Carole Nagengast
Department of Antrpology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico
87131
KY WORS: violence, state, dissidence, human rights
INTRODUCTION
Among te primary goals of the modem, post-Enlightenment state are assimilation, homogenization, and conformity within a fairly narrow ethnic and
politcal range, as well as te creation of societal agreement about the kinds of
people there are and the kinds there ought to be. The ideal state is one in which
the illusion of a single nation-state is created and maintained and in which
resistance is managed so that profound social upheaval, separatist activity,
revolution, and coups d’etat are unthinkable for most people most of the time.
The state thus attempts to ensure conformity to encompassing unitary images
through diverse cultural forms and an array of institutions and activities that,
taken together, help determine the range of available social, political, ethnic,
and national identities (2, 12, 66).
The crisis of the contemporary state springs from its differentially successful monopolization of power and the contradiction between it and the demands
of peripheralized people(s) who through resistance have created new subject
positions that challenge fundamentally the definitions of who and what ought
to be repressed. To phrase it differently, the ways in which nation and state are
constlcted and the manner in which those constlctions enter into social
knowledge have to do with consensus about what is and what is not legitimate.
When consensus fails, ethnic or political opposition, which is otherwise sup-
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110 NAGENGAST
pressed or subtle, becomes overt. The state, of course, cannot allow this to
happen. As Claestes (49: 110) phrases it, “The refusal of multiplicity, the
dread of difference–ethnocidal violcncc-[is] the very essence of the state.”
Since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989,twenty-two new global communities
have been created, fifteen from the remains of the Soviet Union alone, but the
phenomenon is not resticted to tat part of the world. There are over fifty
ethnic conflicts now taking place, mostly within the contines of diverse nationstates-a veritable explosion of violence with the state lending the force of
arms to one side or the other. Geographers predict tat there will be twentyfve additional new states by 1996, even more in the twenty-frst century
(260),all forged, some violently and some by agreement, from the territory
and peoples of existing states. I addition to Abkhazians in Georgia and
Armenians in Nagoro-Karabakh, Tibetans, Quebequois, Kurds, Tamils, and
Basques are among others seeking their own version of a nation-state.
At the same time there is an apparently contradictory trend, namely the
globalizaton of capitalist economy and culture. These two trends-the fragmenting of illusory nation-states and the simultaneous homogenization of
culture-may only appear contradictory; the latter may be drving the former.
The nation-state has long been the vehicle, the ideological justifcation, and the
politcal legitimation for liberal rational form of political and cultural unity
and economic homogeneity. Although the social organization and economic
achievements of a market economy are goals toward which many new entities
are stiving, especially those of the former Soviet Union and East Central
Europe, their prospects for retacing the trajectory of nineteenth and twentet
century bourgeois capitalism are slight. The potential and reality of additonal
ethnic and nationalist violence are enormous as dissidents challenge the prevailing and approaching order and existig states struggle to implement new
distibutons of power and capital, to suppress interal movements for political
change, especially autonomy and self-determination, and to stave off exteral
threats to newly established borders.
Until relatively recently, few anthropologists examined violence and conflict between groups and the state and among groups withi states, especially
violence rooted in ethnicity, nationalism, bids for autonomy and self-determination, and political demands for fundamental change. Some have looked
primarily at the invention and reinvention of categorical differences inflected
by language, culture, and history in colonial and post-colonial societies (101,
102,109,117,135,209). An emerging project to rethink violence and social
theory at the level of the imagining of the state and the role of the anthropologist in this project is suggested by the work of Coronil (64),Feldman (84a),
Gordon ( 109), Isbell ( 138-140),Taussig (240, 241), Poole & Renique ( 198),
recent collections of Carmack (37),Downig & Kushner (74,75),Nordstom
& Mai (192),Warren (253),and others (29,65,230). This review places the
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VIOLENCE AD THE STATE 111
existing literature within a theoretical perspective that considers both the ethnography of the state and the ethnography of violence, but we must frst
consider some terms of the discussion.
VIOLENCE, TERRORISM, AND TORTURE
Violence is often reified, taken as a characteristic or category tat is eiter
present or absent within a society or group,making it difficult to examine te
role it plays in social relations or to examine it as an alterative people use to
deal with human predicaments. Going beyond the mere presence or absence of
violence challenges us to locate it witin a set of practices, discourses, and
ideologies (137),to examine it as a way to deploy power within differential
social and political relations (30), or as a means that states use to buttress
themselves and to maintain power (132).
Scholars do not agree on exactly what constitutes violence. Noting that it
permeates daily life in many parts of the moder world,Williams (256) selects
violence as a keyword,denoting a concept that in his estimation significantly
reflects ideas and values that often characterize general discussions of contemporary society. He identfies seven senses of violence: aggressive behavior,
vehement conduct, infringement of property or dignity,the use of physical
force, and treat, or dramatic portrayal of any of the above. Riches (204)
argues that what is gencrally called violence can bc practical or symbolic,
visible or invisible (as in witchcraft), physical or emotional, and can stem fom
a perpetrator’s personal capacity or from the forces of society. He gves
precedence to the frst in each of these dichotomies,restrcting the use of the
term violence to practical,physical, visible,and personal physical force that
people use to achieve goals. In this instrumental view, interactions in which
physical hurt is eiter absent or not readily apparent, even if it may have been
intended or implicit,is not violence.
