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Dr. Salam Al Rabdi \ Author And Researcher In International Relations
Violence is one of the
means used in politics, regardless of its legitimacy and its philosophical
ethics, and also away from the dialectics of social contract theory or human
nature that revolve around the human instinct and the struggle for survival.
Based on this, it can be said that the rationale of the relationship between
violence and politics raise many problematics, as from an analytical point of
view there is a difficulty in the possibility of a precise and clear separation
between violence and politics, and it happens due to the cultural and
ideological background by which an action or behavior can be judged as falling
In the category of political violence or vice versa. For example, political
violence related to resistance to occupation according to certain culture may
be a legitimate and legal act, and in return the same act may be according to
another culture an illegal act, that falls under the category of terrorist
practices.
It is worth mentioning
in this context the difficulty of defining and enumerating political, economic,
cultural and even legal issues and actions that can be described as political
violence. For example, to the present day there is no global agreement on a
comprehensive and clear definition of political violence related to terrorism,
and the same applies to the definition of the crime of aggression issued by the
General Assembly of the United Nations, which still carries with it many
interpretations and diligences.
In this context related
to the problematic of the concept of political violence, many question marks
can be raised, which revolve around:
1- How to classify the economic
sanctions imposed by some countries or issued by the UN Security Council: Are
they violent and inhumane political acts and means? Or are they a legitimate political sovereign
action?
2- How to classify the media
policies that encourage and incite violence. Do these policies fall under the
category of incitement to political violence and support for terrorism? Or do
these policies fall under the category of freedom of expression?
3- How difficult it is to
classify political violence in terms of its source, whether it is emanating
from states, individuals or non-governmental organizations, not to mention the
difficulty of separating each of them?
4- How to classify corruption as
one of the most dangerous forms of political violence based on modern concepts
used in approaching corruption problematics?
5- How to classify violence
related to comprehensive human security, such as environmental, health,
technological, and biological violence..etc?
According to this group
of question marks, it seems that there is an urgent need to clarify the idea
that political violence is not only conditional on the association with
physical violence or concrete violence,
there may be more severe and influential economic and cultural violence at of
all political levels. In addition, what complicates matters on a philosophical
and realistic level is that most political theories that base their analysis on
the assumption that the state as a political institution (which possesses the
legitimacy of violence within and outside its borders) is the main actor on the
world stage, has been categorically overridden with the increasing influence of
Individuals, NGOs, transnational corporations ..etc. Also, the criteria of
power itself have changed and are no longer measured only by the extent of the
ability to use legitimate violence represented by political power, and are no
longer confined to the traditional form associated ith classic economic power
or conventional military power.
Consequently, and based
on the development in the nature of contemporary human issues, work must be
taken to create a new critical political vision for everything related to the
criteria for how to understand political violence in all its forms. In this
regard, we are obliged as a result of the ethical dilemmas associated with many
issues (such as issues of climate change and the environment, and everything
related to the biotechnology revolution and gene manipulation, as well as the
implications of artificial intelligence.etc) to reconsider many concepts,
especially with the presence of new terms related to contemporary political
violence, such as environmental violence, technological violence, biological
violence, algorithmic bias violence and health violence..etc.
Perhaps one of the
brightest evidences for the importance of finding a new critical view of the
concept of political violence are those accelerating developments at the level
of global health security resulting from the repercussions of the spread of the
Covid-19 pandemic, was accompanied by
many violent and unusual manifestations in global politics that are related to
health issues, such as exchanging accusations about the causes of the pandemic
or wars of masks and medical devices ... etc.,
which confirm the extent of the new changes in the concept and standards
of political violence.
In light of the foregoing, we can say that, despite the existence of many initiatives that try to develop a logical critical vision on how to approach the concept of political violence, but unfortunately it is traditional, and it is characterized by its inability to create a new intellectual framework capable of understanding the emerging phenomena and practices, which are related to the philosophy of political violence. As well as it is ignoring to a large extent most of the aforementioned problematics and dialectics, as it seems to be still centered around a classic vision of the era of modernity, that already has been surpassed it .
We are currently in the era of Postmodernism, Post-truth and
Post-humanism which has dropped all axioms and postulates, that it is era of
the methodology of skepticism and atomization that we need, despite all the
problematic controversies in that methodology.
