200020858

SA1002

Luke McGinty

Number of Words: 2125

I hereby declare that the attached piece of written work is my own work and that I have not
reproduced, without acknowledgement, the work of another.

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How have anthropologists sought to understand the relationship between the state and
violence as a means for maintaining political order? Discuss using ethnographic example.

Introduction

Throughout the history of anthropology, many studies have focused on groups which

experience varying forms of oppression and marginalisation at the hands of the state. In light

of this, the use of state violence as a means of social control represents an important topic

within the discipline. Such importance has created a complex moral dynamic between

anthropologists and the people they, with many scholars feeling compelled to “write back

against terror” (Taussig, 1989, p.4) in order to dismantle the very power structures and

hierarchies they seek to understand. These dynamics provide a unique insight into the

relationship between the state and violence as a means of maintaining political order. In an

effort to examine the ways in which anthropologists seek to understand this relationship, it is

necessary to clarify what is meant by the state and what is meant by violence. According to

critical theorists, the state is the “human community that (successfully) lays claim to the

monopoly of the legitimate use of physical violence within a particular territory” (Weber,

2004). The state has many institutions, referred to as the ‘ideological-state apparatus’

(Althusser 2006), that use legitimated violence for the implementation and maintenance of a

socio-political order that benefits the ruling class. Within this conception of the state, it is

also important to consider broader perspectives of the state that characterise it as not just a set

of influential institutions, but as a system of cultural power, discourses and practices “that,

taken together, help to define public interest, establish meaning, and define and naturalize

available social identities” (Nagengast, 1994, p.116).

In addition, it is important to define and categorise what is meant by the term ‘state violence.’

Broadly speaking, state violence can be defined as the use or threat of physical force as a

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means for coercion or intimidation. However, due to the all-encompassing nature of the state,

the ways in which violence manifests itself in the lived realities of citizens is more complex.

Considering this, two main categories of violence can be identified, 1) explicit violence –

conceived of as the direct use of physical force by the state – and 2) implicit violence,

conceived of as the indirect threat of violence that exists within the structures of society. The

social sciences have produced much literature focusing on the topic of explicit violence, such

as Torres’ (2018) work on state-sponsored death squads. Whereas, critical branches of

anthropology have approached the study of state violence in such a way that allows for a

better conception of the subtleties of implicit violence. This is due to anthropology’s focus on

micro-level human relations and the ways in which macro-level structures manifest

themselves in the daily realties of citizens (Sluka, 2000). In this way, anthropological

conceptions of violence better recognise the fluid and interrelated nature of the two categories

of violence. Therefore, I will use the example of documentation and legal uncertainty in

Palestine to examine the ways in which anthropologists have sought to understand the

relationship between the state and violence as a means of maintaining political order.

Explicit violence in Palestine: Contexts of violence

The treatment of Palestinian citizens at the hands of the Israeli state provides a striking

example of the dynamics of state violence and the intersections between its explicit and

implicit forms. Firstly, I will briefly touch on the more explicit form of state violence, which

is most easily seen at society-wide scales, in hopes of demonstrating the wider context of

cultural violence that exists for Palestinians. This context, laid out in Chomsky and Pappé’s

(2015) work, elucidates the obvious examples of physical violence perpetrated against the

Palestinian people. By looking at the history of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, which is

characterised by indiscriminate airstrikes and the forced removal of civilians from their

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homes, it is clear to see that what is occurring in the region can only be accurately thought of

as an “incremental genocide” (Chomsky and Pappé, 2015, p. 148). Examples of the horrific

physical violence perpetrated by Israel in recent years include the murder of 1,166

Palestinians during the hostilities of 2008/9 and the murder of 2,251 Palestinians during the

2014 Gaza conflict (OCHA, 2022). Overall, between the years of 2008 and 2022, the

Palestinian death toll amounts to 6,600, whilst the Israeli death toll amounts to 262. This

imbalance in the number of deaths is due to the large gap in military capability of both sides,

with the state of Israel demonstrating clear superiority due to its ties to wealthy western

nation, namely the USA (Chomsky and Pappé, 2015).