Bourdieu, on the other hand, includes the symbolic “censored” and
“euphemized” but “socially recognized violence” embedded in everyday,
hegemonic practice in “disguised and transfigured” form (30:191), a totalizing
vision partially challenged by Comaroff (56). Feminist scholarship in particular (177,228,235) and that of subordinate peoples in general (45,63) insists
that symbolic violence is important in te stucturing ad ordering of relations
of domination and subordination, though critics cauton that state regimes
everywhere justify their own violence as a reaction to te (symbolic) violence
implicit in opposition itself. The very presence of opposition is read by te
state as violence subject to suppression ( 192). This review addresses both
physical and symbolic violence.
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112 NAGENGAST
ANTHROPOLOGICA L STUDIS OF VIOLENCE
Anthropologists who have considered violence primarily in its practical,
physical, and visible manifestations have juxtaposed “violent” societies [e.g.
the Yanomami (42, 43), the Kiowa (178),or the Kohistani of Pakistan (147)]
with those said to be peaceful [e.g. the !Kung (157, 169), the Semai (72,
204-207), the lnnuit (32-34), the Buid of the Philippines (104), and the
Xinguanos of the Brazilian Amazon (114)], as though they were mirrorimages. No single explanation has been found for the variance in the degree to
which people use violence to solve differences. Biological explanations are far
from a dead letter in psychological and genetic studies, especially as they are
viewed in popular culture (245), but biology is rarely cited as a single cause
explanation in anthropology (41-43, 76, 97, 115). A large literature has
emerged on other causes of violence [e.g. material, ecological, psychological,
and historical (38,39, 85, 87-89, 103, 104, 114)].
Historically, anthropology has been concered mostly with so-called substate or pre-state societies-the tibal zone (91). Here, people condone, even
encourage violence as a social and cultural resource for a variety of reasons.
For the Maori and indigenous people of the Northwest Coast of North America, it is a means to material rewards and a way to maintain a tade advantage
(86, 247). The Yanomami use it to protect valued resources (42, 43), the
Kohistani as part of a religious code involving honor or vengeance (147), and
the Ilongot to assuage grief (2 10). Antropology has not been in the forefont
of the study of collective violence, terrorism, and especially violence in state
societies, in part because its methods and theory depend on months or years in
the feld, until recently defined as a relatively small, self-contained community
that did not include the state. Also, prolonged research in a local community is
difcult or impossible in times of violent strife and it is risky business to
appear to take sides in situations in whieh the state resorts to torture, terrorism,
and disappearances and in which armed opposition groups operate i a similar
manner. Even studies of violence in the tibal zone, however, are rarely contextualized in a matrix of regional, state, or global economic and political
systems, nor are they always well placed in historic perspective,though this is
changing gradually (91), especially with respect to complex societies (37, 112,
192,253).
Political, economic, and historcal correctives to the more egregious representations of the colonial subject as either inherently violent or innately peaceful have appeared (l09, 181). Gibson (104) discusses the historical circumstances in which the Semai, Buid, and Bataak of Southeast Asia were taken as
slaves by the Sulu sultanate of eighteenth and nineteenth century Philppines.
They responded by retreating deep into the forest and elaborating a cultural
complex of peace and non-violence. Several restudies of the Yanomami indiAnnu. Rev. Anthropol. 1994.23:109-136. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
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VIOLENCE AND THE STATE 113
cate that much of their violent activity coincides with contact with settlers,
petrochemical industries, and insttutions of the state (6S, 90, lOS). Gordon
( l09) places the “Bushmen” of souther Africa, the quintessential harmless
people, in the context of the colonial project to simultaneously subdue and
domesticate them on the one hand and to defne them as “vermin of the veldt”
on the oter, a stategy of containment the United States found enormously
successful in “taming” North American indigenous peoples.
Social scientists who address collective violence in complex state societies
(37,105, 121, 192,243,244,253) examine the culture, economics,politcs, or
sociolinguistics of components of those societies from points of view that
may, for example, explore local culture as it is embedded in the stucture and
institution of the state (224), but they do not necessarily theorize those structures and institutions (62, 63, 126, 195, 200) or the nature of the state itself.
Others more successfully address historical representations of the violent
Other (239-241) and take up the violence that arises within the context of
decolonization, political and cultural struggles for independence from colonial
rule, and the continued domination of former colonial powers (24, 45, lIS,
149). Das (67b), Guidieri et al (117) and Horowitz (136) address ethnic conflict within the boundaries of a state and Glenny (106), Magas (165), and
Poulton (199) are among those who examine the breakup of the Yugoslav
state, though they do so with varying degrees of even-handedness, Magas
being the most obviously partisan.
A number of anthropologists have studied warfare in pre-state and archaeologically known societies (87, 91, 99, 120, 258). War between states as a
special kind of collective violence, its reasons and its meanings, and especially
the national character of the enemies of the United States were early taken up
as anthropological phenomena by North American scholars, partly in response
to the needs of the United States War Department (22, 110) and in support of
the United States in World War II. Sincc thc notorious involvement of anthropologists in counter-insurgency in Thailand in the 1960s (251), anthropologists have avoided direct involvement i war related research.
Anthropological perspectives on the origins of warfare are more or less the
same as for violence: they encompass the cultural (137), social and cultural
(113), economic and political (248), and scarce resources arguments (92).
