POLITICAL VIOLENCE IN DEMOCRACY

Denis Merklen

P.U.F. | « Cités »

2012/2 No 50 | pages 57 - 73
ISSN 1299-5495
ISBN 9782130593362
This document is the English version of:
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Denis Merklen, « De la violence politique en démocratie », Cités 2012/2 (No 50),
p. 57-73.
DOI 10.3917/cite.050.0057
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Translated from the French by Cadenza Academic Translations
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 Political Violence in Democracy
Denis Merklen

For a cause, however effective,

becomes violent, in the precise sense

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of the word, only when it enters into moral relations.
Walter Benjamin
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I
In this paper, I would like to argue that the issue of “violence” plays an
important role in our political life. Our democracies are not defined by Political Violence
their ability to exclude violence from the political sphere; on the contrary, in Democracy
I believe that their current situation is defined by the way they deal with Denis Merklen
the violence that runs through and haunts our societies. But what exactly
is the role violence plays within our political life?
To a great extent, the conceptual pairing of violence and politics
structures the framework of political thought. Many authors blend the
two concepts, while others radically separate them; in her famous essay
“On Violence,” the author of The Human Condition helped turn this
dichotomy into a fundamental opposition for thought on politics.1 I do
not claim to escape from the vice-like grip of this dual tradition (one that
considers violence and politics to be intrinsically linked, and one that
considers them instead to be radically separate). However, I would like
to reexamine how these two terms hang together in the specific context

1. Hannah Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
Jovanovich, 1972), 105-187. [Du mensonge à la violence (Paris: Calmann-Lévy/Pocket, 2000)].
 produced by the combination of two issues: the fact that democracy has
lost its enemies and now reigns supreme, and the presence, within Western
societies, of new low-income classes defined within a post-working-class
context. The hypothesis I would like to put forward for discussion is that
these two factors lend violence a political content that differs from pre-
1980s political violence, and must therefore be understood differently.
Beginning in the 1980s, these newly defined conditions could be
read in terms of the position violence occupies in our society. It is no
longer a question, as it was at the time of Hannah Arendt’s analyses, of
the relationship between violence and domination, violence and power,
or violence and state. Nor does the relationship between violence and
emancipation seem any longer to be a key focus. Judging by research
on “violence,” “incivility,” or “illegality,” it would seem that in the early
twenty-first century, violence has left political life behind, seeping instead
into the cracks of social life. If we listen to contemporary analyses by

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sociologists and in the press, as well as by those in power, violence has
definitively deserted political life to settle within civil society, and is
constantly linked to issues such as the feeling of insecurity or crime. It also
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II appears to be scattered, omnipresent, and polymorphous. Faced with this

level of diffusion, the social sciences seem to have lost their footing and
Dossier
are struggling to contribute to political debate. Recent publications see
violence everywhere: family and domestic violence, violence in schools,
urban violence and violence in the suburbs, “violence in the media,”
workplace violence, political violence, crime and pedophilia, “unseen
violence” (immigration, disability, invisible abuse), child violence, youth
violence, the ambiguous figure of the victim, and a “culture of fear.”2 The
third conference of the French Sociological Association in 2009 received
over two thousand papers jumbled together under the theme “Violence
and Society.”
The disappearance of traditional collective violence gives new visibility
to other uses of force, which therefore seem to pose different challenges
to power and how people coexist within society. What is their political
content? Is it enough simply to say that these forms of violence are a

2. Véronique  Bedin and Jean-François  Dortier, eds., Violence(s) et société aujourd’hui (Paris:
Sciences humaines, 2011). This book includes articles by some thirty authors: anthropologists,
sociologists, psychologists, historians, and political scientists.
 consequence of new social conflicts? What are the social and/or political
mechanisms they are associated with? These are a few of the questions which
the social sciences have to address today – very different ones from those
raised by authoritarian regimes, guerilla movements, or state terrorism.
We must therefore consider whether the social sciences have developed the
conceptual tools necessary to grasp these forms of violence – which, if not
entirely new, dominate the public sphere today – without reducing them
to mere effects of social structures. I will look successively at two examples
drawn from recent research. The first refers to cases of violence observed
in Argentina since the country’s return to democracy in 1983. The second
concerns forms of violence apparent in France since the 1980s.

