Third World Quarterly

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Modalities of Violence in Development: structural

or contingent, mythic or divine?

Trevor Parfitt

To cite this article: Trevor Parfitt (2013) Modalities of Violence in Development:

structural or contingent, mythic or divine?, Third World Quarterly, 34:7, 1175-1192, DOI:
10.1080/01436597.2013.824641

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2013.824641

Published online: 02 Sep 2013.

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Third World Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 7, 2013, pp 1175–1192

Modalities of Violence in Development:

structural or contingent, mythic or
divine?
TREVOR PARFITT

ABSTRACT This paper examines the relationship between violence and

development. It explores whether violence is an intrinsic (structural) part of
development, or a contingent result of poor or mistaken policies and practices
that might be corrected. The issue of how far an element of violence might be
desirable for development is also considered. These two issues are debated in
the context of a variety of approaches to development and in light of various
accounts of violence offered by analysts such as Fanon, Benjamin, Critchley
and Zizek. In conclusion it is argued that an emancipatory conception of
development may be reconciled with Benjamin’s idea of divine violence in the
form of a Badiouan event—with the proviso that the Derridian conception of
the economy of violence is also applied in such a way as to minimise, or at
least limit violence.

The relationship between development and violence is complex. Its history is as

long as the concept of development itself, although radically different views have
been held as to the nature of this relationship. Some have asserted that a measure
of violence is essential to development, even desirable. More recent commenta-
tors are likelier to condemn the violence associated with development and to
argue for less or non-violent strategies. Some advocate the abandonment of
development as a whole, condemning it as intrinsically (or structurally) violent
and oppressive. This paper will examine the extent to which development and
violence are mutually imbricated, questioning how far development can be
stripped of any violent tendencies and whether or not this would be desirable.
First, we shall briefly survey and define some of the radically variant approaches
to development with a view to examining their relationship to violence. Our
analysis of violence will reveal that different analysts have variant understand-
ings of what constitutes violence, but that they tend to agree that it involves
marginalisation and exclusion.

Trevor Parfitt is at the University of Nottingham Malaysia, Jalan Broga, Semenyih, Selangor, Malaysia.

ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/13/001175-18

Ó 2013 Southseries Inc., www.thirdworldquarterly.com
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2013.824641 1175
 TREVOR PARFITT

What is development? Is it violent?

It has become commonplace to date the beginning of development to the end of
the second world war. Many point to US President Truman’s inaugural speech
of 1949 as an initial launching point for development aid and policy. However,
Cowen and Shenton argue that development as a discourse can be traced to
much earlier debates in the Victorian period on the nature of progress and how
to manage it.1
If the origins of development are hard to discern, the meaning of the term is
even more complex. Many analysts accept that the concept of development has
undergone a process of evolution, gathering layers of additional meaning with
the passage of time. Initially economic growth was seen as the core of develop-
ment, but this was succeeded by the view that provision of basic needs was
essential to combat the high poverty levels associated with underdevelopment.
Later approaches to development have variously laid emphasis on the need for
grassroots participation in development activities, and on the importance of
enhancing capabilities for action, of promoting people’s well-being and
achieving greater equity.
This is to say nothing of those who regard development as an imperial
imposition of Western power over less developed states. This view propounds
an explicit and systematic relationship between development and violence. Such
an imperialist development is intrinsically violent in its promotion of Western
domination over peripheral areas irrespective of the preferences of people in
those areas. However, other approaches to development can also be seen as
entailing violence. Projects aimed at economic growth can be violent in their
effects, as in the case of ventures such as the Narmada Dam in India, which
involved large-scale displacement of local people. Even grassroots participatory
approaches can be deemed violent, with some regarding them as left-wing
indoctrination, while others see participatory projects as a fig leaf for a
wider-scale imposition of neoliberal structures of power and dominance.2
A crucial area of debate concerns the question of whether violence is integral
to development, or contingent. This is a critical question for those who aspire to
a non-violent development; for if violence is an inevitable part of development,
this means that their aspirations are doomed to failure. However, if violence is
incidental, then a reformed peaceful development is possible.
A prominent school of thought that sees violence as intrinsic to development
is the ‘post-development’ approach. A classic statement of the post-development
critique dates from 1992:

The idea of development stands like a ruin in the intellectual landscape.

Delusion and disappointment, failures and crimes have been the common
companions of development and they tell a common story: it did not work.3

Critics such as Escobar and Nandy make it even clearer that development
should be seen as being violent to its core. Escobar argues that development is
a strategy to enforce Western modernisation on developing states. He defines
modernity as ‘the ensemble of values, institutions, economic systems and social

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 MODALITIES OF VIOLENCE IN DEVELOPMENT

relations that originated in Europe in the seventeenth century, if not before’.

This modernising development project has been portrayed as benign, but has
actually led to ‘long lasting and structural’ violence that is closely related to
displacement. Escobar argues that:

…modernity is essentially about displacement—conquering territories,

uprooting peoples from place, restructuring spaces, such as creating
plantations and urban sprawl or ghettoes, and so forth—and that displace-
ment, to put it bluntly, has grown out of hand.4

Escobar illuminates his argument with a case study from the Pacific region of
Colombia, an area that is rich in natural resources, but whose indigenous people
are being driven out by paramilitaries, partly at the behest of oil palm
growers who are extending their production for world markets as part of
Colombia’s development plan.5
Nandy expounds similarly, asserting that:

There is an intrinsic and close relationship between development and

violence. Well-intentioned development specialists and development experts
cannot snap this bond and though the development community pays lip
service to the removal of certain forms of conspicuous, gratuitous violence,
it never really does so seriously. There is an unstated belief that those who
stand in the way of development or who retard or impede the process of
development are actually obsolete, retrogressive and redundant and deserve
to be thrown into the dustbin of history.6

