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Government of the Russian Federation

FEDERAL STATE AUTONOMOUSEDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION FOR HIGHER EDUCATION

NATIONAL RESEARCHUNIVERSITY

“HIGHER SCHOOL OFECONOMICS”

Faculty of Social Sciences

MASTER THESIS

Critique of Institutional Violence: The Case Of "Just War"

Field of Study 41.04.04 Political Science Master's Program “Politics. Economics. Philosophy”

Kirill Vladimirov

Moscow,2020

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Violence, war and justice
• 1.1 The interrelation between violence and (just) war
• 1.2 Ontological differences regarding justice and violence
• 1.3 Violence, politics and legitimacy
• Chapter 2. Critique of just war theory
• 2.1 Critique of just war theory principles
• Chapter 3. Institutional violence and just war theory
• 3.1 Two concepts of institutional violence
• 3.2 Institutional violence, just war theory and challenges of political ethics
• Conclusion
• References


Introduction

The issue of political violence has been much discussed throughout the evolution of intellectual thought on political ethics, political decision making and the nature of politics as such in the realms of political philosophy, peace studies and international relations. On the one hand, the issue of violence is considered as an unwanted or undesired component of political action which is to be erased and removed from politics and replaced with non-violent practices of resistance; while on the other hand violence remains the unavoidable and inherent feature of politics. There is also the practical view of violence, the view of use of violence; the view of operating with instruments of violence and resolving political problems with it. For example, the common distinction in matters of use of violence can be met between schools of liberalism and realism in international relations.

While recent political and philosophical studies mostly focus on the forms and types of violence with an attempt to approach this issue in the domain of applied or normative ethics which consider probable consequences of use of violence in specific cases, there is still a place for revisiting and challenging core issues of political violence. At first, this is the question, do criterias of normative morality based on the egalitarian notions of justice and fairness can detect other aspects of political violence besides direct physical coercion and use of force, and to what extent? Do these aspects inherently linked with the nature of violence and politics or are they alien to them and, in turn, should be ignored by the normative approach towards violence? And moreover, what kind of types of violence normative morality might overlook and omit? In this way, the narrative of the prospective work and major questions do not concern the praxis of violence and normative morality, but rather challenges its nature. The project focuses not on how political violence is used in observed historical cases but studies how violence functions on the examples of just war theory as one of the commonly used types of normative morality.

In my opinion, the answer to this question can be given through the critique of political violence and institutional violence as its subset. In this way, the objectives of the paper is to: 1) consider the interrelation between war and violence, how these substances interact and influence each other; 2) define key ontological differences towards issues of violence and justice; 3) provide the critique of just war principles “from within”, i.e. subject matter are the inherent omissions of just war theory; 4) provide two concepts of institutional violence - structural violence based on the ideas of Johann Galtung and the notion of violence of institutions; 5) provide the critique of just war theory “from outside” based on two concepts of institutional violence, i.e. subject matter is the ontological difference towards morality and violence in politics.

The significance of the paper is caused by two reasons. At first, this is the lack of philosophical studies devoted to challenging the idea of institutional violence from the positions of structures of violence in the spirit of Foucault and Bourdieu philosophies. Secondly, this is the opportunity to revisit and alter normative approaches towards use of violence, for instance to give an analysis of just war theory from the position and notion of ubiquitous violence which infiltrates the body of politics as such.

The prospective paper is to be divided into three major parts. The first part considers the interrelation between notions of war and violence. Even though the major focus of the paper remains the idea of just war theory and institutional violence, it is necessary to give a complex overview and introduce the background of political violence. This includes notions of legitimacy, justice and methodological differences towards issues of violence. After that, the work proceeds to the critique of just war principles and also considers ideas of political realism and political idealism which underlies the attempt of normative morality to reconcile these two schools of thoughts.

