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[AU: (from the Editor): Re the intro and conclusion it is arguable that nonviolence is the preferred method if winning hearts and minds is the objective. Communication and persuasion is much more difficult (if not impossible) in an armed conflict situation: violence replaces politics or dialogue (Arendt). Please mention this.] [I have tried to address this adequately in the revisions to the introduction.]
<ET>Insurgent War and Peace Ethics.</ET> Insurgents, guerrillas, freedom fighters, terrorists, “‘francs tireurs,”’ and unlawful combatants—militant forces opposing an existing government or political order are often depicted as ignoring or flouting any sense of ethical conduct of war. But the question of violence, and the ethics of its use (or refraining from its use) is a key one for any militant movement. Insurgents opposing a state with greater military force must rely to a large extent on “winning hearts and minds,” undermining the state's ability to govern. Violence can serve as part of this strategy, by intimidating a population or demonstrating the vulnerability of the government. But it is always a danger for insurgents, since violence tends to crowd out room for dialogue and political compromise – and, in a straightforward military contest, insurgents are likely to lose. In addition, insurgents who genuinely take themselves to be acting on behalf of an oppressed population may be committed to restrictions on violence that go beyond merely tactical considerations. This entry will explore the ways in which insurgents and allied theorists have taken up the question of the proper use of violence.
<H1>The Question of Violence.</H1> Not all militant political movements use violence. The ethics of insurgent violence must be understood as part of the broader issue of the role violence ought to play in militant politics.
H1H2>Nonviolent Militancy.</H1H2 Nonviolent tactics proceed from the the recognition that any regime, even an authoritarian one, relies on some degree of popular support or at least acquiescence; active, nonviolent, resistance involves denying that compliance and hence drastically raising the costs of governance.
Perhaps the most influential approach to non-nonviolent militance militancy was Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi’s satyagraha (soul force or truth force), which he applied as a leader of India’s independence movement from 1916– to 1947. Satyagraha, and nonviolent approaches generally, are sometimes described as “passive resistance,” including at first even by Gandhi, but this label can beis misleading. Far from being a form of acquiescence, nonviolent militancye goes beyond persuasion/advocacy and normal politics, to embrace pressure, and sanctions: coercive tactics, such as strikes, boycotts, and mass demonstrations.
Two advantages are claimed for nonviolence over violence. First, many proponents of nonviolence believe that it is inherently morally superior to violence, and able to communicate with opponents. Intending to harm or kill one’s adversary is problematic because it fails to treat him or her as a moral thinking being, capable of change, and therefore potentially deserving of respect and forgiveness:,and the finality of killing assumes the infallibility of the killer’s own moral or ideological, religious views.
Secondly, governments often command superior powers of violence, making nonviolence an attractive tactical choice. A movement that eschews violence may be able to gain sympathy publicly, both within a given society, and internationally. Conversely, the use of violence by a militant movement gives their opponents an opportunity to use repressive force without censure.
As a coercive tactic, nonviolence is not ethically unproblematicNonviolent militancy is still coercive, and so raises ethical questions. In particular, while although nonviolent movements do not maim or kill their opponents, they inevitably cause harm, as a way of inflicting costs on the government or society that the militants oppose. For instance, the Indian boycott of British textiles in 1920 caused hardship in Lancashire mill towns that relied on the Indian export market. When in Britain, Gandhi visited the workers to explain the campaign.While Although some proponents of nonviolence have gone further and advocated truly passive tactics, Gandhi’s response was to focus on intention (his solution was similar to the “doctrine of double effect” invoked in contemporary just war theory to provide a limited excuse for “collateral damage”). Harm that was merely a foreseen but unintended result of nonviolent tactics was acceptable because the consequences of actions are so various and difficult to determine, that no one can be expected to take them all fully into account; the intent was the morally important element.
Gandhian ideas influenced other militant movements, especially during the anti-anticolonial struggles in Africa. Kwame Nkrumah’s “Positive Action” campaign for Ghana’s (formerly the Gold Coast) independence from Britain was self-consciously based on the Gandhian model, culminating in general strikes and boycotts. While Although there was rioting and looting in Ghana, the independence movement was predominantly non-nonviolent. Nonviolent tactics were also prominently embraced by the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, the Solidarity movement for labor and political rights in Poland in the late 20th twentieth Century century, and some elements of the 1987–1993 Palestinian intifada (rebellion; literally, shaking off)against the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
H1H2>The Difficulties of Non-ViolenceNonviolence.</H1H2Non-Nonviolence poses two difficulties even for militants who support it in principle. First, nonviolent tactics rely on mass non-noncompliance with authority. Nonviolence, in highly charged situations of political conflict, requires restraint and discipline; this is exacerbated by the need for nonviolent movements to maintain discipline in a large number of people, rather than a relatively small military vanguard. Second, for militants seeking national liberation or control of an existing state, it raises questions about the nature of the state they hope to take charge of.
