Violence as a Constitutive of States

Abstract

Is the state monopoly on the use of legitimate violence a modern invention that refers exclusively to a particular provincial sociohistorical phenomenon that emerged in seventeenth-century Europe? The answer this paper presents is no. Instead, I argue that the canonical Eurocentric epistemic communities have sought to displace other systems of governance and administration and replace them with European and Westphalian-like models. Yet, an urgent question remains unanswered: Why were political scientists and political sociology scholars from the Global South forced to adopt these [Eurocentric] theses and apply them to other, diverse regions, which have had different and prior historical, social, political, cultural, and economic experiences from Europe? To answer these questions, the paper adopts a decolonial approach to examine the following hypothesis: internal violence, repression, and control (from above) were the constitutive factors of forming and preserving political authority necessary for the establishment and development of modern states outside the Western hemisphere. To do so, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Ibn Ḵẖaldūn’s (1332–1406) theses on the ontological and constitutive role of violence are deployed to critique the Weberian principle of the state’s monopoly over the legitimate use of physical force. I present what I call the Ḵẖaldūnian trilogy of ʿasabiyya, al-Daʿwa al-Diīniyah, al-shāwkāh wa al-ghālbāh wa al-qāhr (i.e., the dominant group, religious-ideological discourse, force majeure, and repression-domination), upon which state/authority relies to constitute and consolidate its power and legitimacy, without being occupied with either the legality or the justice of this violence, as epistemic alternative of the Eurocentric conceptions of state-building.