Finally, the third part examines which types and manifestations of violence the just war theory omits according to two concepts of institutional violence. Here, the critique of the idea of just war and war justification will be given from the position of institutionalized violence or hyperstructural violence in the sense of constant reproduction of violence by Bourdieu's idea of habitus. The main argument is based on the claim that as long as the violence is ubiquitously structured by anonymous institutions, it cannot be justified as such because all the agents which attempt to give the justification are already summoned (or captured) by the unreflected structure of violence. The second possible argument here is that any political decisions which are justified whether in the tradition of just war or in tradition of political realism, they cannot be considered as just because of the erosion of boundaries of a political field and its constant and incessant metamorphosis. In this way it might be said that “just war is just war”.

On the one hand, such an approach and argumentation concerning just war theory might seem inappropriate, thus just war theory remains normative and used in specific real cases of political decision making. And it is necessary to emphasize that the paper avoids the assessment of the quality of such decisions. The argumentation rather challenges the idea of moral judgement as such in the reality of totality of violence which was described in details in works by Hardt & Negri and Jean Baudrillard and also questions, how the logic of justification of violence can be revisited considering the fact of hyperstructural or hyperinstitutionalized violence. war violence legitimacy

Chapter 1. Violence, war and justice

One more thing which is necessary to outline here is that this work does not focus on the concept of justice as such but considers its interrelation with the idea of violence. These concepts could be appropriately mentioned and considered together in case of how violence corresponds with the issue of violation of rights (Bufacchi, 2007), revolutions and coup d`etat what rather relates to domestic political violence. Thus the major topic of the recent work remains the focus on the specific aspect of use of force, the just war theory, where the issue of justice and violence find the explicit points of contacts in the application of such force in warfare, the chapter rather focuses on how the concept of justice functions within the just war theory and how just war theory justifies the use of force, and moreover, what just war theory “overlooks” when it comes to the justification of violence.

When speaking on justice in general, the first thing which comes to mind are different approaches in finding the answer for the question “what is just”. Utilitarianist would rather provide an answer that the greater the good for the greatest number of people, the juster the balance of power and, subsequently, is more equal. In other words, the ideal of utilitarian justice is perceived as a state of a total equality where each agent is satisfied with their needs. Deontic position would rather prescribe that what is right is just, and the more right our actions towards each other are, the juster the balance of power. There are also other approaches towards justice, for instance in consequentialism where the justice is assessed as a degree of morality of an action which is contingent on the action's outcome or result.

Speaking of the idea of balance of power which belongs to the domain of political realism and neorealism in international relations, when such balance is broken, the just war theory can be used as a moral justification of recovering the desired balance of power, but the stronger such desire, the stronger the risk of discovering unipolarity and hegemony behind the solid arguments like “war for peace” or “war to end all wars”. It is claimed, that nowadays, just war theory rather serves to the maintenance of liberal hegemony and unipolar world, it is rather serves to the doctrine of “the Empire” (Hardt & Negri, 2001, 12-15), than to the maintenance of the old concept of multipolar world which exists only as a “displaced myth” in the world of media and ideology with its declamations and flirtation with ideas of global diversity and equal treatment, the ideology of multipolarity which in its turn hide the unipolarity not of the country or nation, but of the hegemony of the capitalistic system as such. In this way, it might be said that just war theory rather becomes a resurrected myth to serve a hegemony of capitalistic system to maintain its status, than an instrument of explicit struggle or exchange of power.

Coming back to the issue of justice, we can also say that “justice means fairness. [f]airness, in turn, means that people, groups, cultures, and nations are treated as equals in at least two ways. First, they are treated with equal concern and, second, with equal respect”(Fotion & Coppieters, 2008, 15). But does justice mean equality? And moreover, let us put the question in a more extreme way, does justice being understood as equality implies the absence of violence?