Like Escobar, Nandy regards development as a strategy of Western political and

economic imperialism and, as such, irrevocably violent in its repressive
exclusion of indigenous populations. This leads to a clear position in favour of
the abolition of development.
If post-development theorists argue that development is intrinsically violent,
there are many analysts who hold that, while much development may be
violent, there is no inevitable correlation between the two. They accept that
there may be incidences of violence, as when local people are displaced by a
dam project, but deny any necessary linkage between development and
violence. This opens up the prospect for the achievement of a non-violent form
of development, perhaps through reforms to existing imperfect development
strategies. A recurrent theme in much analysis is the need to improve
development policy in order to minimise violent outcomes.7
Development ethics is such an approach, one of its central themes being the
need to curb the violence that has often been associated with development. That
such analysts assert that development is capable of ethical regulation does not
necessarily signify their naivety. Denis Goulet, the founding father of develop-
ment ethics was critical of neoliberal policy, noting that ‘markets as masters of
society enrich the rich and pauperize the poor’.8 Many of his successors
recognise the difficulties of eliminating or at least reducing this exclusory
violence of development. For example, McNeill and St Clair explain how

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 TREVOR PARFITT

initiatives to introduce ethical and human rights criteria into the running of
organisations like the World Bank, UNESCO and the Inter-American Develop-
ment Bank (IDB) foundered in the face of resistance from their management.
Bank personnel would not accept a central role for human rights discourse in
the 2006 World Development Report because they were afraid of the conse-
quences of human rights being considered more important than neoliberal eco-
nomic policy. UNESCO and the IDB rejected rights and ethical initiatives because
they were seen as politically risky and threatening to those who held the purse
strings of these organisations.9
If many development ethicists recognise the difficulties of reforming and
regulating development, it also has to be acknowledged that the project of
rendering development ethical may itself set limits on strategies for action that
compound such difficulties. Dower explains that development practitioners are
obliged to behave ethically ‘because there is a certain kind of relationship
between means and ends that makes them intertwined’. This invokes the
principle that one should ‘act so that the means you adopt are value-consistent
with the system of ends to which you are committed’. He further explains:

Thus, if we are pursuing peace, we should do so peacefully; if we are

pursuing justice, we should act justly; if we are promoting human rights, we
should respect human rights in the process; if we are trying to establish
democracy, we should treat other people democratically in the process; if we
are trying to promote the truth, we should do so truthfully.10

In short the ends do not justify the means and therefore non-violent objectives
should be pursued non-violently.
It should be noted that, while Goulet himself clearly preferred peaceful
methods, he gave out mixed messages on this topic, arguing in 1976 that
revolution could be ethically justifiable in the face of an inequitable world
order.11 Recently Crocker has endeavoured to develop a practicable approach to
the project of ethicising development. He argues that the key to ethical develop-
ment is the promotion of well-being through the extension of deliberative
democracy at all levels of development. Crocker’s view of deliberative
democracy is influenced by Rawls, in that he sees it as ‘the exercise of public
reason’. Opportunities for political participation and discussion must be
maximised so that those at the receiving end of development policy have the
chance to help shape the policies that affect their lives. Crocker acknowledges
that economic and power inequalities may restrict the opportunities of the poor
for meaningful participation in the policy process. However, he argues that only
rough equality is necessary to give most the chance to participate and to prevent
the rich from completely dominating the process. This enables Crocker to
relegate non-deliberative methods (up to and including forceful violence) to the
back burner. He cites Fung to argue that non-deliberative methods should only
be used when deliberative methods have been exhausted and only in a
graduated manner proportionate to the methods used by the opponents of
deliberative democracy.12 Thus, Crocker does not eliminate non-deliberative

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methods as possible strategies for development, but he relegates them to the

status of last resort, with violence as the last of last resorts.
Crocker’s development ethics shares a commonalty with Critchley’s approach
to more general questions of modernity, notably that of political emancipation.
Critchley shares the concern of such analysts as Escobar and Goulet about the
exclusory and inegalitarian violence of global neoliberalism, arguing that it must
be opposed by an alliance of progressive forces united by a Levinasian ethics
of infinite obligation to the other. This ethics of alterity entails an anarchistic
strategy involving non-violent political action to bring about change that oper-
ates in the interstices of the state.13 Although Crocker’s deliberative democratic
development may be less confrontational than Critchley’s oppositional counter-
strategy to neoliberal modernity, they both entail ethical positions that seek to
eliminate violence not only from global governance, but also from their own
reform strategies.
A number of themes emerge from the discussion so far. Clearly there is a
difference between those who regard violence as intrinsic to development, such as
the post-development analysts, and those who regard it as incidental and
potentially eliminable, such as Crocker and Dower. Strands of commonality
between post-development and some development ethics analysts (not to mention
Critchley) emerge in a consensus on the role of neoliberalism in causing much of
the violence associated with development. The question of neoliberal violence
opens up fault lines in development ethics. Crocker’s account of globalisation
underplays the leftist account that emphasises the role of major capitalist powers
in underwriting a predatory neoliberalism based on dispossession and marginalisa-
tion of the global poor.14 This elision of powerful forces whose interests lie in
opposition to greater equity enables him to argue that deliberative democracy will
be able to cure the ills of development without undue recourse to violence. On the
other hand, St Clair notes that ‘the free market needs those at the very bottom’
and argues of the World Bank that ‘many of the proposals coming from this global
institution serve to justify an unfair global system’.15 In arguing that the
unfairness and violence of development may be a structural part of neoliberal
capitalism, St Clair casts doubt on the viability of a deliberative democratic
process for reforming an intrinsically violent system.
What is clear is that all the analysts reviewed so far see the violence of devel-
opment as something to be condemned and eliminated. The post-development
analysts want to abolish development because of its intrinsic violence, whereas
proponents of development ethics aim to reform development in order to elimi-
nate or at least curb its violence. Critchley advocates opposition to the violence
of neoliberalism by a non-violent anarchist strategy, which may be suggestive of
a development of pacifistic resistance. Yet this apparently universal condemna-
tion of violence has not always been so universal. In the next section we shall
explore some possible justifications of violence in development.

