60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

40 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
As far as the modern state monopolises violence, this implies further
modalities. By that very token, the state hedges in violence, and it
does so in a germane way precisely by itself, by means of its organs exerting
violence in the very act of hedging it in. The monopoly of violence,
after all, does not imply forfeiture of violence; rather, violence
is concentrated and harnessed, put at the disposal of the state, and
ideally reserved for its exclusive use. Still, through this concentrated
potential violence, and its sheer threatening impact, a pacifi ed space is
created domestically, and through the workings of diplomatic negotiations
and treaties, and in particular, through regional supranational
organisations also within the international sphere. This may be called
pacifi ed precisely in the ideological sense that such ‘peace’ is predicated
on the prior application, and on the virtual potential, of largescale,
warlike violence. Therefore, precisely by hedging in violence,
the state also exerts violence, both in manifest and implicit ways.
The manifestation of violence by the state is not restricted to exerting
it in concrete situations of confl ict, coercion or punishment. The
state also stages violence in displaying its potential for exerting it on
an everyday level as well as on a mass scale. State visits by heads of
state or government are accompanied by more or less boastful military
paraphernalia, in some cases important festivals and anniversaries
are marked by parades of the military, and in some cases also the
police. This links up with the performative dimensions that integrate
actions of violence into a whole range of rituals, reproducing societal
relationships as well as cosmologies over a wide array of fi elds. Violence,
even in its most gruesome forms, including mass killings and
genocide, can thus be read in terms of a ‘poetics’, carrying culturally
deep-rooted meanings, however despicable such actions may be to
the observer or analyst (cf. Whitehead 2005, Hinton 2005). Further,
in such public performances of violence the state exposes its potential
for the actual exertion of violence and also demonstrates the legitimacy
of violence applied under its own purview. Moreover, the introduction
of violence into everyday life or into seemingly civilian,
festive contexts serves to ‘banalise’ violence and make it more acceptable
as a frequent occurrence (cf. Thomas and Virchow 2006). While
such displays generally do not expose manifest violence as such, but,
rather, means of violence, this still contains the very real threat inherent
in the possibility that such means actually be deployed. To give
a gross example from colonial history: after putting down the Bondelswarts
uprising in southern Namibia in 1922 by actually bombing
the insurgents, the South African air force fl ew a whole series of sorties
in which they demonstrated bombing to assembled African communities
in the region or dropped a Union fl ag in front of the house
of the most powerful chief in the area (see Kössler 2006: 85).