Others take a political economy approach (18, 47, 259) or a purely historical
one (171). Explanations for maintenance or continuation of war include resistance and rebellion on the part of indigenous or othcr oppressed people (91)
and revenge, which in state societies may be couched in religious, ethnic, and
ideological language (e.g. “Remember the Alamo” or “Kill a Commie for
Christ”). Revenge is often deeply personalized-the images of Saddam
Hussein the assassin in the Gulf War of 1990, the World War I specter of tle
bloodthirsty Hun, World War I and Cold War enemies as insects, pigs,and
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114 NAGEGAST
beasts of various kinds are commonplace ( 146). Cohn (54) discusses the
imagery of sex and death among nuclear defense technicians, and other articles
in a edited volume ( 182) reveal the triumph of image over reality and the
social, economic, and political context of media coverage of the Gulf Wa
throughout the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. Sex and masculinity are often
aspects of the representation of warfare, but Elshtain (79) casts considerable
doubt on gendered myths that depict men as makers of war and women as
simultaneously conciliators and socialzers of wariors.
Te continuation of war may also be justified in offcial circles as a rational, common sense stategy of deterring force with equal or greater force.
Finally, a warrior class or group has an interest in maintaining war or its threat
( 171). Tese last two explanations are especially characteristic of state societies wit well-developed departments of defense and standing armies, but
numerous non-state societies also have permanent warrior classes and measured responses to violent incursions frm the outside (91).
POLITICA VIOLENCE
Poltical violence encompasses overt state-sponsored or tolerated violence in
all of Williams’ senses, (coercion or the threat of it, bodily hann, etc) but may
also include actions taken or not by the state or its agents with the express
intent of realizing certain social, ethnic, economic, and political goals in the
realm of public affairs, especially affairs of the state or even of social life in
general. These may or may not be direc� violence. For example, ferocity
between Hutus and Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi (158, 166, 167, 173); between Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka ( 142, 2 15, 228a, 236-238); between
Ladinos and indigenous peoples in Guatemala (37, 168, 246, 253); between
Israelis and Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Stip (227); or
among Croats, Serbs, and Muslims in the Balkans (106, 125, 165, 199), insofar
as it is tolerated or encouraged by states in order to create, justify, excuse,
explain, or enforce hierarchies of difference and relations of inequality, are
acts of state violence, even though states themselves may not appear on the
surface to b primary agents (cf 133). Moreover, the deliberate acts of agents
of the state in, for example, the Soviet Union in the 1930s, which caused mass
starvation in the countyside ( 13, 14, 164), and similar economic or political
deeds elsewhere in the world that result in widespread deaths (226) and often
huge numbers of political refugees (67a, 84, 124, 262) also qualf as political
violence, terror, even genocide (15 1, 160).
Terorism is, according to the dictonary, “the policy of using acts inspiring
great fear as a method of ruling or of conducting political opposition,” and
may include violence in all of its senses including tortre or its threat. It “is not
so much the exploitaton of the oter as much as the mere consciousness of the
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VIOLENCE AND THE STATE 115
possibilit,” said Simmel (quoted in 192:8) of domination. Clearly the same
must be even more tme of torture. Torture-te very term evokes images of a
distant, less civilizcd past, of dark cellas, of both the tortured and torturers
radically different from ourselves. Nonetheless torture perptrated by states
and their agents is commonplace, documented in scores of countres around
the world (9). As for terror, academics, politicians, and popular pundits usually
reserve the label for political oppositon movements or fgures (155), only
rarely applying it to states (29, 46, 132, 156). Violence and terror are highly
politicized terms embraced and elaborated by victims and avoided by perpetrators, especially if the perpetator is a state. In fact, state leaders everywhere
claim respect for universal human rights and deny that their acts constitute
torture, violence, or terror, preferring to characterize them as necessary measures to insure order and respect for the law. Nonetheless, the state is often the
instigator of cycles of violent human rights abuses as it seeks to suppress
change and prevent opposition movements from undermining its legitmacy
(9,69).
Discussions and explanations of torture, oter violence, and terrorism
within state society center on the purported need of soieties to moderize
quickly at all costs (197, 202), to coordinate knowledge with systems of social
control (93), and to legitmate the rule of the state (202). Legitmacy is always
a central concer in the sense that violence is only violence by definition if the
perpetrators fail to establish the legitimacy of their acts against claims of
others that it is illegitimate (203). Consider the case of a Califoria woman
who shot dead, in the very courtroom in which he was being tried, te man
accused of sodomizing her son. In the eyes of her supporters, she was justified
in klling the man who, just before the shooting, allegedly smirked at her
terified son, whom he had earlier threatened with death if he, the child, ever
told anyone about his sexual abuse. The woman’s supporters do not defme her
act as violence. Similarly, the person who bombs an office building or hijacks
an airplane is not considered a terrorist by those who believe that the workers
in the building are part of a military and industial complex that threatens
world peace or that their political cause will somehow be advanced by the
hijacking.
States as well as political opposition movements also take this instumental
view as justifcation for tactical preemption in which they gan advantage over
opponents by forestalling with violent measures possible action by opponents
or by taking rcvcnge for acts completed. They present their actions as both
unavoidable and necessary to prevent what would otherwise be inevitable and
unavoidable deeds of their targets (203). For the most part, the public has
leaed to fnd such official measures justified, that is to say, legitmate by
defmiton. But the public does not accept as readily the structurally similar acts
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116 NAGENGAST
of foreign nationals targeting civilian centers or vigilante justice of the sort
meted out to the alleged sodomizer.
