Article The paradox of political violence

This article explores the paradoxical relationship between politics and violence in the concept of political violence. By examining the works of prominent theorists, such as Hannah Arendt and Frantz Fanon, the article highlights both the difficulty of separating politics and violence, and the improbability of formulating a harmonious relationship between them. Engaging with some of Michel Foucault’s work on power and violence, the article begins to formulate a theoretical approach that conceptualizes political vio-lence in its inherently paradoxical condition. Keywords Foucault, political violence, power This article contends that much of the work on political violence tends to analytically separate politics and violence, and circumvent their interconnectedness. I would argue that such a separation is indeed difficult to achieve theoretically, and that scholars may be better served by directly facing the paradox of political violence, whereby the inter-connectedness between violence and politics is emphasized. The paradox of political violence basically refers to the notion that violence and politics are indeed opposites: the tendency of violence is to destroy politics, and the tendency of politics is to put an end to violence. Rather than use these assertions as the basis of analytical inquiry into political violence, however, this article maintains that underlining the interconnectedness between these two assertions better serves scholarly theorizations of political violence. To illustrate this, I first engage with two seminal texts that conceptualize violence in instrumentalist terms and neatly separate violence and politics – Hannah Arendt’s (1969