a history of violence

a history of violence

A Comprehensive History of Violence: From Ancient Times to the Modern Era

1. Introduction: Defining Violence and Its Impact

According to the World Health Organization, “Violence is the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation.” It does not simply occur in armed conflict environments, but also within different social contexts. While this broader perspective is acknowledged, the current volume deals specifically with violence during and in the immediate aftermath of armed conflict, drawing upon the comparative and regional perspectives provided within the volume as a whole.

This volume provides an overview of violence both during and in the immediate aftermath of armed conflict. Engaging with a wide array of historical documents and literature, it contains both comparative perspectives and a wide range of regional case studies. The included materials allow readers to examine patterns of violence within specific armed conflicts and assess the impact of it on post-conflict areas. As will become clear in these pages, the subject of violence in its many guises is not always clearly delineated. For this volume, various forms of organized collective violence are dealt with at length. In doing so, the aim is not to ignore other forms of violence, but rather to address the diversity and complexity of violent activities associated with organized armed conflict.

2. Violence in Ancient Civilizations

The ancients observed the constant possibility that internal violence or foreign enemies could condition their actions, hence their extreme attention: “Yet this person who hit his father with a blow that cannot be serious,” they ask themselves in wonder, “whose this poor man might be made subject to trial or even a condemnation, is it really so important here that blow? The acclaimed constitutions severely punished mistreatment and for good reason today’s penal codes protect the vulnerable. Given the power to retaliate in the future, their lack of retaliation could often be explained, at least by inertia, and the expansion of citizenship and its sources not infrequently allowed others to depend on the victimized ones. In cases in which hate was particularly strong, instead, the elimination of a potential enemy such as a brother or a father was a frequent solution, but what was clear is that this kind of violence did not receive social approval even in the most violent episodes of ancient society.

As with the emergence of agriculture, law and ancient states greatly amplified human violence. Law merely regulates force or resources. In many circumstances, the weaker was easily forced to follow the strong. One could say that ancient law ratified the natural violence of the strong, discounting it or regulating it by foreseen norms.

Ancient states and ancient violence

3. Violence in Medieval Times: Wars and Feuds

Other new regulations punished war and fighting. The Church made use of excommunication and threats of the enforcement of these sanctions. Knights received another type of severe punishment in the form of deprivation of their title, rank, and benefits. Both types of excommunication were rarely carried out by the ecclesiastical authorities due to the countermeasures of the emperor or the threat of a social uprising. Furthermore, the ecclesiastical legislation was subject to the medieval system of justice. Despite the many limitations of the incentives, it is more conclusive to approach the control of arming and fighting through the punishment of individual delinquent acts. The monarchy preferred the payment of fines and contributions. Because of the inherent difficulties of exercising a monopoly on violence, the state increasingly interfered with everyday life, once again exercising a monopoly on violence. This is how the concept of the outlaw became more complex; from our contemporary perspective, it was now characterized by widespread criminal activity and an unstable peaceful lifestyle of the communities.

In medieval times, with the emergence of feudal kingdoms and city states, a distinction began to exist between the legitimate violence of the state and the new criminal activities labeled as outlawry. Attempts were made to suppress these criminal activities, and in the tenth century, with the advent of organized societies, penal law became more visible in the fight against criminal activities such as theft and manslaughter. Authors from this period began to see theft in a somewhat physiological manner, that is, as a natural act resulting from the physical need of a human person. Such ideas overcame the simple dichotomy of outlaw and peacekeeper.

4. The Rise of Modern Violence: Industrial Revolution to World Wars

However, terrorism and now cyber-attacks on increasing scales trouble the peace. They are difficult to control and gain public attention because of increased speed in communications. Additionally, people of different beliefs or races can often coexist, but at times it takes continuous, serious efforts to keep the peace. A byproduct of increased peace is the rise of legal indignation and a willingness to protect those who have less. Awareness of suffering makes people work to protect those who suffer. Countless non-governmental organizations and advocacy groups make use of sophisticated media publicity and wide-ranging networks of friends. UN Human Rights laws and international humanitarian law are now in place to protect people at moments of crisis and beyond. The increase of legal responses to harm caused rather than other expressions of revenge indicates that there is a societal will to solve and prevent the personal violence of the past.

During the 20th century, advancements in communications and transportation technologies brought far-off events and people closer, making the impact of multiple increases in violence more destructive to more people. Economically, passive recipients of industrialization became active participants in the productive process. Material benefits from heightened participation increased the overall quality of life worldwide. After World War II, most of the developed world merged to ensure demands at the individual, national, and international level were increasingly met with the aid of the United Nations. Peaceful resolutions to disputes brought down the number of interstate wars, giving way to an overall increase in commerce and democracy. Substantial reductions of political, capacity, and genocidal violence made the world a safer place.

5. Contemporary Forms of Violence: Terrorism, Cyberwarfare, and Beyond

5.1. Between Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism Since its earliest emergence, terrorism has been defined as the instrument by which a violent minority seeks to bring about a political regime in a more or less extreme form of order—its relationship with the doctrines of the political theory having been formed in the course of a long historical evolution. As its etymology suggests, terrorism, just like the thing it was originally identified with, is nothing more than the exercise of any and all forms of government authority by a violent minority upon the respective majority. It is the iniquitous means by which the French device of faith, virtue incorporated into France’s first (Jacobin) constitution, governs and administers the same citizens who have adopted it with popular acclaim. From that fateful associating of violence with the idea of government on the revolutionary stage of a France that maintained the primacy of culture and the primogeniture of sovereignty, humanity will begin to decline towards the tragic cycle of the contemporary moral and social disease that afflicts it.

In the late 20th century, splendid though it may have been for the increased importance of the individual and of those collective bodies capable of representing its interests, that era has nonetheless witnessed the outbreak of a newly globalized political disorder. As the formal and informal rules of inter-state violence—and therefore of order and peace—have begun to lose their raison d’être, forms of war other than those waged for independence, or national consolidation or supremacy, or for the ideological victory of one utopian vision over another have started to appear on the historical stage. Economic and financial warfare, informal and interstate terrorism, but also, in addition to the centuries-old practices of piracy and privateering, the most recent and insidious forms of depredation such as computer and cyberwars, have given renewed centrality to violence and its relationships with the other momenta of, and relationships at, the level of both international and domestic order.