V I O L E N C E A N D P O L I T I C S I N A RG E N T I N A

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At the end of the last military dictatorship (1976-1983), Argentine
society ratified the old political pact of 1853 in which political players
renounced the use of weapons. From that point on, elections alone could
legitimate power. This was anything but trivial for a society which for most
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III
of the twentieth century had been subjected to political instability and
constant challenges to democracy, so frequent were the coups and military
Political Violence
dictatorships. Now, nearly thirty years after December 10, 1983, the in Democracy
institutional system seems to have gained an unprecedented solidity and Denis Merklen
strength. The economic crises of 1989-1991 and 1998-2002 were severe
ordeals, but were overcome within and through the system. The handling
of human rights violations, albeit laborious, is also an indication of the
firmness of the new forms of conflict management. New social movements
for the defense of human rights such as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo
have helped set a strong moral limit on the use of political violence.
Violence no longer takes the forms typical of the pre-1983 period. The
armed forces have given up organizing coups, and as such are no longer
direct political players. The Left, meanwhile, has stopped seeing armed
rebellion as the means to transform the social order. The open use of force
seems to have been expelled from power struggles, whether they are going
on within the state, political parties, the unions, or interest groups. Does
this mean that Argentine society has definitively overcome the problem
of political violence? Certainly not; no society can completely eliminate
 political violence, for such a pretension would amount to wishing for the
abolition of all forms of conflict. On the contrary, it is easy to show that
violence is nestled in the heart of political life, even though it differs both
in its form and the way it is handled from its former incarnations.3
Let us take what can only be called “political crimes.” These start off as
local news stories, and are reintroduced into the political sphere by the
media or human-rights movements, which denounce the implication of
the government or political figures. Reports of crookedness are certainly
not unprecedented in the country’s history but, indicative of the darker
sides of politics, they are all the more unbearable for the fact that they
suggest little has changed with the return to constitutional order. This
category includes the murder of two journalists and of an entrepreneur
linked to the government during the 1990s, the suspicious death of the
son of the president, Carlos Menem Jr., and the disappearance in 2006 of
a key witness in the torturers’ trial.

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Of a very different nature, the numerous police interventions that result
in the death of citizens, who may or may not be suspected of crimes, are
particularly significant. The violence of these acts derives not only from
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IV their brutality, but also from the illegal use of a legitimate power that
borders on the clandestine. Even if devoid of partisan goals, this violence
Dossier
is not external to politics because it is the work of members of the state
apparatus. The frequency of these illegitimate police interventions has
earned the institution the label policía de gatillo fácil (trigger-happy police),
and it has been denounced for many cases of youths from low-income
neighborhoods being tortured in police stations. Among these “blunders,”
groups of youths were gunned down in the streets of Buenos Aires suburbs
in the 1980s, arousing major concern. There is no doubt that widespread
corruption in a police force that has been said to operate like the Mafia is
one of the most serious problems of the democratic institutional system,
which none of the proposed solutions has managed to resolve.4 Successive
reorganizations of the Buenos Aires police force have had practically zero

3. For a detailed description of the forms of violence in democratic Argentina, see Denis
Merklen and Silvia Sigal, “Violence et politique. Une approche argentine,” La Nouvelle Revue
Argentine 2 (2009): 11-20.
4.  Two human rights associations have emerged in response to police brutality, the Commission
of Families of Victims of Institutional Violence (COFAVI) and the Coalition against Police and
Institutional Repression (CORREPI).
 effect, as demonstrated by the “Ramallo massacre” in September 1999:
police executed the hostage takers in a bank robbery in front of the press,
then killed the only survivor at the police station where he was being held.
Police excesses have often led to massive “marches of silence” – thirty-nine
marches between 1989 and 1999 in response to murders gone unpunished.5
Police violence cannot be separated from the spread of crime, especially
after the hyperinflation of 1989. With rising unemployment and an
almost instantaneous decline in middle- and lower-class incomes, poverty,
destitution, and hunger invaded both statistics and public debate. In such a
context, “common-law” offenses pass into the political sphere, as everything
indicates that this violence is part of the new social question. The close
association between crime and poverty saw crime become a commonplace
way of life for the lower classes,6 and the association between this crime
and illegal police activities (which in fact are interwoven with crime) drew
these forms of ordinary crime into political life. Political content can also

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be sought in the underlying operation, caused essentially by the media,
through which a diverse series of individual cases were turned into a
“collective phenomenon (crime, insecurity, violence),” thereby leaving the
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field wide open to a political demand for harsher repression. V

