Pen and Protest: Intellect and Action
A Symposium in Honor of Berenice A. Carroll
November 17, 2007
Structural Violence, the Cult of Power,
and Peace Studies:
Relevance for the 21st Century
Harry Targ
Department of Political Science/ Committee on Peace
Studies,
Purdue University
“The ideas of the ruling
class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling
material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”
Marx’s prescient comment in the German
Ideology was relevant in 1972 when Berenice Carroll published her provocative article called
“Peace Research: The Cult of Power” as it is still today. Similarly Berenice’s
analysis of the reification of power and what it means for scholarship and action in 1972 remains
particularly important for our own time.
Dominant Paradigms and the Study of the Cold War
If we think back to the time
when “The Cult of Power” was written dominant paradigms in international
relations, political science, and history continued to reify power as the
central concept driving political analysis. The world was understood as one
dominated by two superpowers overseeing two competing power blocs. The bipolar
world was a particular variant of the state system that was created in the seventeenth
century. The ultimate units of analysis were separate and distinct
nation-states. Since a few were more powerful than all others, which was always
the case, international relations became the study of powerful states. The arms
race of the post World War II period concerned some analysts of international
relations so they fashioned a peace research that was committed to conflict
management or resolution among the big powers.
This scholarly lens on the
world seemed increasingly divorced from political reality. The dreams of human
liberation that came with the rapid decolonization of the African continent
were being derailed as what Kwame Nkrumah called “neo-colonialism” replaced
formal colonialism. Gaps between rich and poor peoples and nations began their
steep climb. Covert operations, military coups, big power interventions in poor
countries increased. Wars ensued against peoples in South and East Asia, the
Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. And multinational corporations were
spreading their operations all across the globe, initiating the first great
wave of outsourcings of production and jobs. For many Americans and Asians, the
most wrenching experience of all these manifestations of global disarray was
the Vietnam War.
In this historical context, radical
peace researchers began to argue that our understanding of these phenomena
required a significant paradigm shift. If we wanted to understand the world in
order to change it we needed to break out of the state centric, great powers,
conflict management conception of international relations. We needed to develop
theories and prescriptions that helped us understand the world we lived in so
that we could work on the reduction of the enormous gaps between human potential
and human actuality; and, therefore, human violence.
These peace researchers
called structural violence, the
difference between how humanity could live, secure in economic and social
justice, versus how most people live. They asked questions about the structures
and processes that prohibited the full realization of human possibility. Peace
researchers also saw an inextricable connection between direct violence, or killing which was the more traditional subject
of peace research, and structural
violence, which involved the institutionalization of human misery.
Further, they hypothesized that there were connections between imperialism, dominance and dependence, the workings of capitalism , patriarchy, institutionalized racism, social and economic injustice and both direct and structural violence.
More specifically, radical
peace researchers began to see that both direct and structural violence were
the resultants of a global political/economic/ and cultural system in which
Centers of Power within and between countries controlled and exploited
Periphery countries and people. A system of imperialism existed whereby ruling
classes in core countries collaborated with ruling classes in peripheral
countries to exploit masses of people. This was a system that had its roots in
the rise of capitalism out of feudalism. It was a system of imperial rule. It
was a system of patriarchy. It was a system of institutionalized racism. And
wars were the result of struggles for imperial control and domination. Radical
peace researchers borrowed ideas from dependency theory and grafted them onto
traditional theories of imperialism to offer an alternative paradigm to the
state-centric, power driven model that dominated the academy and political
punditry.
The Cult of Power
Berenice Carroll added to the
emerging paradigm shift in her article “Peace Research: The Cult of Power,” by
deconstructing the use of “power” as the concept central to the traditional
paradigm. Also she alerted peace researchers to the implicit acceptance in
their work of the cult of power. Perhaps most importantly, Carroll offered an
alternative conception of power that would radically redirect study in a way to
link the “pen to protest.”
In her seminal article,
Professor Carroll pointed out that virtually all theories of international
relations began with a conception of power. And the power variable had seeped
into the public consciousness of world affairs as well. In its contemporary
usage “power” referred to control, dominance, and the ability to shape the
consciousness and behavior of others; individuals, groups, and/or nations. The
dean of international relations study in those days was Hans Morgenthau, who
wrote the classic international relations text, Politics Among Nations, which went through eleven editions from its
first imprint in 1949 until the 1970s. Morgenthau said that power was central
to human affairs: ‘Power is the control of the minds and actions of others,”
and “international politics like all politics involves the struggle for power.”
Carroll pointed out that theorists sometimes defined power as the ability to
dominate. Sometimes they defined power as the instrumentalities of control (such
as military capabilities). Sometimes they defined power as a perceived status
ordering of nations. But what was central here was control and domination. And
as long as the ability to control and dominate were unequally distributed only those with the greatest power were
worthy of attention.
