60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

violence, legitimacy and dynamics of genocide – notions of mass violence examined 39
397-9). The sovereign impersonating and owning the state was supplanted
by an authority – based on violence – devoid of such subjectivity
(cf. Gerstenberger 2006: 517-19). At the time, this ‘nation’ was
by no means homogeneous, linguistically or culturally. For achieving
underpinnings of the ‘daily plebiscite’ (Renan 1990: 19) in such
homogeneity, a long and in important ways violent process directed
by the central state was required. However, regardless of whether
we conceive the nation politically in terms of demos or in communalist
terms as based on ethnos (Kumitz 2005), it is always faced with
requirements concerning the order of violence it represents. What is
more, as a part of an international system predicated on the mutual
recognition of sovereign entities, the state is obliged to measure up
to some minimum requirements, which concern above all eff ective
control of the bounded territory which it claims and which is recognised
by others (cf. Kössler 1994: chs. 2, 3). In important ways, therefore,
an international order of violence also predicates dispensations
of such order on the level of individual states. In the international discourse
that has gained ascendancy since the end of ‘bloc’ confrontation
(1989-91), this premise is brought out graphically in the claim to
a right to intervene, by military means, in the cases of ‘failed states’,
seen as those which do not comply with general norms (for criticism
of the concept, see Hauck 2004).
What then does the nation state do, what is it supposed to do, according
to the standard imposed by the international community, in terms of
ordering and administering violence? As we have seen, fi rst and foremost,
the state monopolises violence. Internally, this happens through
the defi ning and enforcing of law, in democratic states through the legislative,
executive and judicative branches of government. Externally,
violence is monopolised by the state above all in its being the main
agent of international relations. To be sure, again on the international
scene as well as within domestic relations, state-sponsored relationships
do not by any means exhaust societal life. Rather, strands of international
civil society, even though by no means devoid of inequality,
hegemony and class relations (cf. Kössler and Melber 1993, especially
ch. 3), also contain versions of a basic form of social organisation that
diff ers, in fundamental ways, from the hierarchal forms shaped by the
state: networks may very well gain more weight under the conditions
of increasingly unbounded means of communication in the wake of
the microelectronic revolution (cf. Castells 2001: 1-2). It should also be
noted that tendencies towards the privatisation of war – inter alia in the
context of the ‘network war’ (Castells 2001: 158-64) – and also nonstate
security apparatuses (cf. Baker 2008) – are changing the confi guration
of violence and the formal state.