Social transformations linked violence to another change: the renewal of
the repertoire of lower-class collective action. The weakening of the once- Political Violence
mighty trade unionism, the deepening social divide and the withdrawal in Democracy
of the state gave rise to original means of protest, linked to the new Denis Merklen
politicalness of the low-income classes,7 and in which the use of force is
present in various forms. First, the uprisings most directly related to a sudden
increase in poverty exploded violently at the height of the economic crises
of 1989 and 2001, and were called saqueos. The dramatic and profound
deterioration in living conditions of whole swaths of the population was
followed by the looting of shops and supermarkets in the outskirts of large
cities. Anger and hunger combined to put an end to governments of Raul

5.  Sebastián Pereyra, “Cuál es el legado del movimiento de derechos humanos?” in Tomar la
palabra. Estudios sobre protesta social y acción colectiva en la Argentina contemporánea, eds. Federico
Schuster et al. (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2005), 151-191.
6.  Gabriel Kessler, Sociología del delito amateur (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2004).
7.  Denis Merklen, “Une nouvelle politicité pour les classes populaires en Argentine,” in Quand
le travail se précarise, quelles résistances collectives? eds. Paul Bouffartigue and Sophie Béroud (Paris:
La Dispute, 2009), 237-251.
 Alfonsin (1983-1989) and Fernando de la Rúa (1999-2001), each seen as
responsible for the economic disaster and unable to protect the population
against such a sudden deterioration.
Second are the revolts that occurred in some of the provincial capitals,
which had been subject to the so-called “structural-adjustment” programs
launched by the first government of Carlos Menem. While the nonpayment
of state employees’ wages was generally the initial spark, the revolts were
more broadly directed against corruption and the arbitrary nature of local
political systems which, despite their electoral origin, were authoritarian
and rife with nepotism. Full-blown local rebellions occurred between
1989 and 1999 in the provinces of Chaco, Chubut, Tucumán, Jujuy,
Catamarca, Chubut, Córdoba Mendoza, Río Negro, San Juan, Santa Fe,
and Santiago del Estero. These outbursts of rage, baptized estallidos by the
press, began with the torching and ransacking of buildings representative
of government (the seat of the governor, courts, councils, local legislatures),

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followed by the sacking and burning down of the authorities’ houses. Their
forced resignation seemed to validate these movements, which were often
interpreted as a response to the authorities’ blindness to the suffering of the
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VI people. From this perspective, the estallidos can be seen to foreshadow the
revolt of December 2001 that culminated in the resignation of President
Dossier
Fernando de la Rúa.
The use of the word estallidos (explosions), which reflects only their
sudden and collective character, highlights how difficult they are to name.
These “events” supposedly resulted directly from dissatisfaction, or even
ire, released from established structures. Yet a detailed analysis shows that
the alleged spontaneity of this violent behavior, seen as a raw reaction to
poverty, actually fits into the normal functioning of the political system.
For although these “explosions” are the response to a situation, they are
not disorganized, meaningless collective behaviors, with no relationship
between means and ends. As with the “riots” in France, the use of labels
such as “explosions” does nothing but conceal their political connection,
apparent as much in how they are triggered as in their duration. But there
are other factors that indicate the political content of these revolts. Unlike
the attacks on shops (saqueos), and despite the consequences of delayed
 payment of wages on family budgets, the estallidos did not target businesses
but buildings that housed the authorities.8
Third, it is important to mention the organized collective movements
with a certain degree of continuity, such as the occupations of urban land
(asentamientos) and the piqueteros. The illegal occupation of public and
private land was widespread in the second half of the 1980s in all major
urban centers, and originated in the difficulty, or even impossibility, of
gaining access to housing. Varying degrees of violence seem inherent in
the very organization of these movements, and were also common within
the asentamientos; violence was similarly present in clashes with the
police or with groups of residents from neighboring areas who resisted
their settlement.9 However, the piqueteros formed the most significant
social movement in terms of their repercussions and duration. They were
originally organized by both the unemployed and workers rejecting factory
closures, and first appeared in 1996 in the provinces of Neuquén and Salta,