THE STATE
Conventional social science theories of the state, drawn largely from utilitarian
and Weberian analyses of legitimacy and political power, objectify and endow
the state with institutions with law-making and enforcing capabilites that may
be more or less democratic, more or less brutal, more or less violent. Insofar as
anthropology has dealt with the state, it has taken it as an unanalyzed given or
posited a stage, implicitly the final one, in the evolution of political and
cultural organization. In this view, the state is manifest as the political management of a specified geographic territory and its inhabitants through the mechanism of centralized goverment institutions staffed and contolled by a small
number of specialists (51,221). State stuctures and practices are the cumulative effect of a social contact in which the public has ostensibly agreed that
the state has a monopoly on force, and therefore it and only it can legitimately
constrain and coerce people. According to conict theory, the state emerged in
order to allow an elite class to obtain and maintain power over subordinates,
thereby managing class confct through force and by means of the control of
ideology (99; cf 48, 152). I a benign view of origins, the state provides the
stability needed for increasing complexity and presumably desirable and benefcial overall growth and development (39, 51), a utopian bias that has been
implicated in the ongoing critique of colonialism and its projects (188, 216; cf
222). Recent debate in other social sciences about the nature of the state (21,
35, 40, 83, 100, 141, 179, 211, 223) and analyses that interrogate the state as
ethnographic subject are not as commonplace in anthropology, although that is
changig slowly (1, 10, 52,71, 250).
To be sure, there is an autonomous and extraordinarily powerful entity
called the state. According to Abrams, one measure of its powerfulness is its
ability to thwart attempts to unmask that power (2:63). But the state is not just
a set of institutions staffed by bureaucrats who serve public interest. It also
incorporates cultural and political forms, representations, discourse, practices
and activities, and specific technologies and organizations of power that, taken
together, help to define public interest, establish meaning, and defie and
naturalize available social identities (2, 12, 53, 66, 79, 94-96, 185, 186, 190,
193). Tese identities are located within both the domain of state apparatuses
and so-called civil society, often glossed as public versus prvate, a distinction
that renders opaque the state’s daily intrusions into peoples’ lives, their employment, their bodies, “through a plurality of qualities and statuses which are
the predicate of the subject ‘1”’ (3:42). Abrams, for example, characterizes the
state as an ideological proj�ct, “an exercise in legitimation
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VIOLENCE AD TH STATE 117
be illegitimate if seen directly and as itself, an unacceptable domination”
(2:76). He advocates a shift to aalysis of social subordination, the legitimating of te illegitimate, and to te hegemonic felds in which power relations
play themselves out. Integral to this view is Gramsci’s (111) teory of hegemony, especially transformative hegemony (58, 255, 256).
It has bcome an anthropological commonplace to note that arbitrary symbolic systems are created in a dialectic of official hegemony and popular
resistance tat both divide and unite and that are naturalized so that they are
both part of taken-far-ganted daily life and flexible enough to respond to
changing plitical and economic circumstances (35, 66). The agreed upon
identities imply closure on other modes of being by disrupting, diluting, sometimes even denying the possibility of alteratives. The state promotes and
enforces that consensus in a dialectical relationship with te intelligentsia (31)
even as exteral relatons chage. This is not a totally tansparent process of
course, a Stuart Hall (122:44) reminds us:
Ruling or dominant conceptions of the world [may1 not directly prescribe the
mental content of…the heads of the dominated classes. But the circle of
dominant ideas does accumulate the symbolic power to map or classify the
world for others; its classifcations do acquire not only the constaining power
of dominance over other modcs of thought but also the inertial authority of
habit and instinct. It becomes te horizon of the taken.for granted: what the
world is and how it works, for all practcal purposes. Ruling ideas may
dominate oter conceptons of the social word by setting the liIitto what will
appear as ratonal, reasonable, credible, indeed sayable or thinkable, witin the
given vocabularies of motive and acton available to us.
In most states, the struggle for consensus is not ordinarily contested in the
realm of politics but roter in that of social life where consensus is built. It is
the deviants and resisters of all kinds who are subject to the state’s violence.
Although there is a danger tat the state as ideological project becomes a
mechanical device to explain all limitations to human freedom, proponents
maintain that that project is a dialogue between destruction and preservation,
prohibiton and enabling, and it illuminates how people contest, negotiate,
lea, and ultimately interalize identtes.
THE NATON
We cannot speak of te state without also discussing nation and nationalism as
hegemonic ideas that inflect the behavior of those who engage in violent
acton against a perceived Other. There are two views of nation, te frst of
which is that nations existed naturally bfore the emergence of states; that tey
are unique, distnctive units distinguishable from all others; that language,
culture, or religious differences may even be manifest in physical singularity;
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118 NAGEGAST
and that they are unambiguously based on shared history, values, and/or territory (23,27). In this Herderian view, nationalism is the spiritual, ideological,
and political expression of objective reality and must coincide with a political
state and a specific territory. The second, more generally held view, among
scholars at least, is that a nation is constructed initially by subjective selfawareness by virtue of its presumed members bringing to consciousness a
sense of commonalty and collective will (12,58,60,61,100,134,145,225,
237, 237a). Moreover, nations do not produce states, but rather states produce
nations through “the artefact, invention, and social engineering of nations”
(134:10). In short, the integrative needs of the modem state produced nationalist ideology, which created the nation, “sometimes tak[ing] pre-existing cultures and tum[ing] them into nations, sometimes invent[ing] them, and often
oblterat[ing] pre-existing cultures” (100:48,49), a dynamic relationship recognized and elaborated by nationalist leaders of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, among them Pilsudski of Poland (185,208) and Mazzini
of Italy (111). Those who discuss nationalism solely as an instrument of
intellectuals and activists (261),however, must explain how it becomes the
lived reality of everyone else who then act upon it, and acknowledge that
intellectual ideology is not transformed into folk culture unproblematically
unless the ideas of intellectuals are a reflection of an already hegemonic
popular culture.
