Keyword

Axes

Upper Left Quadrant Details Upper Right Quadrant Details Lower Left Quadrant Details Lower Right Quadrant Details Details

Quadrants

Outline

The URQ shows that, for any state, the most important type of violence is international violence, because it is a threat to the very essence of the state itself -- its sovereignty, which means recognition by other states. International violence is also most important to the state because the world system of states is anarchistic, a condition in which violence is regular and highly probable. The ultimate in violence is interstate war, and war has in fact been defined as politics by other means. In the ULQ, the state is defined as that institution in society that is the sole monopolistic possessor of the legal means of violence (Weber). This is based on awareness that there is internal war as well as external war. Internally, the state is an employer of violence and also the object of violence because its monopoly of legal violence eventually engenders illegal actions against its own regime or political class -- action which is violent or becomes violent as result of state reaction through its armed arm, police. In the LRQ, civil society, so often treated as merely a passive resource of state authority, is also the source of individual, group and larger collective action against precisely that authority and the regime governing in its name. Violence directed by ideology in a collective or social movement against state authority is called revolution. This contrasts with a newer category (LLQ) which also arises out of civil society or private group action but is characterized not by a goal-oriented ideology but from terror for its own sake: no agenda or no plan for takeover or reformation, just for vengenace or "revolution for the hell of it", as Abby Hoffman put the case during the relatively moderate radicalism of the American 1960s. The recent spread of individual terrorist acts should however not lead to obliterate the fact that terrorism also remains an instrument of new governments -- and old governments in crisis. Both faces of terrorist violence tend to merge in state-sponsored international terrorism.