Political violence, including discursive violence, appears to be on the increase worldwide. Is political violence compatible with democracy? What does it tell us about the state of democracy today? These are some of the questions touched upon in the second of five segments of the interview of Pierre Rosanvallon by the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy. The segments, which are now subtitled, are released weekly along with commentaries from its research team.

This week, AHCD Postdoctoral Researcher Lipin Ram and International Law PhD Candidate and AHCD Research Assistant Juliana Santos de Carvalho draw links between Professor Rosanvallon’s take on these essential questions and their research.

COMMENTARY BY LIPIN RAM

Violence and the ‘enemies’ of democracy

“But when violence becomes a principle of political action, when violence becomes the principle of behaviour towards one’s adversary, at that point, it becomes something else. Because violence is the sign that there are no longer political adversaries but enemies” – Pierre Rosanvallon (interview extract).

In the years following the fall of the Berlin wall and the disintegration of the Soviet world, liberal democracy appeared to have emerged triumphant over its ideological rivals. The question now, it had seemed, was simply about achieving ‘democratic deepening’, especially in the global South and Eastern Europe.   Violence was seen as the troublesome vestige of the past, wholly separate from the new era that was dawning across the world founded on democratic politics – a mode of state-society relationship that explicitly excluded violence and institutionalised social conflict through peaceful deliberations.

Today we stand bewildered in the face of the contemporary state of democratic politics; the triumphalism lies in tatters, not only in the ‘new’ democracies of the global South, but in the very axial points in the West from which democracy expanded, and sometimes was ‘exported’, to the rest of the world. Old and new malaises of democracy have prompted serious concerns of a ‘crisis,’ and violence – physical and discursive – is no longer confined to the fringes of democratic societies. Gun totting ‘Proud Boys’ reveal the new and emboldened face of white supremacy in the US, Hindu nationalists and upper-caste storm troopers in India deploy violence routinely, and subaltern and minority populations in democratic nation-states in many other parts of the world live in fear of repression and persecution. Most importantly, these forces and elements have acquired either direct control of state power or have become too significant to be ignored.

As Rosanvallon notes with admirable clarity in the quote above, the liberal vocabulary of political adversary and deliberation have receded from discourse. It has now become dominated by the vocabulary of the  ‘enemy’, tellingly foretold by Carl Schmitt, whose life and work have always existed in a somewhat uneasy relationship with the Nazi dictatorship. Social antagonisms become more political, not less, Schmitt has argued, the more they approach “the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping” (Schmitt 2007, 29).  From this point on, violence is always a real possibility. Today, in countries like India where Muslims, Dalits and other subaltern have been stamped the ‘other’ by the dominant socio-political discourse, we are faced with the question of how to step back from the brink of endemic violence. As Rosanvallon puts it, “One has the impression that America – and this is also the case for India – are countries that are on the way to becoming radically divided societies where people simply no longer share the same world”.  Unless the threat of violence is addressed, we simply cannot hope for communities in democratic societies to meaningfully “share the same world”.

Reference:

Schmitt, Carl. 2007. The Concept of the Political. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.

Lipin Ram is postdoctoral researcher at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy.  His work is located in the emerging field of social-anthropology of democracy, a research paradigm that turns often taken-for-granted elements of the democratic process – voting, party politics etc. – into objects of anthropological research. His PhD dissertation – soon to be published as a book with Routledge – explores the co-emergence of violence, affect, vocabularies and practices of kinship and community in India’s democratic politics. READ MORE

COMMENTARY BY JULIANA SANTOS DE CARVALHO

Political violence, racism, and the democracy of the everyday

What is the relationship between political violence, communal life, and democracy? During times when divisiveness and partisan politics seem to be particularly accentuated around the globe, Pierre Rosanvallon gives an insightful exploration about today’s multifaceted character of political violence and how it affects our communities. He explains that whereas discussion, difference, and contestation are inevitable and constitutive of healthy democracies, the contemporary rise of political violence represents a dangerous malfunction: an indication that systems of discussion and negotiation have been transformed into systems of confrontation. He then underscores the fragility of democracy, making the case for continued, everyday efforts of precluding violence from taking over political life. In this short commentary, I use his understanding of political violence to reflect on a recent episode of racism in my home country, Brazil. I reflect further on the ways through which it is possible to build a counterpoint to the political violence of racism, bringing up the question of diversity in institutions.