Should development be violent?

It is within living memory that many ‘Third World’ nationalists believed that no
development would be possible for their countries in the absence of a violent
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revolution to liberate them from imperialist domination. Development had to

involve an emancipatory component based on violent liberation. One does not
have to look far from the British metropole to find Irish nationalists such as
Pearce justifying the Easter Rising of 1916 in terms of the need for a ‘blood
sacrifice’ by a few nationalists to spark a mass campaign to end British colonial
rule. Without bloodshed it was thought that there could be no freedom or
independent development for Ireland.16
A less romanticised justification of revolutionary violence came from Fanon
in Algeria. He argued that colonial domination was based on a Manichaean
discourse in which the coloniser was the repository of all virtues while the
colonised was characterised as a bestial native who required the domination of
the colonist. This system of oppression was underpinned by violence:

The violence which governed the ordering of the colonial world, which
tirelessly punctuated the destruction of the indigenous social fabric, and
demolished unchecked the systems of reference of the country’s economy,
lifestyles, and modes of dress, the same violence will be vindicated and
appropriated when, taking history into their own hands, the colonized swarm
into the forbidden cities.17

Thus, colonial violence would spark the revolutionary violence that would
overthrow it. He elaborated this point as follows:

Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with

reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater
violence.18

Thus, the colonised had to use violence to overthrow colonialism as it was the
only thing that the colonial regime would succumb to.
Fanon also justified the use of revolutionary violence as more conducive to
development than a negotiated peace. He argued that the propensity in negoti-
ated settlements was for the national bourgeoisie to take over from the colonial
government and to continue politics as usual, so that those at the bottom
remained excluded. On the other hand, ‘during a war of liberation the mobiliza-
tion of the masses introduces the notion of common cause, national destiny, and
collective history into every consciousness’ thus facilitating post-liberation
nation building.19 Violence was essential to development, not only because it
was required for liberation, but also because the experience of common struggle
prompted a process of political conscientisation conducive to development.
Events since Fanon’s death in 1961 may be seen as casting doubt on his views
of revolutionary violence as a force for development. While many of the postcolo-
nial nations that have become a part of neoliberal globalisation have experienced
little if any development success, the same can be said of most if not all of the
states that have embraced a revolutionary project. Whether through external desta-
bilisation (Nicaragua’s struggle with the US-backed Contras, or Mozambique’s
ruinous war against the RENAMO forces backed by apartheid South Africa), or
through a process of political decay associated with bureaucratic centralism

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 MODALITIES OF VIOLENCE IN DEVELOPMENT

(arguably Mozambique, Angola or Cuba), post-revolutionary states have shown

little evidence of development. The states that have experienced some forms of
development, notably economic growth, are those mostly Asian states associated
with the developmental state model (an undeniably capitalist, though hardly a
neoliberal strategy), or ‘socialist’ states such as China and Vietnam, which have
apparently embraced their own variants of state capitalism. It might be argued that
Fanon himself understood the fragility of revolutionary consciousness in that it
could quickly be dissipated in the face of constant setbacks.20 The point remains
that revolutionary violence does not seem to have played the role he envisaged for
it, that of catalyst for development.
More recently political activists have been more likely to argue that pro-
jects of political emancipation can more effectively be pursued through the
use of non-violent means. This has much to do with the work of Gene
Sharp, who has been credited with inspiring such anti-authoritarian popular
movements as the colour revolutions that deposed Slobodan Milosevic in
Serbia and Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine, as well as the more recent Arab
Spring. Unlike Crocker or Critchley, Sharp’s reservations about violence are
not the product of ethical considerations, but of pragmatic strategic impera-
tives. He argues that violence is not the best strategy for removing oppres-
sive regimes as follows:

By placing confidence in violent means, one has chosen the very type of
struggle with which the oppressors nearly always have superiority. The
dictators are equipped to apply violence overwhelmingly. However long or
briefly … democrats can continue, eventually the harsh military realities
usually become inescapable. The dictators usually have superiority in
military hardware, ammunition, transportation and the size of military forces.
Despite bravery, the democrats are (almost always) no match.21

Consequently Sharp advocates strategies of non-violent struggle. He exhaus-

tively examines the non-violent strategies that emancipatory movements can
use to maximise their chances of achieving democratic reform. It should be
observed that the conditions he specifies for success are demanding, in that
they require careful analysis of the ruling regime’s points of weakness,
development of and adherence to a viable strategy for peaceful overthrow of
the regime and high levels of discipline on the part of democratic activists,
not to mention courage in the face of repression (and this is not an exhaus-
tive list).
This might raise questions as to whether or not Sharp’s non-violent methods
are really more efficacious than violent or revolutionary means. Sharp is clear
that his work does not present a deus ex machina for the victims of tyranny,
noting that: ‘Nowhere in this analysis do I assume that defying dictators will be
an easy or cost-free endeavour. All forms of struggle have complications and
costs. Fighting dictators will, of course, bring casualties.’22 When questioned
about the uncertain outcomes associated with the Arab Spring in 2011 he
replied to the effect that:

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 TREVOR PARFITT

The actual situation is not good and this is not a surprise. We have many
examples in history, including the Shah revolution in Iran, but those bad
outcomes are not a good reason to sponsor dictatorships. The population
needs to be heard and has a right to react to dictatorships.23

