An End to Violence

The first thing that has to be stated is that the threat remains of the disarticulation between objective approaches to violence, which may be quantified and which can claim to be universal as they are theoretically acceptable to all, and subjective or relative approaches, which look at what an individual, a group, or a society considers as such at any given time. A legal definition of violence, centered on the state and, in the words of Max Weber, on a legitimate monopoly of force, appears to enable this problem to be set aside and violence simply to be objectivized. In this context, André Lalande’s Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie (1968), backed up by Montesquieu, mentions the “illegitimate or at least illegal use of force.”1 But when the state entrusts private agents with a substantial part of war-making, as is overwhelmingly evident with the US intervention in Iraq (Makki 2004), and when internal security is likewise handed over to the private sector, a trend currently at work worldwide, the state monopoly of legitimate force is called into question and, thus, the possibility of discussing violence objectively, as in Lalande’s definition quoted above. The advent of the age of victims that began in the 1960s considerably strengthens this process of calling into question, and the upsurge of individual identities has considerable “memory” and “victim” dimensions. Many players nowadays are demanding acknowledgment of and, in some cases, reparation for the crimes