In the contrast to the point that justice means equality and fairness, Ted Honderich (2014, 35) criticizes the application of the principle of absolute equality and claims that such principle is absurd and gives an example that “not everyone can possibly live by the seaside; [a]lso, we cannot think of treating the sick as we treat the healthy.” What I find attractive and fruitful for the further consideration in these both passages concerning the interrelation of equality, justice and fairness, is the only one word, treatment, which inevitably implies the idea of having an interaction with “the other”. Such interaction might be considered impactful, i.e. treatment as an impact, and the other paradigm - relational, i.e. treatment as a connection.

Moreover, there are more perspectives which might lie behind the word treatment. I would prefer to focus on two and brightest of them. One perspective includes the degree of forcefulness or coercion with which the treatment is provided and such consideration reflects the linear paradigm of liberal approach - the less the treatment is violent and coercive, the more it is just concerning “the other”, and therefore contributes to more equality of all involved parties. And the other perspective is rather much more polar and binary than the first one, and implies the clear contradiction between two approaches towards the problem of social interactions - individualistic ontology (also known as methodological individualism) and relational ontology (Marxian approach) which in turn have different views on the matters of justice, violence and equality.

What are these differences? In liberal tradition, for instance, and John Rawls (Wenar, 2017) might be considered as a bright adherent of it, the justice is fairness among free citizens which hold equal basic rights and cooperate within an egalitarian economic system. The key difference with the Marxian approach here is that an egalitarian economic system refers to the concept of access to the opportunity to obtain a produced good, while Marxian approach is rather based on the rejection of such a view. In the egalitarian paradigm, the good is alienated from those who produce it, and what is left to producers is the access to the opportunity to obtain a produced good. As Van de Veer (1973, 369) claims, “many of Marx's comments can be construed more plausibly not as a rejection of the principle of fair distribution, or distributive justice, but as a rejection of the rhetoric of "justice," "equal right," and "fair distribution" on the tactical basis that such terminology had been commandeered by the bourgeoisie and drained of any content that would make them useful expressions in the spread of socialist doctrines”. It is also worth emphasizing that even Marx rejected the bourgeoisie approach towards the fair distribution, he did not reject the concept of fair distribution as such. Moreover, “Marx's commitment to a principle of justice was not inconsistent with his metaethical view on the question of the justifiability of basic normative principles”. In other words, the alternative to the normative understanding of justice proposed by Marx was not one more set of normativity of justice, but the critique of the bourgeoisie paradigm of equality as such.

But such differences towards justice and equal treatment take their origin, in my opinion, into the ontological difference towards social interactions (Ball, 1978, 97-112). As mentioned before, usually, treatment is perceived as an impact or the exposure where the agent Aprovides the treatment towards the agent B. Such treatment might be initiated in case agent B does not want to take the treatment and in case agent A has enough authority and persuasiveness over agent B to do something. In other words, the treatment is considered an interrelation between A and B where A enforces B to behave as A wishes to or as it ought to be right in the interpretation of agent A or a normative set of prescriptions. This might be interpreted as the classical approach of methodological individualism where there is nothing else but separated and individuated entities interacting with each other.

On the other hand, there is another concept of treatment based on the relational ontology which holds that the world consists not of separated standalone entities and objects, but of relations, and “[t]herefore, for them, causal - and coercive - relations hold between elements in a socially structured ensemble of relations” (Ball, 1978, 98). Moreover, as Terrence Ball (1978, 115) claims that, “according to the alternative - indeed, antithetical - structural model, coercion is not and cannot be, a relationship between individuals for the simple reason that individuals do not exist (except perhaps in the heaven of liberal theory)”. Finally, we might assume that while liberal approach, in general, is based on the assumption that society consists of individuals, there is also another point that society is nothing but a sum of connections and relations in which individuals find and define themselves.