This demonstrates that, while Sharp believes non-violent resistance is more

effective than violence, it does not guarantee success. Inasmuch as development
is conceived as involving a democratic right for people to be heard, it can be
seen that his advocacy of nonviolent resistance has a clearly developmental
aspect, despite any uncertainties as to its outcome in particular contexts.
Another interesting question concerns how far Sharp’s non-violent resistance is
really non-violent. Among Sharp’s list of non-violent tactics one finds a category
of physical interventions, including non-violent raids, air raids, invasion, obstruc-
tion and occupation. Among the category of economic interventions are non-
violent land seizure and seizure of assets, while political intervention incudes
disclosure of the identities of secret agents.24 These ‘non-violent’ actions present
an interesting comparison with some of the characteristics of neoliberal globalisa-
tion that post-development analysts condemn as evidence of its intrinsic violence,
notably displacement and dispossession. If seizure of assets by democratic activ-
ists is non-violent, does it not follow that what the post-development analysts
terms dispossession is also in essence non-violent? Similarly, if invasion, obstruc-
tion, land seizure and occupation by democratic activists are non-violent, what
makes neoliberal displacement violent? Critics of neoliberalism might point to
such factors as the aforementioned use of paramilitaries by Colombian oil palm
growers to clear land by means of physical force. Neoliberals might reply that
most instances of what they would term privatisation (as opposed to disposses-
sion) take place peacefully without any recourse to physical force. In any case the
use of force to seize land or other assets indicates the violence of the means of
accomplishing dispossession or displacement rather than the violence of those
goals in themselves. Clearly Sharp and post-development analysts such as
Escobar are using the term ‘violence’ to signify different phenomena. Sharp is
using it to denote deployment of physical force (actual fighting), whereas Escobar
is arguing that neoliberal displacement and dispossession are violent not in the
sense that they involve use of force, but because they deprive disadvantaged peo-
ple of resources they need to make their living, thus further marginalising them.
This indicates that the concept of violence is no less complex than the
concept of development. In order to understand the relationship between devel-
opment and violence we must better understand the various nuances of violence.
The next section will examine some of the variant analyses of violence that
have been proposed, particularly in the recent debate between Critchley and
Zizek, in order to unpack some of the different modalities of violence and their
implications for some of the development analyses we have looked at.
Is violence irreducible?
When Critchley advocated his non-violent anarchist strategy of resistance to
neoliberalism he was immediately criticised for the ‘utopian’ nature of his
project. One of the most virulent critics was Zizek, who responded to
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 MODALITIES OF VIOLENCE IN DEVELOPMENT

Critchley’s assertion that anarchists should not imitate the sovereign violence of
the state by asking the pointed question: ‘what would Critchley do if he were
facing an adversary like Hitler?’. Zizek answered his own question, asserting
that ‘in such a case one should “mimic and mirror the archic violent sover-
eignty” one opposes’.25 Clearly, Zizek believes that violence in an emancipa-
tory/developmental cause is fully justified.
Critchley was swift to reply to Zizek’s critique of his non-violent stance.
First, he addressed what he saw as Zizek’s state centralism, a tendency that
robbed the Russian and Chinese revolutions of their emancipatory character. He
accused Zizek of being an authoritarian Leninist, who argues that ‘the only
choice in politics is between state power or no power’26, a choice that Critchley
rejects.
However, the interesting aspect of the debate for us revolves around the
variant definitions of violence at stake in the debate, which draw to a
considerable extent on Benjamin’s Critique of Violence. Zizek commences his
analysis by differentiating between different types of violence. The first is what
he terms ‘subjective violence’, which he defines as ‘directly visible … violence
performed by a clearly identifiable agent’, inclusive of riots and acts of crime or
terror.27 This is clearly the type of violence that analysts such as Sharp and
Crocker have in mind when they use the term. However, this is not the only
sense in which the term can be used. Zizek also refers to objective violence,
which can take two forms. The first is symbolic, which pertains to the violence
of language (we shall return to this); the second is systemic violence.28 A sense
of what Zizek means by systemic violence is given by post-development
critiques of neoliberal development (or, indeed, in Fanon’s critique of colonial-
ism) as being intrinsically violent—the violence is actually a necessary part of
the system’s normal working. It is not immediately obvious who is responsible
for such violence, because abstract, impersonal forces like those of the market
drive the workings of the system.
A recent example is the way that the imperative to maximise profits in the
financial markets encouraged speculation in food commodities, a tendency that
drove food prices up by 80% between the start of 2007 and the middle of 2008,
according to the IMF Food Price Index. This had a disastrous impact on the poor
throughout the global South, with the number of chronically malnourished
rising by 75 million in 2007 and another 40 million in 2008.29 They were the
victims of an exclusory violence that had its origins in the operation of finance
capitalism. A problem with this kind of violence is that its source is not as
obvious as in the case of subjective violence. Its effects are likely to be seen as
a humanitarian emergency, while the systemic violence underlying them remains
unexamined. Many observers cannot see how increased Southern hunger might
result from the normal working of the capital markets in their constant search to
maximise profits. Even those that do understand the nature of systemic violence
may well disavow it. Thus many financiers deny the systematic brutalism of the
international financial markets with self-serving discourses about the virtues of
free markets and foreign investment.
The proposition underlying Zizek’s account of systemic violence is that it is
universal, particularly under contemporary capitalist conditions. He further
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 TREVOR PARFITT

argues that, while those responsible for communist crimes can be identified
(Stalin, Mao), the same cannot be said of the crimes of capitalism.