In order to understand why such extreme physical harm has been used in to create a culture of

violence in the region, it is important to elucidate the ideological motivations of the

aggressors. The Zionist ideology of the Israeli state is one that seeks to create a homogenous

and cohesive Jewish population in the region, at the exclusion of the Palestinian citizens who

live there. This is because states that engage in genocidal activities, such as Israel, “view the

target populations as irreconcilable with their self-conception” (Torres, 2018, p.387-8).

Therefore, we can see how the Zionist ideology fosters and normalises environments which

encourage the use of explicit forms of state violence. This violence, in turn, leads to the

creation of a society that divides itself along ethnic lines in order to eradicate the perceived

‘other.’ Such strategies of ideological dissemination and implementation create the conditions

for the replication and strengthening of such ideologies, in so far as the constructed social

order comes to view instances of violence on behalf of the state as legitimate. This relates to

Max Weber’s (2004) conception of the state as having a monopoly on legitimate violence,

meaning that Israeli citizens view the state’s actions “as both unavoidable and necessary to

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prevent what would otherwise be inevitable and unavoidable deeds of their targets”

(Nagengast, 1994, p.115).

Implicit violence in Palestine: Documentation during the second intifada

As illustrated, instances of explicit of state violence are often easily identifiable to both

victim and aggressor, as well as to the society in which they take place. On the other hand,

implicit forms of state violence permeate the socio-political landscape in ways that are not as

easily recognisable but are legitimated by the dominant ideology of the state and its citizens

nonetheless. To appreciate how anthropologists understand the intricacies of implicit state

violence, it is vital to elaborate on its place within the social sciences. Critical conceptions of

implicit violence as being structural in nature, are part of a growing movement in which

scholars recognise that “structural inequities … are a more significant source of harm and

suffering than the more spectacular instances of political violence” (Famer, 2004).

Anthropological analysis builds on this recognition by examining the ways in which the day-

to-day manifestations of implicit violence create the aforementioned environments that allow

the state to maintain order and to use explicit violence to quell civil unrest where necessary.

An example of how anthropologists have studied the relationship between the state and

implicit structural violence is seen in the uncertainties and potentialities of legal

documentation during the second Palestinian intifada. Identity documents have played a vital

role in the creation and maintenance of social categories for Palestinians (Bornstein, 2002), as

practices that regulate the movement of people embed relations of domination and

subordination that have the capacity to further reproduce themselves. This is clearly seen in

Kelly’s (2006) work that explores the use of implicit violence by the state, in the form of

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Palestinian national identity cards at various Israeli checkpoints. One village that has been

particularly affected by the uncertainties and violence of legal identification is that of Bayt

Hajjar. For some context, following the failure of the Oslo Peace Process, which created

rising tensions that boiled over into the second intifada, the Israeli army increased the

presence of its soldiers in the region and began to police roads around the village according to

ever-changing laws of legal identification. In response to the growing civil unrest in defiance

of this structural violence, the Israeli state “responded by cutting off access from Bayt Hajjar

to the highway with a mound of earth, and it was announced that people with PNA identity

cards were banned from riding in any vehicle on the road” (Kelly, 2006, p.96-7). This

escalation in the powers of legal documentation had disastrous implications for the people of

Bayt Hajjar, as they were abruptly cut off from their main source of income in the Israeli

economy. This illustrates how changes in the rules of state structures act as a form of implicit

violence, in that they prevent people from obtaining the means of their subsistence. The

intrinsic power imbalances involved in the formation of these laws concerning legal

documentation are also “reproduced in the practice of the law” (Dyzenhaus, 1999). This

creates social environments in which the threat and possibility of more violence against the

oppressed is omnipresent. Such violence implemented by the state acts according to the

hierarchies of power from which it was born, thus further embedding and replicating the

constructed order of society that maintains the position of marginalisation for Palestinian

citizens.

