WORLD IS NO MORE VIOLENT

World Is No More Violent

World Is No More Violent

Introduction

While the question of violence in general is daunting, when considered from the perspective of political theory, it immediately becomes more manageable through a focus on the relationship between violence and politics. In the history of political theory, this relationship has been formulated in different ways by three groups of thinkers. The first, which traditionally includes thinkers as varied as Niccolò Machiavelli, Max Weber, and Vladimir Lenin, is thought to have identified politics—or more precisely, political power—with force, domination, coercion, in short, violence. Hannah Arendt is emblematic of a second group of thinkers who share the definition of violence proposed by this first group while emphatically rejecting its association with political power. Arendt also rejects a third group of thinkers—whose clearest representatives are Georges Sorel and Frantz Fanon—with whom she disagrees on the definition of violence itself. However, something is lost in this conceptual incongruence, as this third group can be seen to propose an understanding of violence that is in many ways compatible with Arendt's formulation of politics.

The term terrorism, like globalism, is difficult to define and has a diversity of meanings among different groups and individuals. As a common cliché says, “One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.” The shifting contexts in which the term is used make it difficult, but not impossible, to study the phenomenon as a distinct form of political violence. For the purposes of empirical analysis, terrorism must be defined explicitly. This chapter offers such a definition, while acknowledging that it may differ from that of other scholars, cultures, governments, media outlets, and perhaps the reader. It is useful to examine first the evolution of the usage of the term throughout history. Although examples of terrorism stretch back several millennia, the word terrorism is relatively new to the world stage.

Body: Discussion and Analysis

In my opinion, the world is still violent; The first usage of “terrorism” was in reference to the actions of a nation, not a sub national group. After the French Revolution in the late 18th century, the victors conducted a brutal campaign against nobles perceived to be enemies of the newly formed state. The series of mass executions by the post revolutionary government was referred to as the terror. This early conceptualization differs from the more modern use of terrorism, in which the perpetrators are not usually governments and are instead nonstate actors (Laqueur, 2001). The usage of terrorism to refer to the violent actions of nonstate actors arose in response to the bombings and assassinations conducted by radical members of political movements such as anarchism and revolutionary socialism in the late 1800s and early 1900s. During the 20th century, the use of the term expanded immensely, often to include any type of political violence that the observer found to be disagreeable. This is where the murkiness of terrorism's meaning arises. Politicians and the media are quick to label any enemy violence as ...