…when one draws attention to the millions who died as a result of capitalist
globalization, from the tragedy of Mexico in the sixteenth century through to
the Belgian Congo holocaust a century ago, responsibility is largely denied.
All this seems just to have happened as the result of an ‘objective’ process,
which nobody planned and executed and for which there was no ‘Capitalist
Manifesto’.30

Systemic violence is both anonymous and universal. It is irreducible and cannot

be avoided. This is a contention that has important implications for the relation-
ship between development and violence.
For an analyst such as Crocker it suggests a fundamental flaw in his project.
His avocation that only rough equality is necessary for the poor to have a voice
in development ignores the systemic violence implicit in the neoliberal
development project that St Clair observed in her study of organisations such
as the World Bank and UNESCO. This casts doubt on his contention that non-
deliberative action should be a last resort. Archon Fung echoes such doubts in
his observation that:

The governance arrangements that set the terms of world trade and interna-
tional finance among states, are not now, nor will they become in the fore-
seeable future, fair and inclusive deliberations. Activists in social movements
who view the decisions of these bodies as unjust seek primarily to influence
them through coercive pressures that increase the costs to those bodies.31

Apparently Fung regards development as an area in which the opportunities for

deliberative democratic action are severely limited, necessitating a more
immediate resort to confrontational action than that envisaged by Crocker.
On the other hand, it might be thought that recognition of the systemic
violence of neoliberal development would constitute affirmation of the post-
development analysis. This does not automatically follow for the following
reasons. First, a large part of post-development scholars’ objection to develop-
ment concerns its destruction of traditional society. However, this ignores the
violence intrinsic to such societies. Berman emphasises this point in his analysis
of Goethe’s Faust as an agent of development. Goethe clearly indicated how
Faust’s ambitious construction projects destroyed traditional societies, as
symbolised in the displacement and death of Philemon and Baucis, an elderly
couple occupying a piece of land Faust had marked out for one of his projects.
However, Goethe also evoked the repressiveness of traditional society in his
account of how Gretchen’s village and her peers rejected her when she became
pregnant with Faust’s child, eventually driving her to suicide.32 Goethe was
more nuanced in his account of the violence implicit to both development and
traditional society than many post-development analysts, who elide the violence
of traditional society in order to emphasise the violence of development. Esco-
bar denies this criticism, arguing that post-development analysts ‘did not try to

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represent “the real” [of the Third World]’.33 This point does not bear analysis.
Commentators like Esteva and Prakash, and Rahnema celebrate the virtues of
traditional societies, while saying little about their sexism and other systems of
violent exclusion.34
Second, if violence is irreducible it follows that any strategy the post-
development analysts propose is likely to entail its own forms of violence. For
example, Rahnema argues that traditional societies ‘had a much more realistic
view of things … Not blinkered by the myth of equality’. On this basis he
propounds a post-development agenda in which society should dispense with
democracy and embrace what he identifies as Confucian principles, in which a
leadership group (the jen) make decisions on behalf of the majority (the min).
Rahnema does not examine such questions as how the jen will emerge as
leaders and how it can be ensured that it will eschew self-serving decisions in
favour of decisions benefiting the whole community.35 Clearly Rahnema’s
agenda consists of a return to the parochial authoritarianism that Goethe
effectively excoriated some two centuries ago.
Critchley vigorously disputes Zizek’s analysis of the irreducibility of
violence. He defends a space for non-violence by criticising Zizek’s use of
Benjamin’s analysis of violence. In the next section we shall contrast their
analyses, once again drawing out their implications for development theory.

Is development divine violence?

Benjamin’s Critique of Violence starts by examining the violence that underpins
the working of the law. His analysis leads him to distinguish between two types
of violence, which are taken up in the Critchley–Zizek debate, these being
mythic violence and divine violence. He draws on the myth of Niobe, whose
14 children were killed by the gods to punish her for boasting of her fertility, as
illustration of mythic violence. Benjamin associates this use of violence as
punishment with law-making violence, because the violent punishment of Niobe
is designed to establish and reaffirm the power of the gods, just as the laws of
modern societies are designed to establish and guarantee the powers governing
those societies. Benjamin also refers to law preserving administrative violence
that serves mythic violence by maintaining the rule of law. If mythic violence is
about power, divine violence establishes justice. Benjamin envisages divine
violence rupturing the control of mythic law-making violence:

Just as in all spheres God opposes myth, mythic violence is confronted by

the divine. And the latter constitutes its antithesis in all respects. If mythic
violence is law-making, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets
boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at
once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former
threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without
spilling blood.36

Thus, we develop a sense of divine violence as striking like a bolt from the
blue to impose a justice that disrupts and destroys the mythic regime of laws

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underwriting the secular powers of society, powers that exclude and marginalise
the ruled.
Critchley criticises the way in which Zizek appropriates and uses the concept
of divine violence. He cites Zizek’s understanding of divine violence as ‘the
heroic assumption of the solitude of the sovereign decision’,37 and notes his
examples of the Jacobin Terror in the 1790s and the invasion of the bourgeois
areas of Rio de Janeiro by the poor from the favelas somewhat over a decade
ago. Zizek’s rhetorical flourish of divine violence as heroic sovereign decision,
combined with the violence of his examples, enables Critchley to criticise him
as an advocate of centralist, vanguardist power, who would repeat the
authoritarian errors of Lenin. Critchley also argues that Zizek’s suspicion of the
modern left leads him to adopt an untenable political quietist position.38
Certainly Zizek argues that demonstrations against the Iraq war had the perverse
effect of underwriting the imperialist politics of Bush and Blair because they
highlighted the contrast between the democracies where such protest was
allowed and the repressive autocracy in Iraq where free speech was brutally
repressed.39 Zizek tends to give the impression that more moderate forms of
opposition are to no avail. This leads him to the conclusion that advocates
of political emancipation should do nothing and await the divine violence of
revolution. He asserts that ‘sometimes, doing nothing is the most violent thing
to do’.40 While this may be correct in some contexts, it seems questionable to
suggest that the best response to global injustice is to do nothing and wait for
divine violence.
Critchley sets about recovering divine violence from what he sees as Zizek’s
authoritarianism by arguing that Benjamin’s analysis of divine violence is
prefaced by a passage asserting the viability of non-violence. Certainly Benjamin
argued that ‘there is a sphere of human agreement that is nonviolent to the extent
that it is wholly inaccessible to violence: the proper sphere of “understanding”,
language’.41 Critchley develops this idea to argue that extra-legal and therefore
non-violent paths to resolution of conflict are available. The key point is that
they can only take place outside the state at the level of the private person. This
clearly bolsters Critchley’s vision of a non-violent anarchism operating outside
the state and therefore avoiding the violence of state laws and action.
Critchley also draws attention to Benjamin’s analysis of the Biblical dictum,
‘thou shalt not kill’. Benjamin took the following view:

