a history of violence

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"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results."
-- Albert Einstein

Ian Spears from the University of Guelph delivered a presentation at Saturday's conference on post-crisis state-building. His research interests have focused largely on problems and prospects for conflict and conflict resolution in African states. His earlier work concerned the difficulties in negotiating and implementing power-sharing agreements in the aftermath of civil wars. More recently, he has been considering the opposite approach, the possibility that secession or, more radically, the redrawing of Africa’s borders, might provide an alternative to conflict resolution. Quite bluntly, he put forward the idea that perhaps one of the best things the West can do in Africa is to just leave it alone -- that is, to let the various groups "sort things out" amongst themselves, as was the case in the history of Europe and North America. Controversial? No doubt. It also brought to mind something I wrote for one of my undergraduate courses:

Violence as an active social force is ever present in the history of modernization. But violence, in and of itself, is dispassionate and non-intentional. The use of violence, and the justification thereof, arises not out of causal necessity, but rather is driven by pronounced social and political agendas. When we examine the history of modernization in England and France, we recognize the inextricable part played by violence in the upheaval of the social order. At first glance, however, it seems that there is a certain incommensurability between the histories of these countries. Barrington Moore, Jr. argues that “the underlying social structure of France was fundamentally different and hence ruled out the kind of peaceful transformation – which, we have seen, was actually quite far from peaceful – that England experienced”. While I believe that Moore is correct in asserting that the conditions leading up to the French Revolution in some sense necessitated the use of violent force, I also argue that violence in general is inextricably linked to major revolutionary processes. I make no presumptive arguments about the degree and the direction to which violence is exercised, but I believe that it is just as important to consider the development of democracy and modernity in England with an eye toward its own violent history. The social and historical conditions may have differed in some aspects, but what is common between France and England is that revolution was born out of seemingly disparate factors that collectively resulted in general social malaise and dissatisfaction with the standing social order, providing the impetus and justification for the use of violence to bring about change.

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To say that violence is necessary in one sense is not meant to serve as justification for its exercise. The forms and directions which violence takes are not guided by necessity. These are shaped by the social and historical realities in which violence operates. In England, the main impetus for violence, against the peasantry by the landed upper class during the enclosures and by the parliamentarians against the royalists during the Civil War, was the developing commercialism and capitalism. It was the landed upper class that appropriated violence to promote their commercial interests and, although another transformation would occur in the form of the Industrial Revolution that would render the nobility obsolete, it was they initially who set the stage for England’s entry into the modern era. In France, the nobility became the victims of the violence, as justified by the revolutionary ideologies of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The nobility represented what the revolutionaries believed to be the cause of France’s suffering: the inequality, undeserved obligation, and unwarranted privilege that defined the old order. These contrasts in the social and historical realities necessitated different ways of effecting change and transformation. The nobilities of England and France played very different roles and suffered very different fates in the modernization of their respective countries. The disparate histories of these two countries took them on different paths to modernity, but the violence which is inextricably linked to their transformations helped define the role of those elements of the old order in the creation of new social, political, and economic relationships.

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