How does this all relate to the issue of just war theory, justice and violence? Firstly, as long as the major purpose of just war theory remains the moral justification of war provided as a series of criteria, it inevitably remains the set of linear conditions which correlate with the mentioned examples of influencing interaction, where the agent A influences agent B to do x. Second thing here is the additional condition which can be applied ex-ante or ex-post, e.g. criterias of justification of war. In other words, continuing the example of Terrence Ball and combining it with the word treatment, just war theory is rather an externally added set of conditions to justify the coercion, not inherent to the connection or relation, but artificially brought into the context, e.g. the treatment of A towards B is just, even if it is coercive, if and only if the treatment satisfies the criterias of a, b, c.

But can such externally added criterias of justice being applied to the war, capture the essence of violence and coercion as connection? Obviously not, and such impossibility is not caused by shortcomings of any of approaches, neither methodological individualism, nor relational ontology. These criterias, being applied to the social event like war cannot uncover the violence as a relation which exists in the form of an institution, rule or interconnection, thus criterias of just war theory captures individuals and assesses their actions only, not relations inherent to their interaction. Just war theory, being a set of rules, rather prescribe how to act and how behave with “the other” than describe a “strange convergence”, a relation hidden in the interaction as such.

Such relation which lies beneath the surface of action, interpellates individuals to act in a certain way, and consequently make individuals individuals in sense of a historic reproduction of a set of patterns, behaviours, rules and connections which place or expose the masses in a certain disposition on a historical horizon. Violence and coercion not as a force which is usually opposed to reason, but as a structuring force which bring the order, but not in sense as the order as rules to which other must obey (even the following concept of order includes such rules), but the order as a structuring structure of rules, where violence remains the structureless structure (or structuring force) which brings the capability for the existence and vitality of relations in society, no matter how “bad” or “good”, “just” or “unjust”, “coercive” or “non-coercive” such relations might seem.

That was the first argument which can be imposed on just war theory from the position of ontological differences. Of course, one might say that it is inappropriate to assess one ontology from the other or compare them in such a way, but it might be argued and reminded that this work is not aimed to criticize the just war theory in general, but to find what just war theory misses and overlookswhile applying the normative criterias to manifestations of violence and the consideration of ontological differences might be useful in this case.

1.3 Violence, politics and legitimacy

Before going further to the critique of just war, it is worth mentioning what else constitutes the issue of violence as such in the realm of politics. The first consideration refers to the concept of politics and the misconception that politics is the act of unification where the violence takes the unpleasant connotation, where all the conflicts and disputes should be resolved in a peaceful manner by a legitimate authority who is accepted by the people for there is no necessity to persuade them anymore with any instrument of violence, as Hannah Arendt claims in her work “On violence” (1972, 143-155).

This misconception reads as follows, even it might seem trivial and obvious (Vladimirov, 2019a). In my opinion, the politics cannot be perceived as the pure unifying activity as Arendt claims, thus the separation precedes unifying and unifying is impossible without separation. There is the politics of separation, for instance, the fall of Berlin wall, recent Brexit procedure, fall of USSR, disappearance of great empires and governments, reconsidering territorial boundaries, etc. Separation is the unavoidable part of politics. The politics is not uniting separate individuals, as individualistic or atomistic approach tends us to think, but on the other hand, politics is the incessant and ongoing process of separation and unification; and moreover, the nature of politics is prior to the process of socialization thus the later requires the existence of similarities and differences between actors which in turn is impossible without preceding separation or unification. In that way, such unifying into different units, on which Arendt reflects in her work, can be achieved only as a result of the previous stage of separation, on which Carl Schmitt (2007, 26) reflects while introducing the concept of “friend-enemy”, i.e. before we unite we must separate from each other, and such separation may be violent or non-violent.

Secondly, as long as politics as such is the incessant process of unification and separation which inherently constitutes the violence as one of the instruments of legitimation of authority, competition for power and mobilization of social groups, it might be assumed that generally, political violence is aimed to be an instrument of achieving political goals, neutral due to its substantiality to politics but forceful due to its coercive nature; the instrument which takes its` place in a series of other tools of achieving political goals (e.g. concluding peace agreement, negotiating, uniting in alliance) which can be used in a given situation with a given degree; whether it is an explicit use of force, coercion, espionage, violation of agreement, etc. Political violence as an instrument is neutral due to its substantial nature in the realm of politics, whether it is legitimate or illegitimate, law-preserving or law-making, explicit or implicit, direct or indirect.