The liberal intelligentsias of the nineteenth century, leaders of nationalist
movements in Poland, Italy, Germany, Serbia, Romania, Belgium, and elsewhere had to codif one of a number of dialects, almost always that of the
elite, into national languages and privilege or invent common histories in order
to bind people together around loyalty to a new poltical form that in Europe,
North Amerca, and their colonies had a decidedly economic rationale (148).
Elites, national leaders, and educators did not apologize for tis cultural repackaging but rather celebrated what they saw as rational, democratic movements toward moderity and capitalism. It was progress (145; cf 45) and
subordinate atavistic identities and people had to be submerged and homogenized, sometimes disappearing altogether, sometimes retaining an identity as a
minority or an indigenous people. At best subordinate laguages, cultures, and
ways of life are elaborated as national symbols of the past, often converted into
tourist attractions for domestic and foreign consumption (186). At worst they
are suppressed violently as threats to national unity and territorial integrity.
Sometimes, as in Guatemala, both strategies are mobilzed (37,168,188).
Nation and nationalism are in Europe and North America terms of modernity, offspring of the Enlightenment, colonial expansion, religious wars, rationalsm, and liberal capitalism that serve as ideological justification and
poltical legitimation for certain notons of territorial, political, and cultural
unity enforced by the hegemony of liberal thought and organizaton. The
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VIOLENCE AND THE STATE 119
vision of shared nationality as routine lived reality usually masks the hidden
presence of class and other power relations of modem states, including those
of parts of socialist East Cental Europe and the Soviet Union, which were
constructed of similar raw materials (185, 249). Other literature that defnes
nation and state broadly include Malkki’s (167) account of the manner in
which maps and scholarly studies of refugees contibute to the definition of
that which roots people in specific bits of soil. Malkki invokes the “territorializing concepts of identity” (167:25) in describing desecrated graves in a Jewish cemetery in France and the recently buried corpse that was disinterred and
impaled on a umbrella. The corpse could not, in the estimation of the desecrators, be simultaneously Jewish and of the French nation and therefore had to be
taken out of its soil, lest it root there. Boreman (28) takes up the constructions
of national and nationalist narratives and conversations among states and
citizens as a means of legitimating bot the division and ultimately the reunification of Berlin, and Dominquez (73) discusses the politics of heritage as
Ashkenazim and Sepharadim contest the cultural contents of the Israeli state.
Some scholars of te post-colonial world insist that te content of nationalism in the souther hemisphere has logical and theoretical implications not
derived from wester, rational thought but rather is a discourse that emerged in
dialogue wit colonialism. Insofa as it is able to reject colonial rule as an
“almost palpable historical tuth,” so is this nationalist discourse able to construct and assert new political possibilities (45:40, 41). Chatterjee presumes
that these possibilites, though still encompassing discourses of power, are
capable of perceiving, revising, and rejectng the imperatives of capitalism, the
hegemony of the liberal rationalist state, and the moral leadership of an intelligentsia derived from elite classes.
Not only has nation been conceptually delinked fom state, but there is a
growing literature on deterritorialized spatial possibilities in which nations are
deployed in transnational communities of various kinds (15, 107, 143, 144,
212, 213). Gupta (119) offers the non-aligned movement and the European
Community as communities that transgress expectable spatial arrangements.
Violence in the name of keeping some people out, however, is still a means of
enforcing definitions of the nation-state and class and power relations appropriate to capitalist production, as many Mexican and Central American farm
worker migrants to Califora and the Southwest well-know (187, 254).
THE STATE, THE NATION, AND HEGEMONY
The numbers of people worldwide subjected to the violence of their own states
are staggering. More than a quarter of a million Kurds and Turks in Turkey
have been beaten or tortured by the military, police, and prison guards since
1980; tens of thousands of indigenous people in Peru and Guatemala (8), steet
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120 NAGEGAST
children in Brazil and Guatemala, Palestnians in Kuwait, Kurds in Iraq, and
Muslim women and girls in Bosnia have been similarly teated (9). Mutilated
bodies tur up somewhere every day. Some 6000 people in dozens of counties
were legally shot, hung, electocuted, gassed, or stoned to death by their
respective states between 1985 and 1992 for political misdeeds: crticism of
the state, membership i banned political parties or groups, or for adherence to
the “wrong” religion; for moral deeds: adultery, prostitution, homosexuality,
sodomy, or alcohol and drug use; for economic offenses: burglary, embezzling, and corruption; and for violent crimes: rape, assault, and murder (5, 7,
9).
Lyotard (163:46) describes the postmoder as “the presentation of te
unpresentable,” its tanslation into recognizable and acceptable myths and
discourses. For a state, the unpresentable is that which is improper, unthinkable under the requirements of its formal presentation of itself. It is formally
unthinkable that a state would typically and openly exercise its power through
violence, even torture and terrorism (248). If torture is uniagiable in unmediated form, unpresentable for what it is, its representation must be ft ito
existng, acceptable discourses: patiotism, retaliation for real and imagined
past injustices, separatism, terrorism, communism, subversion, anarchy, the
need to preserve the state’s terrtorial integrity, the need to protect the naton
from subversion through etnic cleansing, the fight agaist crime, the war on
drugs (172).