Those who base a condemnation of all violent killing of one person by

another on the commandment are … mistaken. It exists not as a criterion of
judgement, but as a guideline for the actions of persons or communities who
have to wrestle with it in solitude and, in exceptional cases, to take on
themselves the responsibility of ignoring it.42

Critchley uses this passage to develop a concept of non-violent violence, where

violence may be used in pursuit of non-violent aims. He writes:

What is in question here is the tricky and delicate dialectic of violence and
non-violence, where the achievement of the latter might require the

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performance of the former. That is, non-violence paradoxically requires acts

of violence. If we are to break the cycle of bloody, mythic violence, if we
are to aspire to what Benjamin anarchically calls in the final paragraph of
the essay ‘the abolition of state power’ … if something like politics is to be
conceivable outside of law and in relation to life, then this requires the
deployment of an economy of violence. That is, the plumb-line to follow in
true politics is non-violence, its aim is anarchism, but this cannot be a new
categorical imperative of the Kantian kind. In the solitude of exceptional
circumstances—they are not always exceptional, but they often are—the
plumb-line of non-violence might call for violence, for subjective violence
against the objective violence of law, the police and the state.43

Critchley expands on this point by answering Zizek’s question as to whether he

would use violence against Hitler. Apparently Critchley would, but he claims
that this would be to oppose Hitler’s exclusory mythic violence with divine
violence, which he identifies as non-violent violence.44 In this context it is
worth drawing attention to Benjamin’s comparison of divine violence with
God’s judgement on the company of Korah, which ‘strikes privileged Levites,
strikes them without warning, without threat, and does not stop short of
annihilation’.45 This surely makes it clear that divine violence is just as excluso-
ry and forceful as mythic violence. Whereas mythic violence underwrites the
rulership of a few, an elite, divine violence represents the overturning of that
elite, but it is nevertheless exclusory and forceful in its potential to annihilate
that elite. Critchley is stretching the definition of non-violence beyond all
coherent meaning to accommodate annihilating violence. Critchley’s concept of
non-violence is too self-contradictory to retain credibility, suggesting that, after
all, violence is irreducible.
Critchley’s position may be contradictory, but it has the merit of being more
activist than that of Zizek. However, a closer look reveals further problems.
Critchley is only able to emphasise Zizek’s authoritarian Leninism by ignoring
the following comment on state terror:

With regard to the French Revolution, it was, significantly, Danton, not

Robespierre, who provided the most concise formula of the imperceptible
shift from ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ to statist violence, or, in Benjamin’s
terms, from divine to mythic violence: ‘Let us be terrible so that the people
will not have to be’. For Danton, the Jacobin, revolutionary state terror was a
kind of pre-emptive action whose true aim was not revenge on the enemies
but to prevent the direct ‘divine’ violence of the sans-culottes, of the people
themselves.46

This statement does not identify divine violence with state terror. Rather Zizek
sees state terror in opposition to divine violence. Similarly, Critchley also
ignores Zizek’s view that divine violence ‘is not immoral, it does not give the
agent licence just to kill with some kind of angelic innocence’.47 While Zizek
may propound the irreducibility of violence, he is not an adherent of an
unaccountable centralist state violence.

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 TREVOR PARFITT

Critchley makes much of the fact that Zizek ignores Benjamin’s identification
of language as a site of non-violence, arguing that he deliberately ignored it
because it did not fit his Leninist viewpoint.48 However, this is to overlook
Zizek’s identification of symbolic violence, which is located in language. The
development of discourse theory post-dated Benjamin’s tragic wartime death,
but it is worth remembering that one of its central tenets is that language is a
site of contention, conflict and violence. Derrida provides a sophisticated
account of the complexities of language. To radically simplify his argument,
Derrida points out that, in order to perform its function of communication, any
written or spoken sign must be capable of iteration. That is, it must be capable
of carrying the same meaning when repeated under different circumstances.
However, the fact that the sign is used in different circumstances means that
nuances of its meaning will vary from one context to another. With such
variation comes a structural possibility of misunderstanding, slippage of
meaning and therefore disagreement and conflict. To use a Derridian
formulation, iteration simultaneously stabilises and destabilises language,
making it a site not only of understanding, but also of conflict.
Derrida argues that all our knowledge is characterised by a similar structure.
The formulation of knowledge may be characterised as consisting of three
moments—first, constitution of a disciplinary/conceptual space consisting of
supporting evidence; second, exclusion of the evidence that does not support
the claims established in that first moment of knowledge formation; and, finally,
the return of the excluded evidence to destabilise the established body of knowl-
edge. The founding exclusions entailed in the establishment of a disciplinary
space are violent in themselves and they can lead to further violence when the
exclusions return to haunt that body of knowledge. Derrida terms this process
an economy of violence. This account of the formulation of knowledge provides
persuasive affirmation of the view that violence is irreducible, systemic. And
this leads to the inexorable conclusion that development is necessarily violent,
as will be any post-development successor strategy. However, this still leaves
questions as to how we should regard this violence and how far we might
control it.49
The categories proposed by Benjamin may be useful to throw light on the
variant roles played by violence in development. Certainly the predatory
neoliberal project as analysed by post-development theorists such as Escobar,
development ethicists such as St Clair, or indeed Marxists such as Harvey and
Wallerstein resembles the category of law-making mythic violence. Liberalisa-
tion in the global South can be examined as a disciplinary exercise in enforcing
the version of market law that best serves the interests of capital at the expense
of the poor.50 As Escobar and many others point out, all too many development
projects seem more attuned to the needs of world capital than those of poor
people, as in the Colombian example cited at the start of this paper. The danger
of a development ethics that fails to recognise the systemic nature of violence
in neoliberal development is that it may end by attempting to regulate a violent
system, thereby becoming a part of the administrative mechanism of
development’s mythic violence.