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before becoming the main antiestablishment force among the various
forms of civil protest that swamped the country during the 2001 crisis.10
In a sort of collective bargaining by riot, to borrow Eric Hobsbawm’s term,
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they adopted a strategy new to Argentina to make their demands for work VII
and social benefits heard: blockading roads, streets, or points of access to
urban centers, and maintaining them for relatively long periods. Instead Political Violence
of strikes, which were obviously impossible, the unemployed opted for a in Democracy
means of coercion that was effective both because of its ability to disrupt Denis Merklen
the flow of goods and people, and because of its visibility, which the media
helped increase. The piquetes did not fail to elicit similar reactions to the
asentamientos: they provoked middle-class indignation and were accused
of violating constitutional rights by a large proportion of the public, who
simultaneously denounced the inaction of authorities. This movement
was not immune to repression, especially in its early stages: school teacher
Teresa Rodriguez was murdered by the police in Cutral-Co in 1997,
and a combination of police autonomy in the province of Buenos Aires

8. Marina Farinetti, “Los significados del ‘santiagueñazo,’ un estallido social,” L’Ordinaire

Latino-Américain 188 (2002): 109-117.
9. Denis  Merklen, Inscription territoriale et action collective. Les occupations illégales de terres
urbaines depuis les années 1980 en Argentine (Lille, France: ANRT, 2006).
10.  Maristella  Svampa and Sebastián Pereyra, Entre la ruta y el barrio. La experiencia de las
organizaciones piqueteras (Buenos Aires: Biblios, 2003).
 and obscure political maneuvers ended in the killing of two activists in
Avellaneda in 2002. But the political nature of the violence in this case
resulted from the conflict that blocking the main communication routes
caused between those protesting their social exclusion, driven by top-down
modernization that had left them without work, and the beneficiaries of
modernization, who demanded the right to free movement.

VIOLENCE AND POLITICS IN FRANCE

After this brief description of forms of violence commonly described

as “social,” we can now resituate them in the French context in order
to highlight their eminently political nature. Indeed, in France as in
Argentina, the radical opposition between “violence” and “politics” leads
to forms of negation and disqualification which relegate politics to a purely

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institutional framework, making it impossible to observe the ways political
and social life interact.
In France too, crime has become a directly political problem through its
connection with the new social question; but these links are different from
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VIII
those observed in Argentina. In France, crime is associated with a new
segment of the lower classes on the outskirts of major cities, most often
Dossier
referred to as the “banlieues” (suburbs). These categories are certainly socially
determined by the rise in unemployment, especially youth unemployment,
and by impoverishment. Yet they are overdetermined, firstly by colonial
history and forms of social integration reserved for migrants from former
colonies, and secondly by the geographical identification of these categories
in what some have described as “ghettos.”11 The association between
suburbs and violence is so strong that it has come to resemble a stigma,
and is commonly reproduced by the media and politicians who designate
the territories of these social categories as “lawless zones,” or characterize
their neighborhoods as “violent” neighborhoods.
In a survey we recently conducted among librarians working in social-
housing neighborhoods in eight cities on the outskirts of Paris, they
described the neighborhoods in which they worked as “violent” and riddled

11. Didier  Lapeyronnie, Ghetto urbain. Ségrégation, violence, pauvreté en France aujourd’hui

(Paris: Robert Laffont, 2008).
 with “insecurity.”12 The librarians interviewed based their position on the
reputation of the environment in which they work and on ideas picked
up before coming to work there – an image of “violence” in “problem
neighborhoods.” “When I told my family that I was coming to work in
the 93 [a département neighboring Paris], they said, ‘You must be crazy!’”
(Agnès). “When I came to work here, I knew it was going to be hard….
I had a picture of the suburbs, violence, everything you hear on TV, you
know?” (Baptiste). Then there was the young librarian who chose not to
tell his parents where he worked, preferring to let them assume he worked
in Paris so as “not to frighten them.”
It is no secret that the study of what the French call “insecurity” has
inherited much from research in English built around the expression “fear
of crime.” We also know how much this notion has been linked, particularly
after the 2002 presidential election, to the issue of violence of the “jeunes
des quartiers” (young people from disadvantaged neighborhoods) and

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the “gang” phenomenon.13 Research on public safety and fear of crime
distinguishes between two periods: the 1970s with a rising fear of crime
as it appears in opinion polls, and the second half of the 1990s when the
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supposed lack of public safety was consolidated as a political concern.14 IX