All peoples, to a certai extent, take myth as reality (142, 239, 240).
Essential to myth is a process in which “one immunizes the contents of the
collective imagination by means of a small ioculation of acknowledged evil;
thus protecting it against the risk of a generalized subversion” (20:150). A
single or a few separatists, communists, or dissidents of oter sorts is suffcient
to inoculate a shay social order with evil, first justifying the torture or killing
of all separatists, then anyone who knows a separatist, those who are friends or
family to those who know separatists, and so forth. The social order, of course,
need not be objectively precarious for the heavy hand of the state to be felt.
Andersen (11) argues that Argentina’s generals fabricated a threat from armed
leftsts in the 1970s as pretext for their own seizure of power and for the “dirty
war” that cost eight to ten thousand people their lives because they “might
have had” leftist sympathies. Inoculations of evil become part of social kowledge that enter public discourse and inflect the building of consensus around
categories of dissidence and the state’s contol of them. The repression of the
real or iagied violence of dissidents is also justifed and enters into te
hegemonic feld through the violence of representation in popular culture, the
media, television, films, the theater, and music (e.g., 17, 116, 123, 127, 128,
214; cf 180).
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VIOLENCE ANDTHE STATE 121
“We only beat bad people,” said a prison official in Turkey in 1984.1 “They
are no good, they are worthless bums, they are subversives who think that
communism will relieve them of the necessity of working.” The warden revealed with apparent pride tat he had “given orders that all prisoners should
be struck with a truncheon below the waist on the rude parts and waed not to
come to prison again.” “My aim,” he said, “is to ensure discipline. That’s not
torture, for it is only the lazy, the idle, the vagabonds, the communists, the
murderers who come to prison.” “Communism is against the law here, so is
separatism,” said another, referring to the Kurdish movement for independence. During the “dirty war” in Argentina, a general is reported to have
said that “Democracy must be protected for wrong ideas spread like a cancer
through the society if they are not excised.” One is reminded of the announcement that Joao Baptista Figueriredo, President of Brazil, made after his
election i 1979: “I intend,” he said, “to open this county up to democracy
and anyone who is aganst that, I wiljal, I will crush” (quoted in 201:304).
Torture is in part an expedient, a means of squeezing information or confessions from suspected criminals, subversives, traitors, terrorists. Women in
several countries have been raped and otherwise sexually abused by guards,
sometimes in the presence of their husbands or parents as a means of extracting information fom witesses. This for of violence, a commonplace in
Bosnia-Herzegovina during the war of te 1990s, is particularly diabolical in
societies where women are more often assigned responsibility for sexual trasgressions than are men and in which rape is a means by which the men of one
faction humiliate those of anoter. Rape both creates and punishes Otheress.
Turkish guards have reportedly raped men with truncheons (6, 129), a significant symbolic act linked to the stigma assigned in Islamic societies to acts
attibuted stereotypically to the passive parter in a homosexual encounter.
General Turgut Sunalp, a candidate for Prime Minister in 1983, scoffed at
allegations of sexual torture of prisoners, but added his claim for the normality
of soldiers, saying in effect that if the point was to rape, soldiers are healthy
young men wit more pleasurable “tools” at their disposal, so why would they
use truncheons. As for the men who claimed they had been raped, he said that
“if such prisoners had any character at all, they would have committed suicide” (translaton of remarks reported in Turkish newsmagazine Notk, personal communication). The conflation of the penis as an object of the victim’s
Between 1 982 and 1 987, I headed a group in Amnesty Interational, USA that cordinated all
Amnesty Interational’s work on human rights abuses in Turkey. During that time, I came into
contact, both through correspondence and in person, with a n umber of people who had been
imprisoned, sometimes tortured, for their political beliefs or activities, often only because they
were suspcted of subversive activities. Consequently, I have a large store of quotes and comments from former prisoners and from Turkish officials. It serves no interests to name names,
espcially since torture is still daily fare in Turkey (see 6, 129, 1 30, 1 74-1 76).
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122 NAGEGAST
pain and the torturer’s pleasure suggests the ofen sadomasochistic nature of
the relationship. But a number of researchers (93,170,217) remind us that the
goal of state violence is not to inflict pain; it is the social project of creating
punishable categories of people, forging and maintaining boundaries among
them, and building the consensus around those categories that specifies and
enforces behavioral norms and legitiates and de-legitmates specific groups.
Torture has another, only partially successful function-to terrorize people
into conformity.
In 1984, the then Turkish Ambassador to the United States insisted to me
that Turks who claim they were tortured were really ‘)ust” members of unlawful political organizations. He meant Kurdish separatist groups and several
opposition political parties. He explained that they were agitators, ignorant
peasants and workers manipulated by communist infiltators. And because
they were common workers and peasants, they had probably been beaten
before and could not have been surrised when they were struck by prison
guards. “They are calling it torture in order to ifluence world opinion and
discredit the Turkish state,” the Ambassador said. He did not mention the
students, professors, doctors, publishers, lawyers, and politicians who were
among the tortured but invited my complicity in his claim for the radical
Otheress of the tortured with his confidential tone of voice, adding that
Turkish police, prison guards, and soldiers were mostly poor peasants wit
little education. He claimed that brutality was part of their culture,and someties thc guards were overzealous,but they were true patiots, true enemies of
communism and other threats to the Turkish state. Not only must the torturer
and his apologist assign the status of Other to the condemned, the specification
of the kind of differentness te tortured symbolizes must conform to dominant
representations of the vile and worthless,a vileness that has mytical status as
somethig to be found lurking everywhere, a constant threat to the accepted
order (109, 183,240). It is largely underclass status that makes certai people(s) susceptible to violent abuses and it is their ambiguity-as both lessthan-human brutes and super-humans capable of undermining the accepted
order of society-that allows elites to crystallize the myths about the evil they
represent, hence, justifying the violence perpetated against them.
