The Relationship Between Violence and the State

The state is the one organisation in society that can legally take your liberty, your property, and in extreme cases your life. This is not an accident or an abuse of power; it is built into the very definition of what a state is. Political violence and the state are therefore locked in a tense relationship. The state claims a special right to use force, challengers contest that claim, and the boundary between legitimate authority and raw coercion is constantly negotiated. Understanding this relationship is essential to understanding politics itself, because almost every major question of governance, from law and order to development to civil rights, ultimately rests on who gets to use force and why.

What makes the state different 🔗

The most influential answer to this question comes from the German sociologist Max Weber. In his 1919 lecture Politics as a Vocation, Weber defined the state as a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Three ideas in that definition do most of the work.

First is territory. The state’s authority is bounded by borders. Its police, courts, and laws operate within a defined area, which is why a court order in one country has no automatic force in another. Second is monopoly. The state is not the only actor that uses force, but it claims to be the only one that can legitimately authorise its use. Private individuals and groups may use violence, but the state reserves the right to declare such violence illegal and to punish it. Third is legitimacy. The monopoly only holds if people largely accept the state’s right to use force. When that acceptance breaks down, the monopoly fragments.

This idea did not begin with Weber. It traces back to Jean Bodin in the sixteenth century and to Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan argued that only a single sovereign authority could rescue society from a “war of all against all.” Weber gave the idea sociological precision, and it has remained the standard starting point in political science ever since.

Coercion and consent 🔗

If the state rests on force, why do most people obey it most of the time without being beaten into submission? The answer is that states sustain themselves through a combination of coercion and consent. Coercion is the police, the army, prisons, and the courts. Consent is the belief among citizens that the state’s authority is rightful. A state that relies only on coercion is fragile and expensive to run. A state that secures genuine consent can keep its actual use of force in reserve, deploying it rarely. The healthiest states are those where most people obey out of habit and belief rather than fear, leaving violence as a last resort.

Why political violence targets the state 🔗

Because the state holds this concentrated coercive power, it becomes the natural target of political violence. Those who want to change how a society is run must, sooner or later, confront the institution that controls the means of force. Revolutionaries seek to capture it, secessionists seek to break away from it, and insurgents seek to weaken it. Even ordinary protest movements are ultimately appeals to or pressures upon the state.

This is the central paradox of the relationship. The state monopolises violence in order to provide order and security. But that very monopoly makes the state the prize over which violent struggles are fought. Whoever controls the state controls the most powerful instrument of coercion in society, so the stakes of political conflict are enormous.

The state’s own toolkit: legal and extralegal violence 🔗

States do not only respond to violence; they actively use it to achieve political and economic goals. It helps to distinguish two kinds of state violence.

Legal violence is force exercised through recognised institutions and procedures: arrests, imprisonment, the dispersal of unlawful assemblies, the deployment of armed forces under law. Extralegal violence is force that the state uses outside or against its own legal framework, such as custodial deaths, fake encounters, or the unofficial use of armed groups to do work the state cannot openly own. Real governments use both, and the line between them is often blurred. A measure may be technically legal yet widely seen as illegitimate, or technically illegal yet quietly tolerated by officials.

Two recurring uses of this toolkit are worth examining closely: political integration and economic development.

Violence for political integration 🔗

Modern states are rarely born unified. They are assembled out of regions, communities, and groups that often did not choose to belong together. The historian Charles Tilly captured this in his famous formula that war made the state and the state made war. Studying the rise of European states, Tilly argued that rulers built centralised governments through four interlinked activities: war-making against external rivals, state-making against internal rivals, extraction of resources such as taxes and soldiers, and protection of their clients. He provocatively compared this process to a protection racket, in which the same authority that offers protection is also the chief threat people need protecting from.

The point is that political integration was achieved largely by coercion. Local lords were stripped of their private armies, regional autonomy was crushed, and a single central authority imposed its writ over a contiguous territory. The peaceful, law-governed, democratic state that many people now take for granted was, in Tilly’s account, a late and partly accidental outcome of a long and violent process.

Violence for economic development 🔗

States also use coercive power to manage economic change, often on behalf of dominant economic interests. The historical record across many societies shows a pattern: as economies move from older agrarian arrangements toward commercial agriculture and industry, the state frequently uses force to protect property owners and to suppress those who resist the transition.

