Violence and Justice

The Empirical and Normative Issues

The empirical issue has engaged observers of politics at least since Aristotle (384–322 BCE), who argued that revolutionary violence often results when a political regime does not conform to the conception of justice held by a large segment of the population. Hence, a democratic revolution in the name of equality may take place in an oligarchic regime that favors the rich, as Aristotle noted. The orthodox Marxian position opposes this view and states that objective material circumstances bring about revolutionary violence, not conceptions of justice. Ted Gurr argued in his classic study, Why Men Rebel (1970), that the Aristotelian view is essentially correct: when there is a shortfall between what people believe they are justly due and what they expect to receive under a regime they are likely to resort to political violence.

When considering the normative issue of the justice of political violence, a distinction must be made between violence (and lesser forms of coercion) perpetrated by a state and violence by nonstate actors. Scholars often see political violence by nonstate actors as morally problematic because, following Max Weber (1864–1920), the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. This means that state violence often enjoys a presumptive moral legitimacy that nonstate violence lacks. Another important distinction is between the international and domestic realms, where different considerations bear on the justice of violence. In both the international and domestic contexts, one can identify three general positions on the justice of state violence: the view that violence need not meet standards of justice; the view that violence may be just, if certain conditions are satisfied; and the view that violence can never be just.

International State Violence

The paradigm case of state violence in the international arena is war. The position that war need not be justified—that it need not meet standards of justice—is associated with realism, the school of thought that holds that international relations is essentially an amoral struggle for power, where moral considerations such as justice do not apply. If this is true for realists of international relations in general, it is also true of war in particular.

Others oppose this view with just war theory, which maintains that war must be justified. The requirements for a just war are divided into two parts: jus ad bellum, the justice of going to war, and jus in bello, justice in the conduct of a war. Jus ad bellum requirements include a just cause (usually defensive or humanitarian), a legitimate authority (usually a state), right intention, likelihood of success, last resort, and proportionality of expected costs to benefits of the war. Jus in bello requirements are proportionality of costs to benefits of particular acts within the war and discrimination between legitimate (military) and illegitimate (civilian) targets of attack. While scholars widely agree on the criteria of just war theory, they differ in their interpretation and application of those criteria, so there can be a wide array of views within just war theory, ranging from the more permissive to the more restrictive views on the requirements for a just war.

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