the UK government to the negotiating table? Without violence would the United States now be preparing to negotiate with the Taliban in Afghanistan? Without violence would fascism have been defeated? These arguments are not to imply support of violence, but they are recognition that however much we recoil from it, it is a distinct and important form of political action that might in some circumstances have some value.

But the possibility of violence can also be a barrier to political action. The mere threat of violence can deter certain forms of political action as much as it can enable them. In this sense, violence per se is never right or wrong, and what matters are the ends it serves.

As a form of successful political action, violence is, and historically has been, perhaps the most influential driver of social and political change, both in material terms and also through changing established ideas and patterns of thought. The social and political changes wrought by the two world wars are clear examples.

The First World War destroyed empires and led to the creation of new nation-states. Following the war, new independence movements that would eventually lead to the end of European colonies emerged: a process that gained momentum after the Second World War. Despite the initial reluctance of the United States to get involved in European problems, the United States had no alternative to taking up the mantle of a world power. The First World War played a significant role in bringing about the Russian Revolution and the emergence of communism, which in turn framed the whole of the post-war landscape.

Diplomatic agreements that emerged out of the First World War shaped and continue to shape the Middle East, Africa and large swathes of Asia. The emergence of fascism in Europe and the Second World War are directly related to the uneasy settlements of the First World War. Alongside the reconfiguration of global order, the war if 1914–1918 led to fundamentally different ways of thinking about how states should conduct their relations and these trends gained additional impetus after the Second World War. The current US-dominated international system is without doubt, in all aspects, a direct product of both wars. Viewed historically, while it is possible to identify other events and processes that brought about change, all of these developments can be traced back to violent episodes that created new nations, transformed or replaced others and reconfigured the global balance of power among the victors.

Today some revisionist states are attempting to alter the shape of this global order. We cannot know the intentions of the leaders of these states, but it is clear that despite protestations to the contrary, they are increasing their capacity for the production of violence. China, Iran and North Korea all see the value of using the possibility of violence as a way of extracting concessions or changing the balance of power in terms of their personal, regional dynamics; or in the case of China, perhaps global power dynamics. Even non-state actors such as ISIS, and Al Qaeda, or newly emerging white supremacist movements see the value in both threatening violence or the actual use of violence. Hence, the value of violence as a force of social change is clear.

The change of violence

War is the highest form of struggle for resolving contradictions, when they have developed to a certain stage, between classes, nations, states, or political groups, and it has existed ever since the emergence of private property and of classes. ⁷⁰

Pinker argues that violence is in decline and identifies this as a long-term trend. He does not, however, believe that is as an irreversible trend, and he accepts that ‘past performance is no guarantee of future results’. ⁷¹ Yes, the doomsayers could be right and we could wake up tomorrow a nuclear catastrophe, whether by accident or design. But since we are not in the business of predicting the future, we should base our analysis on what has happened, not what might happen. Those of a more policy-oriented persuasion might object and argue that what ‘might happen’ is a necessary part of any rational behaviour. They would be right, but since the boundaries are what might happen are unlimited, we have to base our future projections on some analysis of the past, and some rational belief about the probabilities of X happening. If X does happen, it means our judgement was wrong, but it does not mean that on the basis of the evidence, we were wrong about that judgement. As I have argued above, in the final analysis in political disputes, violence is the last word. Since war remains the most extreme form of violence between states, this accords with the idea that war remains the ‘ultima ratio’. ⁷²

Yet even if this latent potential or violence remains, it would be wrong to conclude that nothing has changed. There are some clear indicators of some of these changes in the trends Pinker identifies. The Better Angels of Our Nature is the most well-known and deeply criticised account of the view that violence is in decline. ⁷³ The historical scope of Pinker’s analysis is breathtaking; some might say foolish, spanning the use of violence in human history from our as far back as aboriginal times. Pinker’s data suggests massively declining levels of violence across historical time.

As might be expected, however, Pinker’s thesis has received much critique. ⁷⁴ However, Pinker’s argument is not new or isolated. The decline in the relative rates of violence has been noted by many others before Pinker and is well supported by the data, even if elements of it are subject to critique. ⁷⁵ Pinker’s innovation was to bring all the arguments together and come up with a catchy title. However, the title is misleading. Pinker’s proposed explanations for this decline in violence has little to do with human nature and more to do with the ability of social forces to drive human evolution. In particular, he attributes the decline in violence to social forces such as the emergence of the State Leviathan, feminism and the Enlightenment. If anything, Pinker’s argument rests on the ability of social conditions to bring about social change.

