Can Political Violence Ever Be Justified? (Political Theory Today) by Elizabeth Frazer & Kimberly Hutchings

Author:Elizabeth Frazer & Kimberly Hutchings [Frazer, Elizabeth & Hutchings, Kimberly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509529230
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2019-07-11T18:30:00+00:00

Liberation

A theme of necessity, and how actors conduct themselves with regard to it, is also central to the thinking about violence by Frantz Fanon, who was primarily concerned with the anti-colonial struggle, but was also, like Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir, influenced by marxist and existentialist ideas. In 1958 Fanon represented the provisional government in exile of the Republic of Algeria. Since 1954, the Algerian war had been fought between the National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale, FLN) and the French colonial military, police and administrative forces. In 1956 the FLN launched a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the French Algerian authorities, which escalated with reprisal actions by the authorities – the Battle of Algiers. The French government deployed troops to suppress the FLN in an exceptionally (for the time) brutal regime including torture and disappearances. As ambassador to independent Ghana, Fanon attended the All African People’s Congress in Accra in December 1958. There he made a celebrated speech challenging the doctrine of non-violence that was influential among African leaders, including Kwame Nkrumah, president of Ghana. Fanon, who received a standing ovation and ‘wild applause’ (although he was not a leader of the Algerian delegation), told the conference that the struggle for liberation could never rule out recourse to violence; that freedom fighters and nationalist leaders had to adopt all forms of struggle, and could not rely on peaceful negotiations alone. Thereafter the idea that it is the context of violence itself, the violence of the colonial regimes and institutions, that determines uses of force and incidents of violence was influential among African leaders.

In The Wretched of the Earth (published in French in 1961) Fanon, at greater length, emphasizes the given, irreducibly violent context of colonial rule, and of the imposition of capitalist production and relations on economies and societies. Governing races arrive from elsewhere; they compartmentalize ‘settler’ and ‘native’ zones, the boundaries of which are violently policed; indigenous culture and society are crushed; native people are murdered. Given this, decolonization can only be a violent phenomenon. Living in such a context oppresses people, and it brutalizes them. Everyone is afraid. Colonized people fear and also are fascinated by the settlers, their brutality and their segregated lives. The colonialists cannot establish the levels of force necessary to thoroughly subdue all territory and people. So the threat of retaliatory violence is omnipresent to them. In such an atmosphere of violence – in particular at the point when native people begin to organize themselves in parties, when corporations want guarantees of order – aggression will be acted out, ‘guns will go off by themselves’.

In his speech in Accra, Fanon called for political leaders not to rule out violence as a strategy and tactic in anti-colonialist and independence struggles. His argument was exhortatory and prescriptive. In The Wretched of the Earth he sets out a more predictive and explanatory theory of violence, according to which there will be stages of action and reaction, colonial violence and liberatory violence. The overwhelming brutality of colonial settlers

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