From that point on, there was a surge in law-and-order concerns and the
lack of public safety became a prominent election issue. Concomitantly, Political Violence
the fear of crime became linked to urban issues, to the “projects,” “youth,” in Democracy
and immigration.15 In 2005, the resignification of the word “racaille” Denis Merklen
(riffraff) marked this issue’s full integration into the political field.
This phenomenon is associated with the new repertoires of collective
action that were described in the 1980s as “urban violence,” before it
became common to speak of “riots” during the events of the fall of 2005.
There followed a whole swath of literature that covered the political and

12. Denis  Merklen, “Sociabilité et politicité. Quand les classes populaires questionnent la

sociologie et la politique” (HDR diss., Université Paris Diderot, 2011).
13. Philippe Robert, L’Insécurité en France (Paris: La Découverte, 2002).
14. Patrick  Champagne, “La construction médiatique des ‘malaises sociaux,’” Actes de la
Recherche en Sciences Sociales 101-102 (1991): 64-75. See also Angélina Peralva  and Eric Macé,
Médias et violences urbaines. Débats politiques et construction journalistique (Paris: La Documentation
française: 2002).
15. Laurent Bonelli, La France a peur. Une histoire sociale de l’insécurité (Paris: La Découverte,
2008).
 media construction of this “violence.” Such uprisings are directly related
to the determinations and overdeterminations mentioned above, but have
an immediate link with the state “involvement” in these areas and have
been exploited in various election campaigns. However, despite these
observations, sociology and political science took a long time to recognize
the essentially political nature of these forms of collective mobilization,
and they so did reluctantly.16
In France too, the police treatment of these populations forms the
epicenter of a specific form of political violence.17 Here it is a direct
response by the state to the jumble of representations through which the
new categories of lower classes have been situated within the social order.
As in the Argentine case, one factor that makes such violence political is the
increasingly widespread feeling among these fractions of the low-income
classes that the police’s use of force is illegitimate. The recurrent nature
of this violence that “always hits the same people” has contributed to the

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development of a social boundary, with on one side of the body politic, the
suburbs, Arabs, Blacks, and young men and boys, and on the other side,
the police, politicians, teachers, the French, and representatives of the state.
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X Rapper Mohamed Bourokba, aka Hamé, from the band, La Rumeur, has
made the accusation that, “the reports of the Ministry of the Interior will
Dossier
never record the hundreds of our brothers killed by the police without a
single one of their killers being bothered about it.”18 Similarly, the inability
or unwillingness of the judiciary to subject the police to the law transforms
the problem of crime into a clash between two conflicting social groups.
This is why almost all of the “riots” are sparked off by the death of a young
person during a confrontation with police – the question of whether
the death was caused intentionally or by accident is the first subject of
conflict and denunciation. Police action also politicizes the whole of the
conflict between the state and the lower classes, as it frequently employs
the same type of repression (often illegal) to offenses that, in principle,
come under common law (when pursuing theft or illicit trafficking) as to

16. Gérard Mauger, L’Émeute de novembre 2005. Une révolte protopolitique (Paris: Le Croquant,

2006).
17. Didier Fassin, La Force de l’ordre. Une anthropologie de la police des quartiers (Paris: Le Seuil,
2011).
18.  Pierre Tevanian, “Entretien avec Mohamed Bourokba,” Mouvements 57 (2009): 120.
 collective uprisings. As Didier Fassin shows, the systematic use of figures
of “rebellion,” “self-defense,” and “contempt of authority” leaves almost
no chance of resisting police violence, with the law helping to strengthen
the asymmetry of power relations.19 On the side of the low-income classes,
the repeated revolts in the form of riots question the legitimacy of police
repression and the attempt to control these fractions of the population by
force. So the conflict settles in as a power struggle, the outcome of which
is uncertain on both sides, despite the asymmetry of the organizational
means and instruments of violence the two groups have available.
In this context, rioting extends the conflict in two directions. First, it leads
to an extension of the conflict because by bursting into the public arena,
it lifts the lid on intrinsically invisible police violence (the police usually
acting clandestinely) and makes it possible to speak out and debate. How
many written pages, radio programs, and television reports were dedicated
to the riots and their context? The fate of underprivileged neighborhoods

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enters the public arena, in connection with both the social conditions
of these lower-class groups (massive academic failure, daily racism and
discrimination, unemployment, urban relegation) and the action of the
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state (the limitations of urban policy, law enforcement attitudes). XI