Moreover, violence and non-violent resistance as a form of political violence cannot be connotated `good' or `bad', or `positive' or `negative' thus only the rational or non-rational use of these forms of political violence makes consequences of such use better or worse. And finally, thus the violence is the inherent substance of politics, the inability to remove violence does not eliminate the responsibility to minimize it, i.e. the rational use of violence. To make it clear, by rational use of violence is meant the use of such degree and specific instruments of violence which do not eliminate the goal itself.

With regard to the first two components, legitimacy and competition, that violence is the instrument of preserving power and gaining the legitimacy of authority, I would like to refer to the argumentation of Robert Paul Wolff. At first, he introduces terms of power and authority. He states (Wolff, 1999,13) that “power is the ability to make and enforce decisions”. I agree with this statement that as long as history is a series of events, then politics is a series of decisions. He also introduces the term authority (Wolff, 1999, 13); “authority, by contrast with power, is not an ability but a right; it is the right to command, and correlatively, right to be obeyed”. Secondly, Wolff thoroughly distinguishes such terms like de facto and de jure authority (1999, 14). And finally, he claims that “violence is the illegitimate or unauthorized use of force to effect decisions against the will or desire of others”. He adds (Wolff, 1999, 15) that “murder is an act of violence, but capital punishment by a legitimate state is not; theft or extortion is violent, but the collection of taxes by a legitimate state is not”.

In my opinion, this argumentation and logic of Wolff refers here primarily to the understanding of violence, authority and power of Hannah Arendt, e.g. the logic that legitimate authority who does not need to coerce citizens, thus authority of state is accepted by them, and if it is accepted then every measure and action performed by such state is accepted as long as authority is perceived legitimate. However, what if this legitimate government, for instance, would significantly increase tax rates or retirement age, irrespective of a gradual or sharp increase? Would it be the manifestation of violence towards citizens or not? Of course, in the logic of Wolff it might be said that as long as the state is accepted by citizens as legitimate, such actions will not be perceived as violent. But what if accepted parameters of legitimacy do not filter unacceptable forms of violence?

On the other hand, I would refer here to the argumentation of Rudolph Rummel who once introduced the term democide (Rummel, 1994), "the intentional killing of an unarmed or disarmed person by government agents acting in their authoritative capacity and pursuant to government policy or high command". He claims that the notion of democide being an extreme and hidden manifestation of violence covers a “wide range of deaths, including forced labour and concentration camp victims; killings by `unofficial' private groups; extrajudicial summary killings; and mass deaths due to the governmental acts of criminal omission and neglect, such as in deliberate famines, as well as killings by de facto governments, i.e. civil war killings” (Rummel, 1994). In other words, a legitimate state might also use violence what contradicts the argumentation of Wolff.

Regarding the issue of legitimacy, Waldenfels (1991, 204) responds that “because every order is selective and exclusive, each contains some element of violence and none can be legitimated in a complete way. If once nevertheless tries to rationalize such violence, there will arise a new specific form of violence used in the name of reason and resulting from a kind of legitimation”. Waldenfels (1991, 204-205) also introduces the term `double violence' as a `double truth' in that sense that “violence is not simply violence”. Another issue here is that such use of violence, whether it is rational or non-rational, might be hidden in structures of rules, rights, obligations, which might be also called institutions.

And here, regarding the issue of legitimation of violence, we might also touch the distinction between political idealism and political realism, and what is the status of morality and ethics between these two approaches. It might be fruitful in order to understand the attempt of the normative morality and just war theory to reconcile violence and politics, and as we previously mentioned, such contradiction might be false to some extent due to embeddedness of substance of violence into the field of politics.