Berenice reminded us that
there used to be definitions of power in public discourse that emphasized
liberation rather than control. These older definitions included words like
strength, competence, rigor, energy, empowerment, the ability to actualize. To
quote Berenice, “Thus it appears that the currently predominant understanding
of power as control and dominance is a development of recent decades. The more
traditional meaning centered on the idea of ability and strength.” She went on
to warn radical peace researchers that while they clearly had a better grasp of reality, they too reified power in the modern
usage. She suggested that peace researchers failed to “…challenge the
prevailing conception of power as dominance; its preoccupation with
institutions, groups or persons which are perceived as powerful, and to some
extent also in a tendency for the researcher to identify with those
institutions, groups, or persons which are seen as powerful;” that is the
elites, the key decision makers, the nation-states and the superpowers. The
danger, she implied, is that we, the most progressive of scholars and
activists, may be inadvertently embracing the conceptual tools that reinforce
the status quo rather than take sides for social change.
To illustrate her point in a
way relevant to both peace and (I would add) feminist theory, Carroll offered a
vivid quote from a distinguished scholar of that time Karl Deutsch who wrote:
"Today, and for one or more decades to come, the
nation-states are and will be the
world’s main centers of power. They will remain such
centers as long as the nation-state remains man’s foremost practical instrument for getting things done.”
What implications for peace
and feminist theory did Professor Carroll suggest should be deduced from this
“cult of power?” First, scholar/activists needed to reject the notion that power
represents dominance. Second, scholar/activists needed to broaden their
research lens from focusing on so-called powerful institutions, like the
nation-state, or decision making elites and begin to examine the entirety of
the social/political/ and cultural terrain. Third, scholar/activists needed to
utilize the older conception of power as actualization, competence, assertion
of rights; in other words a vision of power that understands that historical
change is a complicated affair involving masses of people not ordinarily
studied or valued by contemporary scholarship. Fourth, scholar/activists needed
to reject a frame on reality, accepted even by the more radical, that presents
history as the struggle between the
powerful and victims and which portrays people
as impotent to assert their rights and prerogatives. (Discourse in the academy
is particularly good at framing political reality such that people are
powerless, or ignorant, or lacking in resources to assert themselves, or are in
the end the cause of their own victimhood. This projection is particularly
strong among those who never set foot off the college campus as they
pontificate about the behavior of the people).
Summing this up, Professor
Carroll writes”
“…one of the most pernicious effects of the cultist
conceptions of power is that
it has built up a strong association between the lack of
power in the sense of dominance and powerlessness in the sense of helplessness….To break out of this
mold what seems most urgently needed is to restore to public consciousness and
to the consciousness of scholars the idea of power as competence; to develop that
idea more fully by differentiating the kinds of energy, ability, and strength which
it may imply and, in particular, to seek to study powers of the allegedly
powerless-the kinds of competence and potentialities for autonomous action
which are available to those who do not have the power of dominance….”
Where
are we today?
It seems to me that Professor
Carroll’s argument is as critical to us as peace researchers, feminists, worker
rights activists, anti-racist activists, and, indeed, all social justice
activists today. While the academic world is perhaps more complicated today and
there are manifestations of a theoretical diversity that may not have been as
developed in 1972, I would argue that the main lines of “the cult of power”
argument still hold. Power is reified in our academic disciplines. Top-down
models of human experience still predominate in the social sciences and
humanities. For most fields non-elites remain voiceless and invisible. At best
they are presented as victims, not actors on the world stage. Academic
paradigms, whether consciously conceived or not, therefore project a profound
pessimism about social change and human possibility. And, for some scholars,
the victims become the cause of their own victimhood. The most well meaning of
us as scholars and concerned citizens present a view of the world that demeans
and discourages the vast majority of humankind.
Where do we go from here?
1)We need in our scholarship
to emphasize the centrality of workers, women, people of color, and all
so-called marginalized people as shapers of history, or at least to recognize
their role in creating history.
2)We need to engage in research projects that might help the voiceless gain a voice, the powerless to increasingly and more effectively shape their own destiny, and individuals, groups, and classes gain self-confidence and strength in their social projects.
3)We need to extend our
scholarship to the study and celebration of those who have chosen the path to
empowerment and the evaluation of their relative successes and failures. This
would not be an exercise in romanticism but rather an exercise in developing a
more sophisticated understanding of history and change.
4)We need to build our
theories and our research skills through active engagement in the process of
social change. Theoretical validation comes from engagement not withdrawal.
5)We need to relate models of empowerment to all sectors of society. We cannot embrace the issue of competence, strength, and self-actualization for one constituency and use traditional models of domination to try to understand other parallel constituencies. Here is where understanding the connections between class, race, and gender play a particularly important role.
Berenice Carroll ended her
ground-breaking article by quoting Hannah Arendt:
“It is only after one eliminates this disastrous reduction
of public affairs
to the business of domination, that the original data in
the realm of human affairs will appear or rather reappear in their authentic diversity.”