In terms of the Leviathan effect, Pinker’s argument and data suggest that Hobbes’ metaphorical innovation of the anarchic state of nature was in many respects correct. Pinker estimates that with the rise of centralised political organisation, violent mortality dropped from 15 per cent of the population (25% of the men), in pre-state societies, to about 1–5 per cent today.

Despite all the criticism, however, the data suggests that Pinker is at least mostly correct. We may not feel that violence is in decline, but the trends strongly suggest that it is. ⁷⁶ The chances of anyone suffering a violent death are much reduced from previous eras, and that argument applies particularly to the period 1919–2019. According to data scientist Will Koehrsen, the

most relevant entries are the final two. The US and Europe from 1900–1960, even with two world wars, saw less than 1% of their population perish in armed conflicts. In 2007, just 0.04% of deaths in the world were from international violence. ⁷⁷

These figures only make sense when compared with previous eras, although it is difficult to do direct comparisons because the same data is not available for all time periods. However, the decline in deaths from war and conflict in international politics is clear.

This seems a counterintuitive claim given the human cost of the two world wars, the increasingly destructive capability of modern weaponry and rising levels of inter-state conflict. How do we explain this?

Rather than getting bogged down in a debate about conflicting interpretations of Pinker’s data, I will concentrate my attention on what I think are the most significant qualitative changes that have taken place in the conduct, practice and function of violence from 1919 to 2019.

First, one of the most striking things is that the early part of the twentieth century began with the eruption of massive intra-state global conflict and ended with what Pinker, following John L Gaddis, calls the ‘Long Peace’: the post-1945 era. ⁷⁸ Since 1953, there have been zero conflicts between major world powers and there have been no internationally recognised states that have been erased through conquest since 1945. However, one measures it intra-state war and conflict have declined since the Second World War and inter-state conflict has risen. Looked at this way, the Long Peace may be a wrong term of this period. It has certainly not been peaceful, but the nature of international violence and the form it takes has changed. Some of the factors that might help explain this change include normative changes in our view of war as a means of resolving international conflicts, as well as an international institutional order that was constructed specifically to help states mediate disputes and control the use of violence. ⁷⁹

Certainly, the track record of the UN in preventing mass violence is less than perfect and there is still much room for improvement. ⁸⁰ But this does not mean it is completely lacking in influence. UN efforts to control the resort to violence have on the whole been relatively successful, particularly given the context of the Cold War and the many potential flashpoints that emerged during that era.

The increased destructive potential of modern technology, not least nuclear weapons, now mean that possessor states are reluctant to engage in direct conflict with one another, particularly when other options such as proxy wars and influence in intra-state conflicts. Given the rise in the number of these, however, which correlates almost directly to the decline in inter-state violence pronouncements of peace, seem premature.

Hence, while the number of battle-related deaths has decreased, the total number of conflicts is rising. This could be explained by the displacement of intra-state violence onto inter-state violence. The long civil war in Syria provides an excellent example of this. Yet why, if there are more conflicts are battle deaths declining? Two explanations seem to be apposite. First, although it is clear that technological development has increased the destructive capacity of the means of violence, those same technological advances can help reduce casualties. Drones are an obvious example, where some of the combatants can be moved out of harm’s way yet still inflict dreadful consequences on the enemy.

Also military advances in terms of defensive capabilities on the battlefield such as stealth technology and battlefield armour are playing some role. Likewise, advances in military medicine mean that injuries that might have led to death in previous eras are now treatable. This has led some, such as Tanitha Fazal, to claim that Pinker’s reliance on using battle deaths makes him ‘dead wrong’ about the decline of international political violence, particularly given that battle deaths are the main metric used by Pinker to calculate incidences of war. ⁸¹ This misses the point that the development and deployment of medical care to save the lives of soldiers is itself a part of the very phenomenon Pinker claims is responsible for the decline in international violence. As he puts it:

War leaders and battlefield commanders now treat the lives of their soldiers as far more precious than in the days when they were used as fodder. Not only have armed forces invested in lifesaving technologies at tremendous cost, but battlefield commanders have avoided the temptation to compensate for the advanced lifesaving care by putting more soldiers in riskier situations, keeping casualty rates constant. ⁸²