Secondly, the conflict spreads because the riots extend to other forms of
collective action. One example is provided by the “casseurs” (rioters), groups Political Violence
of youths from the suburbs who, since the 1990s, have invited themselves in Democracy
to protest marches to do battle with police, to destroy street furniture, Denis Merklen
shops and cars, to steal, and often to clash fiercely with demonstrators.20
Demonstrations are an opportunity for them to act outside the confines
of their neighborhood, but are also an opportunity to position their
actions in a sharp ambivalence. On the one hand, the rioters differ from
demonstrators. On the other hand, they bring their own social status
to social conflicts from which they are excluded as stakeholders. In this
manner, they gatecrashed the student demonstrations of the 1990s, the
protest movement against the Villepin administration’s First Job Contract

19. Fassin, La force de l’ordre, 175-216. See also Fabien Jobard  and Sophie Névanen, “La
Couleur du jugement. Discriminations dans les décisions judiciaires en matière d’infractions à
agents de la force publique,” Revue Française de Sociologie 48, no. 2 (2007): 243-272.
20.  Gwenola  Ricordeau, “Pourquoi cassent-ils? Présentation des discours et motivations des
casseurs,” Déviance et Société 25 (2001/2002): 165-183.
 in 2006, and the movement opposing the Fillon administration’s pension
reform in 2010. It is as if they were coming to say, simultaneously and
paradoxically, “we are here among you,” and “we are nothing like you.”
Their presence in the marches signifies the first position; the violence of
their actions signifies the second.
However, the forms of violence that have recently developed in France
are not exclusive to the “suburbs.” Several other protest movements have
been more or less directly associated with forms of violence. Since the 2008
economic crisis, many occupations of factories threatened with closure
have included the kidnapping of executives, and some workers have even
threatened to blow the plants up if their employers refused to negotiate.
University and labor-code reforms saw strong opposition develop among
young people, who occupied high schools and universities in 2008. In
1997, groups of unemployed people occupied companies, branches of
the Assedic (the French job seekers’ agency), and other symbolic places

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such as the palace of Versailles.21 To denounce the housing shortage, the
association Les Enfants de Don Quichotte installed tents in Paris in 2006
and in other cities in 2007. Finally, within the spectrum of environmental
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XII movements, fields of transgenic crops have been destroyed, restaurants run
by foreign firms have been dismantled with tractors, and protests have
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regularly been organized in opposition to the nuclear industry.
More traditional forms of political violence are also present in France’s
democracy, such as conflicts related to nationalist demands, the Basque
question, and the Corsican question. The numerous attacks by Islamist-
inspired movements on French territory, particularly in the 1990s, also fall
into this category, and this case deserves special attention. It does reflect
the classic forms of political violence (those who take up arms in support
of a political goal and seek a response from the state), but upon closer
inspection, this form is also linked to the new forms of violence discussed
in this paper, and which exist within the democratic space. Firstly, the
target of these attacks is the state, denounced as representative of the
nation and of neocolonial power. Secondly, the attacks have sometimes
been perpetrated through the recruitment of individuals whose sympathy
for the movement springs from suburban discontent, combined with

21.  Valérie Cohen, “Transformations et devenir des mobilisations collectives de chômeurs,” Les

Mondes du Travail 6 (2008): 91-102.
 the neocolonial question. In this regard, domestic police action is linked
to army activities abroad. As Didier Fassin points out, the Algerian
population in France still vividly recalls the 1960s police repression during
the Algerian war, and this memory is still revived by the racist nature of
certain police abuses today.

S P E A K I N G O F P O L I T I C A L V I O L E N C E I N A D E M O C R AT I C R E G I M E

The social sciences are confronted with a new situation which calls
for an examination of the border between violence and politics. Not all
violence is (ultimately) political, and it may be said that politics is not
(ultimately) violence. However, to draw an overly radical line between the
two terms is doubtless an obstacle to understanding the violence emerging
within the democratic system, rather than with an aim to destabilize it.

