(1993: 18). This indirect violence may also take the form of what Salmi calls
‘mediated’ (1993: 19) violence which occurs when individuals or institutions
produce goods or trade in weapons of war which (again unintentionally) damage
the health and environment of others. Salmi’s third category relates to what he
calls- repressive violence(1993: 20) when people are deprived of their political, civil,
social or economic rights, while - alienating violence(1993: 21) – his fourth category – embraces the kind of
oppression (ethnic and male chauvinism, racism, homophobia, opposition to
AIDS sufferers, etc.) which undermines a person’s emotional, cultural and
intellectual development. What are we to make of these categories, and their link
to the question of political violence?
It seems to us problematic to characterise direct violence as merely one form of
violence among others. For this is the violence that deserves our immediate attention
since it prevents people from (even in a formal sense) governing their lives. Salmi
estimates that between 1820 and 1970 (after the Napoleonic wars through to the
Vietnam conflict) some 68 million people died as a consequence of ‘direct’ violence,
and this is the form of violence that, as the public rightly perceives, is the pressing
problem (Salmi, 1993: 47). Whereas inaction (as in Salmi’s second category) may
be categorised as an evil, it cannot be said to constitute violence per se, although
it may certainly be the causeof violence.
Again, what Salmi calls repressive and alienating violence may lead to direct
violence, but until it does, it cannot be called violence (and thus political violence)
as such, although like the so-called indirect violence of unemployment, it certainly
harms people and should be condemned. Violence, as we see it, should be restricted
to the infliction of deliberate physical harm: a case could certainly be made for
incorporating abuse as violence where it leads to physical pain of the kind expressed
through depression, etc. But violence becomes too broad a category if it is linked
to any kind of pressure that affects someone’s ‘integrity’ if by that is meant their
capacity to act in a particular way.
For the same reason we would resist the argument of Bourdieu, a radical French
social theorist, that violence can be symbolic or ‘structural’ (1998: 40, 98). Clearly,
verbal and other forms of non-physical aggression are linked to violence, but we
would prefer to distinguish between the causes of violence and violence itself. We
will later challenge the notion that the liberal state only uses force and not violence,
but we take the view that violence is best defined as the intentional infliction of
physical harm.
Distinguishing between political violence and terrorism
It is our view that when political violence is used in conditions in which no other
form of protest is permissible, then it would be wrong to call it terrorism. Miller
argues that ‘violence may be permissible in dictatorships and other repressive regimes
when it is used to defend human rights, provoke liberal reforms, and achieve other
desirable objectives’ (1984: 406). Such violence should not be called terrorism, and448 Part 4 Contemporary ideas