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 MODALITIES OF VIOLENCE IN DEVELOPMENT

As already noted, the irreducibility of violence casts doubt on the solution

offered by post-development, that of abolition of development. The replacement
of development with something else will not of itself eliminate violence. The
risk is that post-development projects will be characterised by their own
particular manifestations of mythic violence, as in the aforementioned
‘Confucian’ agenda advocated by Rahnema.
If the accounts of development characterised by mythic violence are unattrac-
tive, it might be thought that development could more usefully be aligned with
divine violence. Many of the concerns that are regularly cited as central
concerns of development (equity, well-being, the aims associated with the
Millennium Development Goals and emancipation) may be seen as aims to
attain justice, as opposed to neoliberal aims to enforce the laws of a market that
favours the minority. However, there are risks associated with this conceptualisa-
tion of development, some of which may be illustrated with reference to the
work of Fanon and Sharp. While Fanon’s view of revolution is clearly
analogous to divine violence, we have already seen that the post-revolutionary
phase can lead to the decline of revolutionary consciousness and a Thermidorean
restoration of mythic violence. As to Sharp’s work it is clear that, while he is
overtly advocating non-violent resistance, the emancipatory movements he is
addressing may be seen as manifestations of divine violence resisting
authoritarian mythic violence. His work may also be seen as a painstaking
exploration of the formidable hurdles any such movement will face in overcom-
ing the law-preserving violence deployed by such regimes. The continuing
travails of the Arab Spring (in the shape of the ongoing Syrian conflict and the
unfinished revolution in Egypt) bear witness to the wisdom of Sharp’s caution in
his attempts to facilitate the emancipatory work of divine violence. However, the
example of Zizek’s counsel to do nothing is indicative of the need to avoid
being so cautious as to become politically inactive. If we take the stance that
viable developmental progress can only be achieved through a spontaneous
outbreak of divine violence, there is real danger of a lapse into inaction as
progressives wait for the arrival of the redemptive moment of revolution.
Interestingly Zizek provides a solution to this problem by identifying the
moment of divine violence as a Badiouan event.51 To summarise, an event is an
occasion or phenomenon that inaugurates a new truth regime for those that
witness it and accept the truth of that event. An example would be the interrup-
tion of bourgeois political economy by Marxist revolutionary analysis, which
proclaimed its own quite distinct order of truth. It should be clear from this
example that an event does not establish a truth that is universal in the sense
that everybody believes in it. It becomes a truth for those witnesses to it who
exercise their sovereign will to invest in that truth and base their lives on it.52
An event does not have to take the form of a spontaneous outburst of popular
activism, but can be a new analysis or philosophy that gains many adherents—
or it may take the form of a campaign that convinces many witnesses of its
truth and justice, such as the Band Aid campaign of the 1980s or the more
recent ‘make debt history’ campaign. This conception of an event restores
agency to those who would pursue projects of emancipation and development.
It shows that such action as organisation, campaigning and advocacy can have
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 TREVOR PARFITT

an effect on people and can prompt an event informed by the impetus of divine
violence towards global justice. Waiting for the revolution is not the only
alternative.
If there is something to be gained by aligning our concepts of development
with divine violence in the form of a Badiouan event, we must ask how we are
to minimise some of the negative effects to be associated with violence. It will
be remembered that for Derrida violence is irreducible, because in the formation
of our knowledge and concepts we inevitably make exclusions and this is
violent. Some of these exclusions may be of a particularly egregious nature, as
when the American Constitution affirmed freedom and equality, but not for
black people and only on a qualified basis for women. These exclusions inevita-
bly return to haunt and destabilise our beliefs. Derrida referred to this process
as an economy of violence. It is an economy in that the amount of violence
associated with it depends on how open our beliefs are to revision. We can
control and, hopefully, minimise the amount of violence we cause by leaving
our formulations open to revision and recognition of any exclusions we have
made. However, we maximise violence by practising closure and refusing to
change our belief systems in the face of evidence of our exclusions.
It should be clear that this violence of exclusion often bears the imprint of a
mythic violence where a ruling group wishes to preserve its privileges at the
expense of those who are excluded. This explains why the approach of minimis-
ing violence in the context of an economy of violence is different from those
that advocate controlling violence only by using it as a last resort. Avoidance of
exclusion might entail use of violence against those who wish to exclude and
repress others. In cases such as that of Nazism it could well be argued that
minimisation of violence entails an immediate if not pre-emptive use of violent
force to curtail such crimes as the holocaust inflicted on Jews, gypsies and other
groups. This mythic nature of much exclusory violence also helps to explain
why development can usefully be considered as an instance of a divine violence
that refuses the closure of mythic violence in its pursuit of an ever more
inclusive global justice.

Conclusion
It would probably be fair to say that most mainstream development discourse,
from modernisation theory to the Washington Consensus, incorporates a claim
that it is not violent and that any violence resulting from it is accidental and
unintentional. However, this paper has drawn on the thinking of Zizek and
Derrida to argue that violence is irreducible and permeates our concepts,
inclusive of development. Violence in development can usefully be analysed in
terms of Benjamin’s categories of mythic violence, which seeks to establish
power and the law, and divine violence, which seeks to establish justice. On this
basis an approach to development analysis has been advocated that is based on
the following principles. First, development forces should seek to align them-
selves with an evental divine violence in pursuit of global development. Second,
they should endeavour to control the level of violence their analyses cause by

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taking a course of least violence, which entails refusing analytical closures that
preserve exclusion.