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In the late 1980s, everything seemed to point towards the end of political
violence. Virtually no political group asserts a right to use armed violence
in pursuit of political or doctrinarian objectives. In parallel, democracy
no longer has any enemies. No political player, whether revolutionary or
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XIII
reactionary, seeks to abolish democracy. However, behind the adherence
they naturally arouse, these movements hide a third aspect. Everything is
Political Violence
happening as if the use of force was imploding. Organized political violence in Democracy
is being succeeded by a spread of violence that the justice system seems Denis Merklen
powerless to curtail. Its reactions are insufficient, contested, and perceived
as illegitimate. However, no other solution is demanded; only the justice
system can provide a legitimate response to violence. This tension gives
rise to two issues: the relationship between violence, politics, and justice
(and the state’s legitimacy in the use of force), and the presence of new
repertoires of action for the low-income classes.
The Argentine case shows how the spreading resentment of “impunity”
has seen the justice system put on trial by the victims, the accused, or the
many social movements constituted precisely because of its shortcomings.
The fact that the legal system has struggled to provide a solution to the
wounds caused by state terrorism (especially the “disappeared”) and by
the two major crises of recent decades – the hyperinflation of 1989-1991
and the recession of 1998-2002 – has fueled the impression of impunity
denounced so strongly by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. The “powerful
 figures” responsible for the worst atrocities and economic disasters are never
brought to trial. In addition, the corruption and deficiency within state
institutions (police, judiciary, parliament, and government) runs so deep
that the institutions have become part of the problem they are supposed
to fix. The corruption of the regime protects politicians, judges, police,
and businessmen. It is impunity that cements this mishmash together, and
provides the link between violence and the criticism of political corruption.
Impunity also makes it possible to bring together events of a very diverse
nature. Although these instances of “violence” implicate those in authority
only indirectly, the justice system’s powerlessness or slowness to act unifies
and politicizes them.
Like the movements seeking the truth about the fate of the dictatorship’s
victims and the trial of those responsible, the recent mobilizations
demanding “justice” are carried by citizens and the media, short-circuiting
political parties. Mostly launched by the victims’ relatives, these movements

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have taken up the protest model invented by the “mothers” under the
military regime, then continued by the grandmothers and children of the
“disappeared.” The law has proven incapable of subjecting power to its
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XIV controls. The state has regained its monopoly of force; it remains for this
force to be used within the law. Such failures of the justice system are not
Dossier
apparent in France, but the suspicion of bias towards police, businessmen,
and politicians also politicizes violence within a democracy. An intense
feeling of inequality in relation to the rich, politicians, and technocrats
fuels the distance between rulers and the ruled. And the memory of
colonial wars, the wars that the West is leading in Islamic countries, and
discrimination against minorities all reinforce the politicization of violence.
The link between the spread of these various forms of violence and the
skyrocketing number of socially excluded, poor, and disaffected is obvious,
as much in France as in Argentina, even if the objectivity of these processes
of social disintegration is not the same in each country. To the extent that
the link between social issues and the spread of violence is obvious not only
for observers but also for the affluent social classes, the profile of the new
“dangerous classes” is becoming clear; soon, the oft-cited “social divide”
may well be coupled with an almost statutory frontier. The association
between scattered violence and the new social question is such that it
exceeds the mere treatment of illegality by police and judicial institutions.
 In this context, it seems that answers to the questions raised by seemingly
excessive and unbearable violence must necessarily be political.
The radical separation of “violence” and “politics” makes any alternative
that does not amount to an outright condemnation of violence, and
thereby fuel a temptation for harsher policing, impossible. It reins in both
the actions of people and political groups, and the positions of academics
and intellectuals. It acts as an intellectual constraint that causes a genuine
blindness in those seeking to understand the political condition of low-
income classes.
The presence of low-income classes within democracies has changed over
the last thirty years, to the point where now a new lower-class “politicalness”
can be identified. The lower classes of today do not only differ from the
working class by their “sociability” (unemployment, precariousness, and
geographical identification); they also differ politically. Firstly, because the
state has set up a whole battery of public policies destined for the low-

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income echelons, which range from the creation of specialized police and
repressive tactics to the implementation of various kinds of social policies
(urban policy, integration, the fight against unemployment, education,
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and so forth). Secondly, because the low-income classes have developed XV

