The evidence in the United States I have seen points more toward a kind of racialized incompetence, where the police chief in Los Angeles can behave with a certain disregard—I am thinking of the uprising in And I suspect most of what we saw in Minneapolis was not a strategic effort to inflame protesters, but an idiotic and incompetent over-response that also had the effect of inflaming protesters.
And it was an idiotic and incompetent response tinged by race. I do think there is a lot of evidence that there are overreactions when the protesters are black, and that this excess of force is deployed in ways that have precisely the opposite effect of what a police chief is intending.
Instead of trying to bring order, they create more chaos. Trump has run as a law-and-order candidate, and today repeated the looting-and-shooting comment that was made by the Miami police chief Walter Headley, in At the same time, it seems like Nixon was fundamentally selling stability, and Trump often tries to destabilize situations.
On the first part, I have looked at polling data from the sixties, and the numbers are really surprising. It was something like eighty per cent of Americans said that law and order had broken down. So it was more than just urban unrest. There was a sense that the social fabric was tearing, and I think Nixon was clearly appealing to voters for whom that was an anxiety. And I also found that, in the gubernatorial election in California, Democrats who thought Pat Brown, who was the Democratic governor at the time, had handled the Watts riots poorly were hugely less likely to support him.
For some people, the idea that there are these swing Democratic-minded voters is hard to grasp, but there is pretty strong evidence that in , and in , that was an important and influential niche of voters. You are absolutely right that Trump, to a lot of people, is an instigator of chaos rather than a restorer of order, so I think that potentially works against him. So the real danger for advocates of reform in Minneapolis trying to get better policing, and for those trying to pursue racial justice nationally, is that there are people who are turned off by Trump but who have a strong taste for order, and so if they are more concerned about racial disorder, then Trump is their racial order.
Yes, essentially, to view Trump as a figure who will bring order, in any rational sense, is to have a racially tinged view of order. There are more protests in , and Black Lives Matter begins to grow in strength.
By the time we get to , the reason why George Floyd becomes a protest that bubbles over into the streets and leads to various forms of violence and resonates across the world is because of all the protests that preceded it. But it took time.
Is that a fair assessment? Those who push back on the violence cite these riots and look at the change in the presidency afterward, they say the law and order campaign was able to be successful as a consequence of the riots.
The rioting was occurring in a couple of cities, and in those cities, it was devastating and heart wrenching. But protest most impacts the people who are looking at it in their backyard—mayors, congressional members. And if you look at , you have a candidate named Abner Mikva running for Congress on a ticket looking to push back against the war and racial inequality, and he was able to ride the wave and get elected in Chicago.
That protest had an impact on local electoral returns. What starts out as being a geographically specific effect now can snowball into being a larger national effect. Trump today got on a call with governors and told them to crack down on protesters and is threatening to call in the military.
Do you think this could be an effective political strategy in responding to a protest? Will this law and order campaign he has put forth be effective? Absolutely it will. The question is to what degree. And you will have people who buy into his words. Within the countries hardest hit, the only meaningful method of terror prevention in the long run is to address the factors that give rise to it in the first place. Terror is a tactic of war, but it is a product of inequitable governance and political and social exclusion.
Feelings of inequality, marginalization, and indignity feed anger and resentment. Moreover, it is often state violence that sets this tinder alight. According to a UN study interviewing violent extremists across North Africa, violent state repression transformed grievances into terrorist violence in 71 percent of the cases. Ever since modern nation-states burst onto the scene in the seventeenth century, they have violently controlled their populations. In the long run, the cure turned out to be more deadly than the disease, however.
Rummel estimated that in the twentieth century, million people were killed by their own governments—six times more than in all international and civil wars occurring in that period. After the fall of Communism, humanitarians argued that state repression could no longer be tolerated under the rubric of national sovereignty and noninterference. Most states perpetrating violence against their citizens were no longer near-peer rivals, but weaker governments more susceptible to Western strong-arming.