Notes
1 MP Cowen & RW Shenton, Doctrines of Development, London: Routledge, 1995, ch 1.
2 See M Rahnema, ‘Participation’, in W Sachs (ed), The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as
Power, London: Zed Press, 1992, for a critique of NGOs as indoctrinators. For a view of NGOs as part of
an imperial neoliberal project, see J Petras, ‘NGOs: in the service of imperialism’, at http://www.neue-ein-
heit.com/english/ngos.htm, accessed 2 February 2013.
3 Sachs, The Development Dictionary, p 1.
4 A Escobar, ‘Development, violence and the new imperial order’, Development, 47(1), 2004, pp 15–16.
5 Ibid, p 19.
6 S Kothari, ‘Revisiting the violence of development: an interview with Ashis Nandy’, Development, 47(1),
2004, p 9.
7 Analysts as disparate as Warren Baum, Robert Chambers and Dennis Rondinelli could be seen as
motivated by such considerations.
8 D Goulet, Development Ethics at Work: Explorations—1960–2002, London: Routledge, 2009, p 180.
9 D McNeill & AL St Clair, Global Poverty, Ethics and Human Rights: The Role of Multilateral
Organisations, London: Routledge, 2009, esp pp 101, 142.
10 N Dower, ‘Development and the ethics of the means’, in CK Wilber & AK Dutt (eds), New Directions in
Development Ethics: Essays in Honor of Denise Goulet, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
2010, pp 35–36.
11 D Goulet, ‘On the ethics of development planning’, Studies in Comparative International Development,
11, 1976, p 29.
12 D Crocker, Ethics of Global Development: Agency, Capability, and Deliberative Democracy, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008, esp Part 4.
13 S Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance, London: Verso, 2007.
14 See Crocker, Ethics of Global Development, ch 11.
15 AL St Clair, ‘Global poverty: development ethics meets global justice’, Globalizations, 3(2), 2006,
pp 146, 153.
16 AL Reeder, ‘To die a noble death: blood sacrifice and the legacy of the Easter Rising and the Battle of the
Somme in Northern Ireland history’, Honors Projects, Paper 6, 2009, at http://digitalcommons.macalester.
edu/history_honors/6.
17 F Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans R Philcox, New York: Grove Press, 1963, pp 5–6.
18 Ibid, p 23.
19 Ibid, p 51.
20 This is the view taken by L Zeilig, ‘Pitfalls and radical mutations: Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary life’,
International Socialism, 134, posted 27 March 2012, at http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=800, accessed
2 February 2013.
21 G Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation, East Boston, MA:
Albert Einstein Institution, 2010, p 4.
22 Ibid, p viii.
23 Harvard Law School, ‘“From dictatorship to democracy”: Gene Sharp on the possibility of transition’,
1 November 2011, at http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2011/11/01_gene-sharp-from-dictatorship-to-democ-
racy.html, accessed 2 February 2013.
24 Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy, pp 85–86.
25 S Zizek, ‘Resistance is surrender’, London Review of Books, 15 November 2007, p 7.
26 S Critchley, ‘Violent thoughts about Slavoj Zizek’, Naked Punch, posted 21 October 2009, at http://www.
nakedpunch.com/articles/39, accessed 2 February 2013.
27 S Zizek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, New York: Picador, p 1.
28 Ibid, ch 1.
29 T Jones, The Great Hunger Lottery: How Banking Speculation Causes Food Crises, World Development
Movement, London, UK, July 2010. The IMF figures are from p 5 and the figures on the poor are from
p 15.
30 Zizek, Violence, p 14. Clearly Zizek is unaware of WW Rostow’s non-communist manifesto.
31 A Fung, ‘Deliberation before the revolution: toward an ethics of deliberative democracy in an unjust
world’, Political Theory, 33(2), 2005, p 412.
32 M Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, New York: Penguin, 1982, esp
pp 51–71.

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33 A Escobar, ‘Beyond the search for a paradigm? Post-development and beyond’, Development, 43(4), 2000,
p 13.
34 See G Esteva & MS Prakash, Grassroots Post-modernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures, London: Zed
Books, 1998; and M Rahnema, ‘Afterword: towards post-development—searching for a new language and
new paradigms’, in M Rahnema & V Bawtree (eds), The Post-development Reader, London: Zed Books,
1997.
35 Rahnema, ‘Afterword’.
36 W Benjamin, ‘Critique of violence’, in M Bullock & MW Jennings (eds), Walter Benjamin: Selected
Writings, Volume 1, 1913–26, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996, pp 249–250.
37 See Zizek, Violence, p 202 for the original quotation.
38 S Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology, London: Verso, 2012, esp
pp 227–237.
39 Zizek, Resistance is Surrender.
40 Zizek, Violence, p 217.
41 Benjamin, ‘Critique of violence’, p 245.
42 Ibid, p 250.
43 S Critchley, ‘Violent thoughts about Slavoj Zizek’. The same passage can be found in Critchley’s The
Faith of the Faithless, p 219, but with marginally different wording.
44 Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless, p 236.
45 Benjamin, ‘Critique of violence’, p 250.
46 Zizek, Violence, pp 201–202.
47 Ibid, p 202.
48 Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless, pp 214–215.
49 Among J Derrida’s central texts explaining his deconstructive approach are Of Grammatology, trans G
Spivak, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976; Writing and Difference, trans A Bass,
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978; Margins of Philosophy, trans A Bass, Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1982; and The Politics of Friendship, trans G Collins, London: Verso, 2005.
50 See D Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; and I Wallerstein,
Cancun: The Collapse of the Neo-liberal Offensive, Commentary, 122, 1 October 2003, at fbc.binghampton.
edu/commentr.htm, accessed 10 March 2011.
51 Zizek, Violence, p 200.
52 Those interested in attaining a better understanding of this concept might read A Badiou, Ethics: An Essay
on the Understanding of Evil, trans P Hallward, London: Verso, 2000. For an approach to its developmental
application one might look at T Parfitt, ‘Towards a post-structuralist development ethics? Alterity or the
same?’, Third World Quarterly, 31(5), 2010, pp 675–692.

Notes on Contributor
Trevor Parfitt is Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham Malaysia,
and has been a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Malaya.
He is the author of several books and articles about development theory and
management. Currently he is interested in development as modernist ideology.

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