Between Democracy and Violence and the Problem of Military Humanitarian Interventions

Abstract

Abstract In “Power, Violence, and Legitimacy: A Reading of Hannah Arendt in an Age of Police Brutality and Humanitarian Intervention,” Iris Marion Young notes that in 1999, while completing Inclusion and Democracy, she was unable to continue her work on the book since “[w]ith NATO bombs raining on Yugoslavia, reffection on the essentially nonviolent values of democracy felt irrelevant at best and arrogantly privileged at worst” (Young 2007 p. 79). Young then turned to think about violence and wrote “Power, Violence and Legitimacy” (2001, republished in 2007). Young devoted some of her time to thinking about violence again after the Al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the George W. Bush administration’s quick response with a declaration of a “War on Terror.” She did so in two essays, “Envisioning a Global Rule of Law,” which she coauthored with Daniele Archibugi (2002, republished in 2007), and “The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reffections on the Current Security State” (2003, republished in 2007). What all three essays share is a very critical view of what Young comes to call “official violence”—the violence “perpetrated by agents of the state as means to achieve their mission of law enforcement” (2007, p. 95) either domestically or internationally—and of the rhetoric that is deployed to mobilize support for official violence. The criticism, Young points out, is motivated by a “hope for a regime of perpetual peace” (2007, p. 3) that Young believes must never be abandoned, a hope that given Young’s commitments and other work, I read as one for a global version of a socioeconomically just liberal-democracy with accountable transnational institutions and an active public sphere.