Depending on the success or failure of their cause, survivors of state violence often need to conquer the impulse to reciprocate,even the hidden transcripts of power that Scott describes as used by slaves,serfs,and minorities
held in contempt (55,219),for the terror of the survivor may be complete and
social disapprobation may be more or less total. Some survivors speak of the
gUilt and shame they feel as well as of the refusal of people to believe their
stores of abuse and of the persistent questioning about what they had done to
get themselves arrested in the first place (159, 234). Just as Jews have been
held responsible for ant-Semitism (183), women for misogyny (70),Latinos
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VIOLENCE AD THE STATE 123
and African-Americans in the United States for racism, so too have those who
have suffercd torturc been blamed for their own opprcssion. Survivors often
suffer total social, political, and psychological isolation, and suicide is common. Having been tortured by te state may be the ultimate fonn of distinction
(31).
Research suggests that torturers are ordinary people. The techniques of
training them, best known to human rights monitors from the experiences of
the military police in Greece during the dictatorship of the early 1970s, do
brutalize young men. More importantly, they are taught, through the manipulation of symbols, that they are “just doig their jobs,” as one fonner torturer put
it in a rare depiction of the voice of the violent i the documentary film “Your
Neighbor’s Son: The Making of a Torturer” (196). This is a process common
to military recruits the world over (36, 146, 162). The very phraseology of
police or soldiers “doing their jobs,” the above quoted Turkish general’s use of
the metaphor of the penis as a tool of the trade of torture, so to speak, an
emblem of his work in mastering the world, the once High Executioner of
Great Britain’s remark that he didn’t think executions prevented crime, but
that he did what he was hired to do, that it was a matter of sacred duty to him
(229:24-28), all suggest that the discourse of work has historcally been an
effective instrument of state control, an instrument whereby certain sectors of
society have been deprived of essential aspects of their humanity through the
work of others.
At the core of the social contract theory of the state-its surface appearance-is Locke’s (161) contention that “through work, man embarked on a
voyage of exploration whose ultimate goal is the discovery of man; through
work man becomes master of the world; through a community of work, society comes into being” (see also 50). The unproblematized equation in the
capitalist world of work with society and culture entails a compulsion to
represent political, cultural, or ethnically subordinate dissidents as the negation of the proper workig self. So represented, we cannot help but take their
Otheress personally. Thus, the natives discovered and described by early
colonists, missionares, and ethnographers were depicted as savages, prone to
mindless violence, dity, and without material or symbolic goods (25, 109).
Most of all, they were categorized as lazy and shiftless and as such were said
to be without rationality, without culture. Their life styles violated colonial
mores and European notions of progress and civilization, which by the beginning of the seventeenth century centered increasingly upon the discipline of
work (58, 59). Work discipline is an integral principle upon which the institutions of private property and law-and-order were founded and are cental to the
project of the state in the liberal bourgeois world order. Certainly te most
chillig and supremely ironic expression of the relationship between work and
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124 NAGENGAST
national purity was the slogan Arbeit mach/rei (Work Makes One Fre) over
the entance to Auschwit.
Non-work in te sense of labor will not do, of course, but neither will work
that underines the disciplining of the labor force and the proper order of
things. The state must be a state of mind that divides people into the purifed
and honest who do legitimate work and a politically suspect or criminal,
deviant underworld of aliens, communists, loafers, delinquents, even thieves,
killers, and drug lords who do not. The violent dissident must be positoned
and repositoned as necessary, “in a negative relationship with middle-class
rational masculinit, a model that ensures a relatonship of dominance and
subordination…by locking the two into a mutually defming relationship”
(16:15,21). In the United States, the presumed idleness of the unemployed, the
poverty-sticken, the drug user or gang member, the single parent, gay man or
lesbian woman (all the latter with overtones of promiscuity and contagious
disease) is also seen as violence against the social body. It cannot be just any
old work; it must be work that contributes to what dominant groups have
defined as the common good (153).
The hegemony of respectable culture and good taste and the denigraton of
what is represented as the disgusting, degenerate, worthless, criminal lower
parts of the social body is so strong that, according to a poll conducted by the
Washington Post and ABC News in September 1989, 66% of those sureyed
favored random searches of peoples’ houses, cars, and personal belongings,
even if the police had no suspicion of any wrongdoing. Seventy-two prcent
said they approved of censorship of any film depicting illegal drug use. People
have been so inoculated with the fear of evil and with the myth of an essential
relationship of repression to the cure of society, that they are willing to give up
some of their own rights for what has been defined as the good of the social
body. When William Bennett, the so-called drug czar until 1990, said he saw
noting wrong with beheading drug offenders, his audience applauded wildly.
