Laqueur, who has written numerous works on the question of political violence,
argues that Iran has sponsored the Hizbullah group in the Lebanon, and it has
extended support to Shi’ite groups in Afghanistan and Palestinian groups like the
Islamic Jihad. Iraq under Saddam Hussein, he argues, was much more cautious in
its support for terrorist groups (we shall later distinguish political violence and
terror) but it did provide some shelter to the remnants of the Abu Nidal group and
the People’s Liberation Front for Palestine (Laqueur, 2003: 223–5).
Although we think that there is a strong case for using force and violence as
synonyms, Johnston distinguishes sharply between the two on the ground that
violence is force that violates some moral or legal norm, so that we can differentiate
between, say, police force and criminal violence. He argues that it is important to
combine confrontation and conciliation, reason and force in combating violence,
and he identifies terrorists as criminals (Johnston, 1993: 16–17). It is true that
criminals do not necessarily see themselves as acting politically, whereas terrorists
do.
The argument is that because the force of the state is authorised and limited to
specific purposes, it cannot be considered ‘violent’, and therefore the notion of
political violence has to be restricted to those who oppose the state. Miller comments
that ‘it is a well-entrenched feature of our language that to describe an action as
an act of violence is to condemn it forcefully’ (1984: 403). Wilkinson contends that
it is ‘sheer obfuscation’ to imagine that one can theorise about political violence in
a value-free way (1979: 101).
In Miller’s view, the force/violence distinction only applies when laws are general;
when they are enacted in advance of behaviour they seek to control; when they do
not discriminate between persons on irrelevant grounds; and the penalties are
standardised and applied impartially (1984: 404). Violence is unpredictable and
irregular. It is for this reason that the political theorist Pettit argues that only
when force is used in an arbitrary way is freedom compromised (1997: 302). A
non-arbitrary use of force, that is the working of a liberal state, governed by a
constitution, does not make you unfree so that Pettit’s argument is that the force
of a constitutional state does not lead to domination, and therefore should not be
regarded as violence.An assessment of Salmi
Salmi, a development economist from Morocco, has written an important work
entitled Violence and Democratic Society (1993). In it he defines violence as an act
that threatens a person’s physical or psychological integrity (1993: 16), and he
distinguishes between four categories of violence:- direct violence involves deliberate attacks that inflict harm (kidnappings,
homicide, rape, torture). This would certainly embrace political violence. Salmi
distinguishes between direct and - indirect violencewhen, he argues, violence is inflicted unintentionally as in cases
of violence by omissionwhen, say, inaction contributes to starvation or genocide
(as in Roosevelt’s failure to intervene in 1942 against Hitler’s final solution)
Chapter 20 Political violence 447