Colonial India offers vivid examples. When peasants rose against oppressive arrangements, the colonial state typically combined repression with limited reform. In the Deccan in the 1870s, peasants crushed by heavy land revenue and indebtedness to outside moneylenders attacked lenders and burnt debt bonds. The government suppressed the revolt and arrested large numbers of peasants, then passed the Deccan Agriculturists Relief Act of 1879 as a conciliatory measure. The sequence is telling: force first to restore order and protect the existing economic structure, then a measured reform to defuse discontent.

The Indigo cultivation system tells a similar story. Planters used coercive methods to force peasants in Bengal to grow indigo for European markets, and when peasants organised resistance in the Nadia district, the conflict eventually compelled the state to establish the Indigo Commission in 1860. Later, the Telangana armed peasant struggle of the late 1940s against oppressive landlordism under the Nizam of Hyderabad saw peasants organised into armed guerrilla squads confronting the state’s armed forces. In each case, the state’s coercive apparatus was deployed in the contest between landed or commercial interests and the cultivators beneath them.

This connects directly to Tilly’s idea of protection. Part of what state-builders do is protect the interests of favoured clients, including private industries and property owners, especially during periods of economic transformation when those interests are threatened by displaced or impoverished groups.

Is state violence different from other violence? 🔗

A long debate in political theory asks whether the state’s use of force is genuinely distinct from the violence used against it. Two thinkers frame this debate sharply.

Hannah Arendt argued that power and violence are not the same thing and should be kept conceptually separate. For her, genuine power rests on collective support and acting together, while violence is instrumental and appears precisely when power is in jeopardy. A regime that must rely heavily on violence is, in her view, actually losing power rather than demonstrating it. Violence can destroy power, she warned, but it can never create the legitimate authority that real power depends on.

Frantz Fanon, writing from the experience of the Algerian struggle against French colonial rule, took a very different position. In The Wretched of the Earth, he treated violence as a necessary instrument for liberating the colonised and even as a force that could rebuild the identity and dignity of people the colonial state had dehumanised. For Fanon, the colonial state itself was founded on violence, so violence in response was not an aberration but a logical answer to a system built on force.

The disagreement matters because it shapes how we judge political violence today. If we accept Arendt’s view, we tend to see the legitimate state as the proper holder of force and treat challengers with suspicion. If we lean toward Fanon, we ask harder questions about whether the state’s own claim to legitimacy is itself the product of past violence.

Why modern states in Asia and Africa see high political violence 🔗

Weber’s tidy model of a state with a secure monopoly on violence fits some societies far better than others. Across much of Asia and Africa, that monopoly is contested, and political violence is correspondingly high. The reasons are largely historical.

Many of these states were created by colonial powers that drew borders around populations who did not share a common national identity. After independence, the new governments inherited these arbitrary boundaries along with the colonial habit of ruling through coercion. Scholars argue that the inability of postcolonial states to build inclusive political institutions left many of them prone to civil war and state failure. Where the state could not establish legitimacy across rival ethnic and regional groups, force became the default tool of governance, and competing groups responded in kind.

The result is a wide range of outcomes. Some states have consolidated reasonably stable monopolies on force. Others face persistent insurgencies, secessionist movements, and communal conflict. India itself contains this variation: a stable constitutional order coexists with long-running insurgencies in some regions and recurring communal and agrarian tensions in others. The Weberian state, in short, turns out to be more the exception than the rule when we look across the whole world, and the relationship between violence and the state remains an active, unsettled struggle in much of the Global South.

The democratic balance 🔗

For democracies, maintaining the monopoly on legitimate force carries a particular importance and a particular danger. The importance is that the monopoly is what allows legitimate, lawful decisions to actually be enforced; without it, the rule of law is just words on paper. The danger is that the same coercive apparatus can be turned against citizens, used to suppress dissent, or captured by narrow interests. The challenge for any democratic state is to keep its violence both effective and accountable, subordinated to law and answerable to the people over whom it is used. That balance is never permanently achieved. It has to be defended and renegotiated in every generation.

What do you think? When a state uses force against its own citizens to maintain order or push through economic change, what should determine whether we regard that force as legitimate authority or as political violence? And in a society where the state’s monopoly on force is contested, is more state coercion the solution to instability, or part of the problem?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/topic/state-monopoly-on-violence
2. https://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/19sd/refs/Tilly1985.pdf
3. https://www.drishtiias.com/to-the-points/paper1/peasant-uprisings-in-india
4. https://www.nextias.com/blog/agrarian-movements-in-british-india/
5. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230119994_14
6. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1503&context=etd2023
7. https://oxfordre.com/politics/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228637-e-833