Intersections of violence in Palestine

Another aspect of state violence is the way that explicit and implicit forms of state violence

intersect to maintain order. Once again, anthropologists seek to understand the dynamics of

this relationship by focusing on micro-level manifestations of macro-level structures and

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actions. One such dynamic, briefly mentioned earlier, is how implicit violence constructs

spaces that allow for the possibility of explicit violence. This is clearly seen in the use of

identification checkpoints in Palestine. One example of this intersection of violence in

Palestine, again comes from Kelly’s (2006) work. During his time studying implicit state

violence in the region, a labour-contractor was shot dead just outside of Bayt Hajjar, due to

uncertainties and misunderstandings surrounding his legal documentation:

The contractor held an Israeli identity card, as he lived in Israel-annexed East Jerusalem. While trying to pick up

some workers from the village and take them to work in Jerusalem, he had driven around the pile of earth that

had been dumped on the junction of the road out of Bayt Hajjar with the main Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road.

Although the contractor had an Israeli identity card, the Israeli soldiers patrolling the road did not check. Seeing

him leaving a Palestinian village, they assumed that he was a Palestinian trying to gain access to a road which

had been reserved for Israelis and fired several bullets into his car.

(Kelly, 2016, p.101).

The murder of this man illustrates the intersection between explicit and implicit violence, as

the implicit violence involved in the uncertain nature of ID inspections can quickly turn into

explicit bodily harm. This speaks to how the threat of extreme violence penetrates citizen’s

everyday lives. Such examples demonstrate that if the presence of implicit violence, seen as

the passive inhibition of the right to access the resources needed to live, is not enough to

maintain a certain social order and quell civil unrest, then the state uses its monopoly on

violence (Weber 2004) to employ explicit physical violence as a way to order society. The

aim of this state violence is to create a society whose population is socialised by, shaped by

and subservient to certain ideologies. Once socialised into certain categories, that determine

who is allowed to move through the world, the ideologically driven biases associated with

these categories reproduce the violent conditions of their conception, as seen through the

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assumptions made by Israeli soldiers that led to the killing of this citizen. Therefore, by

enacting violence on and controlling the movement of Palestinians bodies, the Israeli state

transfers their ideology from an imagined abstract into a physical reality (Foucault, 1977),

thus embedding and maintaining a hierarchy of identity within the social order, a hierarchy

that privileges Israeli and ‘Western’ identities over that of Palestinians.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the ways in which anthropologists seek to understand the relationship between

the state and violence as a means of maintaining political order can be characterised by the

analysis of the lived realities of people, such as those of Palestinian citizens. These

disciplinary methods highlight ways in which explicit and implicit forms of violence manifest

themselves in the daily experiences of citizens within a state. This, therefore, allows scholars

to conceptualise violence as a tool of the state; a tool that permeates all facets of societal

structures in an attempt to “define, distinguish, and identify particular types of person”

(Kelly, 2006, 91). The social landscape that arises from the production of such categories of

personhood, in turn, legitimises the use of violence by the state, which allows the state to

maintain a political order that adheres to the ideology of the ruling class.

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Bibliography:

Althusser, L. (2006 [1970]) ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes towards an

investigation)’, The anthropology of the state: A reader, 9(1), pp. 86-98. 

Bornstein, A. S. (2002) ‘Borders and the Utility of Violence: State Effects on the

Superexploitation of West Bank Palestinians’, Critique of Anthropology, 22(2), pp.

201-220.

Chomsky, N. and Pappé, I. (2015) On Palestine. Chicago: Haymarket Books. 

Dyzenhaus, D. (1999) Recrafting the Rule of Law: The Limits of Legal Order. Oxford: Hart. 

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107.

Nagengast, C. (1994) ‘Violence, Terror, and the Crisis of the State’, Annual Review of

Anthropology, 23(1), pp. 109-136. 

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OCHA (2022) ‘Data on Casulties’, Available at: https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties#

(Accessed: 12/4/22) 

Sluka, J. A. (2000) Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror. Philadelphia: University

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