Of course one could point to the Vietnam war and the Iran–Iraq war as examples where ‘fodder’ might remain an apt description of how commanders treat their troops. But the US experience in Vietnam led to a revulsion against heavy casualties and can arguably be said to be a major factor in move away from the idea of troops as fodder. ⁸³ The Iran–Iraq War can be viewed as a anomaly because neither state had any option but to use their troops as fodder. Indeed, the Iran–Iraq War was conducted much more like the First World War than the tactical Blitzkrieg of the Second World War, or the highly technologically driven campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Doubtless, when states have no other options they will use their troops as fodder, but those with the capability to avoid it will do so. This is a fundamental transformation of war, and moving into the artificial intelligence age, we could see human combatants largely removed from the battlespace. ⁸⁴

Technology then is a double-edged sword and armour plating, and other developments mean that the more powerful states can implement procedures to reduce their casualties across a range of domains. This has led Christopher Coker to argue that the fundamental nature of war is changing as a soldier’s honour and heroism derived from their willingness to put their lives on the line is no longer a significant factor in war. ⁸⁵

The charge of the relationship between casualty figures and the definition of war is more difficult to refute. Yet we have other more qualitative ways to differentiating between wars. There can be little doubt that inter-state wars have been in decline since the Second World War, even if intra-state conflicts have risen. ⁸⁶

The move from inter-state conflict to intra-state conflict has other consequences for how we understand international violence. First, it is often claimed that the ratio of civilian deaths in conflicts has been rising over time. One oft quoted figure is that at the beginning of the twentieth century, 90 per cent of deaths in warfare were suffered by soldiers, but at the end, 90 per cent were suffered by civilians. ⁸⁷

Pinker refers to this as a bogus statistic. ⁸⁸ Adam Roberts has also recently argued that gathering data on statistics such as this is an incredibly complex undertaking, and unless we have an agreement about the definitions and methodology there is no real data to support this claim. ⁸⁹ The major difficulty here is that given the nature of these new inter-state conflicts, which often have many more competing parties involved in them, often mixing criminal with political motives, and with the influence of both external states using them as proxy conflicts and deploying private military corporations, it is extremely difficult to differentiate a combatant from a non-combatant.

They may not have exactly been the ‘good old days’ but there remains something appealing about clear and consistent declarations of war and combatants clearly identified through their uniforms when compared with the chaos of contemporary conflicts such as Syria, Yemen and the Congo.

Conclusion

Violence is not the only source of social change, but it is the most potent. According to Thomas Schelling one of the great attractions of violence as a political tactic is that the construction of social order and social artefacts can take years, even decades. The use of violence can rip them apart and obliterate them in seconds. It is easier to destroy than create. ⁹⁰ Violence has time on its side. Violence is also a potent force because it both attracts and repels us. Every act of violence is utterly traumatic for those caught up in its grip. Changing or extinguishing lives forever and leaving a trail of despair in its wake. Political violence not only works its effects on those lives immediately affected by it but also through the production of conflicting symbolic effects on those distanced from it. These effects can range from fascination to fear. From hate to horror. From revenge to reconciliation. Violence shapes the imaginary of those untouched by its direct effects because it remains an ever-present possibility that may one day be enacted upon them. In this sense, violence constructs everyone’s historical consciousness, and we are powerless to escape its effects.

The continuity of political violence also undergoes change. Attitudes to war and at least at the state level are enshrined in the UN Charter. We have constructed institutions that attempt to control the use of violence at the global level, although paradoxically just as those institutions seem to declare old forms of war inadmissible, they supply us with new reasons to engage in war: humanitarian war, for example. But violence remains an option. The problem here resides in the fact that the entities that have constructed this global institutional order are exactly those units that see violence as the ultimate ratio.

Moreover, states continue to compete with one another to gain advantages in their relative military capabilities. Hence, despite the decline in inter-state violence since 1945, it could still return with a vengeance. Given the fact that violence is a constitutive aspect of the political, the ‘Long Peace’ may be the anomaly and not the norm. The signs on the horizon are not promising that the Pinker thesis will hold, at least in relation to violence in the international system, both in terms of great power conflict and also regional dynamics such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, and India and Pakistan The emergence of China as a major power and a resurgent Russia keen to reassert itself on the global stage are cause for concern. Also, revisionists states with legitimate claims on reform of the international system may also become agitators for violent political change, and it is here that a range of other concerns, such as the environment and global inequalities, could begin to interact with political violence. Predicting the future is inherently difficult in open systems, but looking at the past through the lens of the 1919–2019 era the only certainty is that violence in the international system may change, but that change in the form violence takes is only recognisable as change because violence continues to have the first and the last word.