On the eve of Brazil’s Black Consciousness Day, our country was gruesomely reminded of the historical brutality perpetrated against our black community. After an altercation with an employee of a Carrefour in the southern city of Porto Alegre, João Alberto Silveira Freitas, a black man, was beaten to death by two white security guards from the supermarket [1]. Appalled by the episode and the continued racism in the country [2], protestors took over several Carrefour units across the country, chanting anti-racist protest calls, and some even setting fire to a few stores [1].

Across social media, these protests have been considered either as legitimate political demonstrations or as violent ‘vandalism’. Rosanvallon’s lucid differentiation between violence arising from exasperation and political violence can be useful to this discussion. According to him, while violence from exasperation can be regrettable but understandable (such as in circumstances of acute injustice), political violence holds a much deeper element of democratic malaise. Instead of just a means, political violence is the state of a society that can no longer dialogue in face of difference, using confrontation as a way not only to subdue but to violently exclude all of those who are deemed as ‘enemies’.

Using Rosanvallon’s understanding of political violence, it is possible to go beyond debates about the protests’ legitimacy and instead exercise a deeper reflection of racism as the actual political violence at play here. Racism is not only a violent means of segregation, but it also encapsulates an exclusionary societal condition in which diversity is regarded as inimical. How, then, to build a counterpoint to this exclusionary, warring politics? For such endeavour, Rosanvallon underscores the importance of upholding a ‘democracy of the everyday’. He explains that although democracy lives by its freedoms and its institutions, there is also the need to look at the everyday, never-ending hard work of upholding dialogical relationships between individuals. I take the liberty of going further with his argument, inquiring the ways through which we can concretize this democracy of the everyday. Which channels can allow for these democratic processes to flourish? How can we allow communities and movements to have the necessary spaces, resources, and pathways to stand strong against divisiveness, oppression, and exclusion?

To say these complex questions have straightforward solutions would be either misleading or an unrealistic aspiration. However, in my work as a research assistant to the Diversity on the International Bench project hosted by AHCD, I have come to know theories and concepts that may be of great relevance to these challenges. When highlighting the importance of making the face of institutions (especially international judicial ones) more diverse, conceptualizations on diversity and courts are not merely a call for tokenistic representation. Rather, they often give an exploration of the political role of judicial institutions, as well as the potentialities of judges that occupy a marginalized standpoint for transformative justice. While judges and judicial institutions are not the sole players here (nor should they be), they can play an important supportive role in strengthening the democracy of the everyday. In the case of João Alberto Silveira Freitas and many others, the relevance of a diverse judiciary committed to anti-racism could not only dispel the white, wealthy, and male myth of neutral justice, but also provide an invaluable symbolic, social, and political contribution to the plights of minorities, social movements, and the question of diversity and human rights. More importantly, it could transform judicial institutions into accessible and useful channels to counteract political violence with democratic justice.

References:

[1] Protests erupt in Brazil after black man dies after being beaten outside supermarket. (2020, November 21). The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/21/protests-erupt-in-brazil-after-black-man-dies-after-being-beaten-outside-supermarket

[2] Contrastingly, Brazil’s Vice-President commented the episode by denying the historical racism in the country. See: Mazui, G. (2020, November 20). “No Brasil, não existe racismo”, diz Mourão sobre assassinato de homem negro em supermercado. G1. https://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2020/11/20/mourao-lamenta-assassi… (in Portuguese).

Juliana Santos de Carvalho is a PhD student in International Law and holder of a Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship for Foreign Scholars. She is also a research assistant to the project “Diversity on the International Bench: Building Legitimacy for International Courts and Tribunals”, led by Professors Maria Neus Torbisco-Casals and Andrew Clapham and hosted at AHCD.