Nation States Claiming a Monopoly on ‘Legitimate' Violence

Over the course of the twentieth century, the nation state became the premier site for the ‘legitimate' exercise of violence - primarily through the armies, police, judicial systems and security apparatus that consolidated within each bordered realm.

Secessionist movements are commonly violently suppressed as the nation defends its territory. The suppression of separatist groups, such as the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the southern Philippines or the United Liberation Movement for West Papua in the western extension of Indonesia, are two ongoing instances where state apparatus and secessionists are involved in varying degrees of violence. The expulsion of European colonial powers did not, to the Moro peoples or West Papuans, mark the end of colonialism in toto. A different group simply assumed the role of oppressor and invoked the integrity of the Nation instead of the Empire. In some cases, ethnic groups with claims to rights to nationhood struggle against multiple nation states. The Kurds' armed struggle for an independent Kurdistan requires assault on Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria. In the struggle in Ireland to gain liberation from Britain, Roger Casement, aforementioned feted author of the landmark report on the atrocities in the Congo Free State, was executed in 1916 for high treason when he supported the Irish Republican movement in Ireland's struggle to break away from Britain. Once knighted for his service to the British Foreign Office, and internationally famous for his work on colonial atrocities in Congo and the Amazon Basin, Casement tragically himself became a victim of Britain's defence of its colonial territories.

In newly founded states of former colonies, national development pro­grammes gained totemic status. The expulsion of the colonisers or the suppres­sion of foreign and domestic foes gave new national leaders responsibility for the improved livelihoods promised in the process of mobilising people to join their cause. Managing expectations of newly liberated populations sometimes required the exercise of force. New political ideologies produced bureaucracies and institutional structures that would perpetrate violence in the name of progress, development and national advancement. A new ideology of ‘devel­opment and economic advance' emerged and was used to justify numerous acts of physical, bureaucratic and institutional violence. Sometimes ‘develop­ment' projects simply saw a transfer of wealth from colonial elites to ‘indepen­dence elites'. The revolutionary socialism of China's Great Leap Forward aimed to produce prosperity for millions of Chinese but instead emboldened a newly empowered phalanx of cadre to beat, starve and humiliate millions of Chinese farmers, ultimately producing a famine that would kill millions - all justified by the national goal of surpassing the West and ‘achieving socialism in one generation'. Earlier, Stalin's socialist-inspired collectivisation programme had similarly devastated the Soviet Union. The Cambodian Killing Fields resulted in 2 million deaths and emerged from a calculated bureaucratic structural violence carefully planned and documented - four years in which new agricultural and social policies reduced the one-time rice bowl of the Mekong to a site of unimaginable terror.

The rise of the nation state altered the power of religious leaders. Religious authorities had in previous centuries pronounced the legitimacy of their right to use violence, but their one-time power would be subsumed under the control of the nation state - which often presented itself as either multi­religious or secular. Sometimes the nation state would make use of religious difference to achieve political ends - such as in the case of the Burmese Buddhist majority in Myanmar seeking to expel the Muslim Rohingya in the 2010s; or in the case of the Buddhist majority in Sri Lanka seeking to crush ethnic Tamil separatists whose campaign for a separate state between 1983 and 2009 threatened the integrity of the Sri Lankan state. During the Pacific War in the mid twentieth century, Japanese military authorities used Shinto and its devotion to the Emperor as a spur for their invasion of China and Southeast Asia.

Religious authorities seeking to exercise their power through violence need some form of state sponsorship. In rare cases, they capture the appara­tus of the state and use its bureaucratic structures to exert violence of an ancient kind, the Taliban's establishment of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (1996-2001) being the most extreme example of this phenom­enon. Their Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice enforced a rigid version of Islamic law upon the population, who were subjected to floggings, mutilations, amputations and public executions.

Internal enemies also became the focus of the nation-state security appa­ratus. National governments inspired by both Marxism and fascism applied threats of violence and actual violence on citizens of their lands. Death squads, purges, torture and terror became integral to preserving the stability on which the nation state's prosperity putatively depended. The hundreds of thousands of people who ‘disappeared' or were jailed in Central and South America from the 1970s are still mourned by mothers and grandmothers in mass protests. Famous among these are the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina and the Ladies in White in Cuba whose persistent, peaceful protests contrast with the obduracy of the state apparatuses' violence.

Early in the twenty-first century the nation state's control over religious contestants for power faces a transnational challenge in the rise of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS). ISIL sought to establish a religious caliphate that stretched across Iraq and Syria through militarised warfare and invited Muslims the world over to participate through military action in the Levant, but also in singular acts of terrorism wherever they may be in the world. The threat of terrorism in the twenty-first century has allowed state security apparatuses around the world to extend their powers of surveillance over populations in their jurisdiction. The nation state's fear of transnational activism is not new to the twenty-first century.

The power of ideologies to globalise, as manifest in twenty-first-century terrorism, was evident half a century earlier in the major rift between ‘com­munism and capitalism' - otherwise known as the Cold War of 1945-89. The power struggle between the USSR and the USA was played out in myriad proxy international and civil wars resulting in millions of deaths. On the surface these wars appeared to be generated variously by local tribal differences or regional religious grievances, but without the support of the USSR or the USA many of the wars that have plunged post-1945 Asia, Africa and the Middle East into chaos would have been much briefer affairs. This battle of ideological giants was also apparent in the CIA's Operation Condor between 1968 and 1989 in which right-wing governments throughout South America gained CIA technical, military and financial support to suppress left-wing or left-leaning groups.¹¹ Dictators like Chile's Augusto Pinochet assumed power after a US- backed military coup, overthrowing a democratically elected socialist govern­ment led by Salvador Allende. General Pinochet's regime lasted from 1973 to 1990 and was a classic example of the two branches of the state, the military and the political, combining to brutal effect.