Structural Violence, the
Cult of Power, and Peace Studies: Relevance for the
21st Century
Harry Targ
(A version of this article was originally presented at a Symposium in Honor of Berenice A.
Carroll called “Pen and Protest: Intellect and Action”, November 17, 2007)
“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." Berenice’s analysis of the
reification of power and what it means for scholarship and action
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 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.”