The shift to violent tactics in South Africa is representative of the difficulty of maintaining non-nonviolent discipline. The African National Congress (ANC), which worked against the apartheid (separation) system of racial discrimination and minority rule in South Africa, began with non-nonviolent tactics aimed at preserving the possibility of communal reconciliation. In 1961, Umkhonto we Sizwe (spear of the nation) was launched by Nelson Mandela, a leader in the ANC and later South Africa’s first post-apartheid president, and other ANC members. Umkhonto was not founded as a part of the ANC, but shared some membership and leadership with the political organization, and the ANC dropped its absolute condemnation of violence to accommodate the movement. Initially, Umkhonto engaged only in acts of sabotage, such as bombing (unoccupied) power stations. Later in its career, it was implicated in bombings that killed civilians, executions, and a brief campaign of laying landmines. At his 1964 trial for sabotage and high treason, Mandela argued the leadership of the ANC remained committed to non-nonviolence as an ideal, but recognized that many of its members and constituents did not share theseir convictions, or have the discipline to respond to violent state suppression without violence. Founding Umkhonto was intended as a way to bring that inevitable violence under control.
Commitment to non-nonviolence is challenged in a different way for movements that become, or aspire to become, governments. Northern Rhodesia’s (now Zambia) independence movement, for example, was largely non-nonviolent, in part reflecting a principled stance by Kenneth Kaunda, who would become the first president. AfterwardsAfterward, Kaunda came to believe that a nation could not be governed using only non-nonviolent tactics—police and an army were necessary.
Gandhi himself called upon on members of the Congress Party, the main independence organization in India, to turn away from politics, once independence was achieved, and focus on building decentralized social structures at the level of the community. Few of the prominent Congress leaders followed his advice.
<H1>The Decision to Use Violence.</H1> When militant groups choose to use violence, their ethical arguments for doing so, and for the way in which violence is used, tend to follow well-worn categories of just war theory—although they may not be couched in classical terminology. Insurgents concern themselves both with jus ad bellum, the morality of going to war, and jus in bello, the justice of war’s conduct. This section discusses the resort to violence; the next will consider the ethics of conducting insurgency.
Insurgents most often advance one of two traditional jus ad bellum justifications: an argument from necessity, i.e., that all non-violent means of redress have been exhauseted, or a claim that they are acting in self-defense or retaliation. SSome insurgents, famously Frantz Fanon,appeal to the inherent virtues of violence as wellargue that violence may have inherent value as well; this will be discussed below.[AU: (from the Editor): please give an example.]. OrSometimes the claim is made that all other methods, short of violence, have been tried.
Just war theory allows groups with a just cause to use force if no other means of redress is available. Most insurgent groups devote the bulk of their efforts to establishing the justice of their cause. Just cause is a very important element in the ethical quality of an insurgency, but the arguments presented are too various varied to survey here..
Some insurgencies leave the requirement that violence be absolutely necessary to the achievement of their goals as an implicit corollary to the argument that their causes are just. Others point to the failures of peaceful movements, or argue necessity on the grounds that non-nonviolent tactics are inherently incapable of bringing about the required social change. Vladimir Lenin, leader of Russia’s Bolshevik revolution, argued that a proletarian state could only come about through violent revolution because the capitalist state was in its very essence a violent tool for oppressing the masses, and so could not even in principle be reformed, but must be replaced.
Rather than argue that violence is necessary to achieve a just cause, some insurgents justify violence as defense against or reaction to state violence. This argument is easiest when the state engages in egregious violence against the insurgents’ claimed constituency. Frantz Fanon, a prominent actor participant in, and theorist of, the 1954–1962 Algerian war of independence, describes the ways in which the colonial situation laid bare the violent nature of the state. While Suffering use of force by the police is a rarity for affluent citizens in Western nations, police but state brutality and military operations against the populace are a daily reality for the colonized. According to Fanon, this daily experience of violence, among other things, makes colonized peoples skeptical of calls for their reaction to be peacefulnonviolent.
Insurgent thinkers also appeal to less extreme forms of state violence. All states use violence to maintain themselves to some extent, in the form of police and military forces. In legitimate states, most people do not consider it appropriate to resist or reject this force, if it is lawfully used. But Iinsurgents reject the legitimacy of the state, or states, they are fighting against. As a result, they do not accept that the illegimate violence used by the state should be either equated with or distinguished from, the legitimate is more legitimate than violence used by insurgents – and, in fact, many insurgents maintain that it is less legitimate. [Insurgent violence must be either equated with or distinguished from state violence – those seem to be jointly exhaustive options. I hope my re-revision keeps the spirit of the revision.] Insurgent violence, they some argue, should be understood as justified retaliation or self-defense against state violence, not as an initiation of violence. It is asymmetric. [I'm not sure that I like this last added sentence – the argument from state violence is mostly about overcoming a judgment of asymmetry in favor of the state, even though it is often taken to create a new asymmetry in favor of the insurgents. But, more pragmatically, I don't think it adds much, and the referent of the pronoun is potentially confusing.]