Yet, despite the new global norm of protection, state violence has continued. North Korea is holding between 70, and , people in concentration camps deemed by a Holocaust survivor to be as bad as those of Nazi Germany.
Today, state killings are potentially among the largest sources of violence against civilians—although with data so easily hidden and manipulated, it is hard to be sure. Indeed, few countries collect or centralize statistics on victims of state violence, much less make them available to the public.
Venezuela has one of the highest murder rates in the world, a grim record that at first glance appears to be the result of murderous criminals taking advantage of a nearly failed state. Organized criminal violence has grown in virtually every part of the world in recent years, whether it be drug cartel violence in Mexico, reprisal killings among pastoralists and herders in Nigeria, 39 gangland murders in El Salvador, 40 or brutality by election-campaign thugs in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Many places are so deadly that they face war in all but name. True, organized crime tends to step into the breach where a government is unable or unwilling to provide basic security and justice. Yet this kind of organized crime flourishes more often when a state is not weak, but collusive. The exchange allows these political elites to enjoy the fruits of corruption, privilege, and perks, while ceding portions of their territory to control by violent criminals.
In some places, criminals and politicians merge and become one and the same. From Latin America to India, violent criminals have gained electoral office, while others seek to influence elections through buying and selling votes. To allow their violent compatriots impunity, politicians politicize and deliberately weaken their security services. Criminalized police battle with gangs and cartels not over law and order, but over control of turf and illegal proceeds. Ordinary citizens are forced to pick sides.
Stuck between massive criminal violence and a predatory, criminalized state that tends to prey on the marginalized, populations become polarized, and fragile regimes get even more brittle. These so-called crime wars thus corrode democracy. Poorer communities are left to protect themselves. Where private security is too expensive and unavailable, people tend to turn to vigilantes, gangs, and mafias that offer security against the predatory state and other violent groups—for a price.
The cocktail of factors driving terrorism—marginalization, exclusion, and repression—can similarly compel young men to join criminal gangs. Finally, as impunity grows, ordinary people turn to violence.
A significant portion of murder emerges from bar fights and disputes between neighbors rather than professional criminals. The ensuing mayhem allows politicians to posture as being tough on crime with repressive or militarized policing. Many citizens, exhausted by crime and violence, are easily seduced by simple promises of law and order. These so-called mano dura tactics tend to win elections. But these policies supercharge criminal groups. Zero-tolerance laws condemn many young men to life in jail, where they learn from each other.
The result is a self-reinforcing cycle of violence among criminal groups, the state, and regular people. Since , Brazil has witnessed more violent deaths than in Syria. The confluence of state repression and organized crime constitutes a wicked problem.
Venezuela and its patrons is not going to authorize United Nations peacekeepers to patrol the streets of Caracas. Gwilym David Blunt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. The summer of was indelibly marked by political violence on the streets of many American cities.
Exacerbated by the COVID pandemic and inflammatory messages from President Donald Trump such as his dismissal of systemic racism in the US , protesters against racial injustice clashed with police, unidentified paramilitaries and armed vigilantes. Most recently this occurred in Louisville, Kentucky, where more than days after the shooting of Breonna Taylor in her own apartment, one of the police officers involved was charged with wanton endangerment for firing shots that went into a neighbouring apartment.
Or to put it another way, police officers killed an unarmed black woman and one of them has been charged for the shots that missed. This decision caused days of unrest, during which two police officers were shot. The protests are unprecedented in recent American history and have prompted fears about the growth of political violence in democratic politics. The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham argued that such a right would destroy the very stability of society that makes the enjoyment of individual rights possible.
If a person could rightfully resist the agents of the law when they simply believe themselves to be oppressed, then the law ceases to exist. Bentham conjured up a world where conscription officers are shot, leaders of press gangs are thrown into the sea and judges set upon by dagger-wielding convicts. It would send society back to the state of nature described by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his book Leviathan — a war of all against all.
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