Terrains of Possibility for Non-State Uses of Interpersonal or Intergroup Violence
Terrains of Possibility for Non-State Uses of Interpersonal or Intergroup Violence
Monday, 7 July 2025: 11:00-12:45
Location: FSE014 (Faculty of Education Sciences (FSE))
WG11 Violence and Society (host committee) Language: English
This panel explores a contradiction: States claim a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. At the same time, their use of violence has the effect of disbursing legitimacy to non-state actors. Indeed, when states use violence, they build terrains of possibility for non-state uses of violence, including interpersonal and intergroup violence. This happens because states that initiate violence cannot simply end it; organized violence cannot be stopped at will (Von Holt 2012). For example, states may equip populations with small arms for purposes they deem legitimate, but then are unable or unwilling to disarm those populations if and when they come to define those populations’ uses of arms as illegitimate. This panel explores how small arms distributed by the state confer legitimacy that remains even after the legitimacy given by the state to use those arms ends. This happens when a state does not retract weapons at the end of an inter-state or counterinsurgent war. We show that legitimacy can remain in the material object. When states prosecute inter-state wars, counterinsurgencies, or settler colonization, even when that violence is ostensibly “legitimate,” they cannot fully define or circumscribe it. Considerations of the afterlives of state-violence cannot be reduced to an analysis that interprets such violence as either opposition to the state (resistance) or state-building (the drive to monopolize violence within the state’s territory). States help to build terrains of possibility that can undermine their monopolies on the legitimate use of violence.
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