Starting with political idealism, it stands for the reference to a set of ideals and prescriptions and the use of such a set while developing and fulfilling the political agenda. Realism and idealism represent the system of value judgments of the political, e.g. `is it the right thing to do'? There is a famous phrase by Peter Drucker which is very common in the discourse of professional managers, business consultants, etc. It sounds like “management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things”, and sometimes it is also rephrased and shortened to “there is a difference between doing things right and doing right things”. In my opinion, this phrase takes the shade of `realism-idealism' dichotomy and attempts to assign different value judgment strategies to different modes of governing (management and leadership). It is crucial to emphasize here that even ethical dimension is usually perceived only as a key element of political idealism and more noticeable, it still might seem that idealism is `more ethical', however, it does not mean that ethical dimension is absent in political realism. In the same way, Roshwald (1971, 100) claims that “we speak of a policy as realistic, implying that it is reasonable and commendable, though if we refer to a policy as a manifestation of realpolitik the implication is that it lacks moral consideration and is to be blamed. On the other hand, idealistic policy, too, may have two value meanings: it may be highly praised as the expression of the best elements in the zoon politicon, or it may be ridiculed as the naive belief of a political fool.”

In my opinion, here we might derive the notion of the ambiguity of political action and judgement. Roshwald emphasizes here that incorrect, or more specifically, inapplicable moral judgment in the given political situation might lead to the negative excesses of both approaches; to naivete in case of idealism and to cruelty in case of realism. In the same way, Niebuhr (2003, 141) claims that “the realistic wisdom of the statesman is reduced to foolishness if it is not under the influence of the foolishness of the moral seer. The latter's idealism results in political futility and sometimes in moral confusion if it is not brought into commerce and communication with the realities of man's collective life.”

Both idealism and realism constitute several sets of values, on which the moral judgement is based. On the other hand, there might be a misconception that political realism lacks values, that realism is immoral and not oriented towards ideal moral goals. But it is crucial to emphasize here in a very explicit manner that political realism does constitute a set of values, but the essence of these values has different features and properties, for instance, "pursuing pragmatic policies", and usually it does not mean that such open proclaiming of goals and pursuing is immoral. Prerequisites of political realism were demonstrated in the works of Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes and Max Weber (as cited in Frazer & Hutchings, 2008, 91), who claim that the interests of state or statesman should prevail over the interests of others and these authors also look at politics, more or less, from the point of view of a political dominator or a state organization. So basically, while idealist would probably say `we must work towards what we might be and have and adjust our goals with ideals', the realist would say `we must work with what we already have and adjust our agenda with checks and balances of a recent situation'. In conclusion, Galston (2010, 391) claims that in the mode of realism “individuals must agree that the core challenge of politics is to overcome anarchy without embracing tyranny”.

And now it is possible to make several connections between notions of political idealism and realism and use of violence (Vladimirov, 2019a). At first, how violence is perceived in these two different modes of politics? The violence has rarely been an end in itself but rather the instrument to achieve the assigned political goal. On the one hand, the extreme approach of “peace at any price” is sometimes read as a part of a tradition of political realism that defines the logic of politics as one in which the ends justify the means, and in which violence is a central, perennial element in the available repertoire of means.

Following this idea, violence is accepted as an inherent feature of human nature and as a necessary aspect of politics. Morgenthau (2004, 31-32), in his contemporary theory of political realism, claims that the power is the main subject of the interest of state or statesmen thus the aftereffects and interconnections between states should be taken into account. On the other hand, political idealism usually considers violence as the unwelcome component of politics (Frazer & Hutchings, 2008, 93). However, Roshwald (1971, 101) notes that in the case of conflict a realist would likely be focused on keeping the balance of forces, saving resources and pursuing his or state`s interests, thus the idealist would likely be focused on the blueprint of ideal state, society or world order.

Chapter 2. Critique of just war theory