The idea of insurgency as defense against state violence is articulated by Enresto “Che” Guevera, one of the pre-preeminent Latin American theorists of insurgency, and a guerrilla leader in Cuba, Bolivia, and Africa., He argued that a viable guerrilla movement is not practicable in any state where democracy or political legitimacy exists—as a moral matter, in genuinely legitimate states alternatives to violence exist; as a practical matter, the populace will not support violence if they feel the government is giving a fair hearing to their grievances without it.. But once an oppressive government has lost that legitimacy, “peace is considered already broken.”
A variation on the argument from about state violence -, most often seen in Marxist or anarchist thought -, is the argument from regarding “structural” violence. “‘State violence”’ justifications focus on the overt force used by the state, in the form of police and the military. “‘Structural violence”’ justifications focus on the ways in which existing systems inflict harm on certain classes in society, such as the poor deprived or members of a particular ethnic group, without the overt use of force. Poverty,and starvation, or infant mortality can leave someone just as dead as a bullet or a knife. Thus, a state/system that creates poverty for some of its members, through allowing or encouraging their exploitation, is using violence against them whether or not it actually applies the instruments of force directly; it is thus claimed to be ethical to respond with physical, direct violence.
Thus far, the decision to use force has been discussed from a traditional just war perspective in which violence is regarded as regrettable but sometimes necessary. Not all theorists of insurgency accept this assumption; some see an inherent value in violence.
The most prominent example is Fanon. Fanon makes much of the psychologically “‘cleansing”’ power of violent action. The colonized person, in Fanon’s theory, sublimates futile feelings of rage against oppression into magical thinking and violence against other colonized persons. Violence against the oppressor re-refocuses the mind on the real problems at hand and fosters psychological integration. The view that violence is necessary for the perfection of the oppressed’s character was popular both with African anticolonial theorists and other insurgents. Other insurgency theorists, such as Guevara, stress the moral character created through violent struggle more generally, similar to the way in which states stress that military service fosters courage and self-discipline. Fascists, too, praised the use of violence as a creative, energizing force, in their struggles to gain power in the 1920’0s and 1930’0s.
H1H2>Ethical Use of Violence.</H1H2 The most pressing question of jus in bello, justice in war, is the proper relationship between combatants and noncombatants. Insurgent movements are most often criticized for denying or ignoring the core principle that noncombatants are immune from attack.
H1H2>Targeting Civilians.</H1H2 Few insurgents deny the principle of noncombatant immunity outright; they may claim exceptions, however, or define the class of noncombatants in different ways than traditional just war theorists.
Military operations by states inevitably involve “collateral damage” to civilians, whether through accidental targeting, the use of indiscriminate weapons, environmental effects such as contamination from depleted uranium munitions, or damage to infrastructure used by both the military and civilians, such as electrical grids. Traditional just war theory distinguishes between targeting civilians and unintentionally (but forseeably) harming them, but insurgent arguments may not make this distinction. Others imply that the extent of civilian deaths, and the failure of states to take appropriate steps to prevent or minimize those deaths, belie protestations that the deaths are unintentional. Either way, attacks on civilians are justified as retaliation for a prior state violation of civilian immunity.
Other insurgent groups target populations or particular groups or communities that the insurgents do not regard as civilian, even if they may not be traditional combatants. The general argument is that individuals who do not participate directly in the conflict may nonetheless be “combatants” because of the material or political support they give. For example, Palestinian insurgents have debated whether all Israelis are legitimate targets of attack as supporters of the occupation, only Israeli military forces may be targeted, or whether Israeli citizens generally are civilians, but those who have settled in certain areas of the occupied territories have forfeited protected civilian status by choosing to live on illegitimately appropriated (in the insurgents’ view) land.
Combined with a version of the structural violence argument, an expansion of combatant status to those who support the military effort opposed by an insurgency can cast the net very wide. If, for instance, insurgents regard poverty as structural violence that results from the developed world’s capitalist economic policies, anyone who benefits from global capitalism may look like a legitimate target. This would include almost any citizen of a North American or European nation. Osama bin Laden, leader of the al al-Qaeda organization that carried out the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City and on the Pentagon, justified the attack on the World Trade Center in an October 2001 interview by arguing that those in the World Trade Center were part of the economic system that the United States used to oppress the Muslims peoples, and so they were not innocent civilians.