survival strategies and forms of collective action that put them in frequent
contact with violence, and often in illegal situations. Trafficking, illegal Political Violence
occupation of land, undeclared work, looting (saqueos), riots (estallidos), in Democracy
and roadblocks in Argentina; illicit trade, various illegal activities based Denis Merklen
in social-housing projects, illegal immigration, factory occupations and
kidnappings of executives, casseurs and rioters, occupation of public places
and various local institutions, destruction of crops, and repeated clashes
with police in France.
To a certain degree, characterizing these forms of action as “violent”
disqualifies the lower classes from the political arena; this disqualification
increases the perplexity of the politicians supposed to “receive” the message
these actions convey from the periphery of the social order. Intellectuals,
teachers, social workers, journalists, and politicians lack the political words
to name what they are faced with – even when they are willing to understand
this otherness in political terms. For instance, in a recent survey, we asked
librarians from low-income neighborhoods in Seine-Saint-Denis to tell us
what the most frequent acts of violence of which they had been victim or
had witnessed were. They rarely spoke of physical violence against people
 (less than 1 percent), but quite frequently of property crime (50 percent),
and in the vast majority of cases (over 90 percent of responses), the word
“violence” was used to describe unruliness, verbal exchanges, and generally
any refusal to obey the orders of an authority figure (librarian, teacher,
policeman, or facilitator). In a context of social and political change such
as we are currently going through, these taxonomic distinctions which
radically separate politics from social issues, violence, and the economy
need to be challenged. That is why we have suggested the concept of
“politicalness,” which should allow us to better understand the political life
of democratic systems and, more importantly, to observe how the presence
of the lower classes causes a political inflection within our regimes.
Hannah Arendt used the notions of “bureaucracy” and “rule by Nobody”
to describe “the most tyrannical” of all “systems of domination,” and she
saw in them one of the causes that could lead to violence in contemporary
societies. Indeed, the systemic nature of domination makes “it impossible to

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localize responsibility and to identify the enemy.”22 In the current context,
something of this can be said to remain in the analysis of our political
systems. As the mechanisms of economic domination and social exclusion
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XVI operate within the framework of the law and democratic legitimacy,
it is difficult to identify an opponent in time to contest these forms of
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domination and exclusion. Except that today, there is no ideological
claim to violence. The “rioters” and “casseurs,” like many of their peers
from low-income neighborhoods, simply say of the traditional forms of
political mobilization (voting, demonstrations, strikes, and participation
in social measures): “There is no point.” The social change of the last few
decades does not contradict them. Lower class “politicalness” takes place
entirely within the democratic space, but in a context where the forms of
participation and mobilization that helped constitute the democratic space
itself have depreciated. Hence the particularly tense and difficult situation
of the most vulnerable groups: the individuals who compose them demand
citizenship, and to do this burst violently into a political system incapable
of listening to them, which, as many have pointed out, could well provide
a political reason for their social exclusion.
Speaking of violence in democracy is difficult as within it violence takes
on a contradictory form. On the one hand, “violence” appears to be a

22.  Arendt, “On Violence,” 138.

 catchall, fundamentally indeterminate word used to describe very different
forms of action, from insult to physical constraint. From this point of view,
it is almost impossible to speak of violence without specifying the meaning
given to the signifier. Yet there is also a use of the word, in our political
system, which is instead overdetermined: everything which falls outside of
the democratic space is said to be violent, and all that is violent is excluded
politically. So, in the social conditions of inequality, discrimination,
impoverishment, and disaffiliation that mark the daily life of a growing
proportion of the lower classes, this use of the word serves in practice to
disqualify certain modes of action and to defend the existing order.

Denis Merklen
Denis Merklen is associate professor at Université Paris Diderot – Paris-7 and
researcher at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Social Issues (IRIS,

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EHESS). He has been visiting professor at several universities abroad, particularly
in Latin America. Since 2007, he has headed the French Sociology Association’s
thematic research network Mouvements sociaux (rt21).
He specializes in the political sociology of low-income classes, and is known in
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the field for his concept of “lower-class politicalness.” He currently directs a joint XVII
EHESS and Université Paris Diderot research team studying the relationship between
popular cultures and writing. Since 2007, he has been conducting ethnographic- Political Violence
type fieldwork on the attacks made against local libraries on the outskirts of in Democracy
Denis Merklen
major French cities. This was the subject of his dissertation for an accreditation
to supervise research (HDR), the main volume of which is entitled Sociabilité et
politicité. Quand les classes populaires questionnent la sociologie et la politique (Paris,
2011). He is the author, among other works, of “Social Boundaries and Family
Upbringing,” (European Studies Program – University of Delhi Working Paper
Series 2011/IV), co-authored with M. D. Gheorghiuet and M. de Saint Martin;
Quartiers populaires, quartiers politiques (Paris: La Dispute, 2009); and L’Expérience
des situations limites (Paris: Karthala, 2009), co-authored with G. Bataillon.