A anthrpological task for the 1990s and beyond is to continue to uncover
the ways in which identities that entail inequalites are historically constructed,
ascertain how those identities become deployed in time and space, determine
under what circumstances people do or do not interalize and subjectify them,
and how they are dismantled, disorganized, and redefned through the redistibuton of pople in different spaces at other times. In oter words, what are te
circumstances and the means through which people crate identties and have
them created for them? How are these identities then normalized so that
resistance is domesticated or failing that, crushed by violent means that meet
wit general social approval? Finally, how do people generate oppsitional
identities, a sense of self that rejects subordination and repression, how do tey
achieve autonomy?
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VIOLENCE ANDTHE STATE 125
Resistance to the poject of the state is understood by some scholars as a
manifestaton of class struggle, especially against capitalist relations of production ( 1 89, 194, 240). Others examine resistance in the context of colonialism (58, 233, 24 1 ), or view it a a result of competition for scarce resources
among etnic grups ( 1 36, 190, 238). Finally, teorists of “new social movements” (4, 77, 8 1 , 82, 232) describe the deliberate appropriation and incorporation of montages of diverse cultural forms into local resistance movements
(55, 1 54, 220, 252). Sometimes these movements mobilize people in the name
of loyalty to an existing nation-state (98, 100, 142, 236), but increasingly they
are couched in ters of self-detenniation and the dismantling of those same
nation-states.
SELF DETRMIATION, NATION-STATES, AND HUMAN
RIGHTS
Some scholars conclude that while nationalism and human rights are compatible, self-determination is not a human right (148). Others (23) ae convinced
that self-detenninaton is te highest right of all. Yelena Bonner, the respected
Russian human rights activist, is but one proponent of the view that “self-determination is the essence of human rights. . . self-determinaton for every pople, for every nationality, a state” (27). These sttements raise two sets of
questions as peoples who live or once lived within the confnes of anoter state
or empire struggle to assert their autonomy. What i self–determnaton claims
on the part of one nation mean that the individual and collective human rights
of another are violated? What happens i one side is coincidentally more
powerfl militarily than the other, or i there is cheap high–powered and
sophisticated weaponry readily available to the highest bidder? Battles raging
in the Caucasus, Tadzhikistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Croatia center on
definitions of nation, state, minority group, and peoples, and on the assumption of state power by a new set of elites or in some cases old elites i new
guises. The other set of questions focuses on the kind of future newly emerging elites imagine in a world order in which te possibilities for recapitulating
the trajectory of the west is uliely, where socialism has been discredited, and
where there are no oter alteratives on the horizon. How, under tese circumstances, will new constellations of power and social knowledge emerge and be
channeled?
In the contemporary post-colonial world left by the demise of communism,
the predominate discourse invokes the paradigmatic liberal ideas of democracy, reason, and progress toward capitalism. At the same time, local populations seek to recover teir histories and taditions. In contradictor national
situations in which an emergent bourgeoisie cannot, in the absence of appropriate social conditions, establish adequate hegemonic domination over a
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1 26 NAGENGAST
newly constituted nation (which is clearly the case for many nascent or hopeful new states), it may resort to what Gramsci ( 1 1 1 : 1 81 , 1 82) called passive
revolution, the transformation of once dominant classes into partners in a
configuration that replaces the structure of colonial power with a different
order, that of national power. Tis translates into the creation of states capable
of transfonning te economy while at the same time suppressing or submerging the interests of subordinate groups.
Tose subordinate groups ofen constitute power groups challenging similarly constituted rivals or the state itself. Many are the historical victims of
colonization, interal or exteral, or a result of the way colonial empires were
carved up. Taeir claims may be couched i the language of human, minority,
or indiger0us rights. For teir pat, states often attempt to absorb subalters in
a process benignly described as assimilation or acculturation, and less benignly as ethnocidc (23 1 :9 1 ), a dialectic between stte and nation, peoples and
minorities, which often results in violent suppression, even genocide (26, 44,
1 50). Since 1 945, state-sponsored violence toward ethnic and political groups
has caused more deaths, injuries, and general human sufferig than “all other
fons of deadly conflict, including interational wars and colonial and civil
wars” (231 :76). Other costs are incalculable: extinction of languages, cultures,
and ways of life; destruction of ethnographic and historical treasures; and loss
or damage to residences, industry, and commerce.
Te Universal Declaation of Human Rights (UDHR) and the covenants
and treaties that give them the force of law i the Unted Natons (UN) are
designed to protect people fom the excesses of the state, including torture and
other fonus of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, and are intended to be
universal ( 1 3 1 , 257). Self-determation is another basie right regarded as so
essential it appeas as Article One i bot covenants to the UDHR:
All peoples have the rght of self-detrnation. By virtue of tat rght, tey
freely determine teir political status and freely pursue their economc, social
and cultural development.
Although this seems on the face of it a unambiguous statement, its interpretation in the UN has been problematic. The defnition of peoples itself is
bot contested and confused with other categories, such as minorities. Member
states defne a minority as “a group numercally inferior to the rest of the
population of a state, in a non-dominat position, whose members . . .possess
ethnic, religious, or linguistic characteristics differig from those of the rest of
the population, and show, if only implicitly, a sense of solidarity directed
towards preserving their culture, traditions, religions, or language” (Capotorti
quoted in 23 1 :59). For some purposes, states consider refugees and indigenous
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VIOLENCE ANDTHE STATE 1 27
ship (e.g. the indigenous peoples of Peru, Bolivia, and Guatemala; Blacks in
South Afica; and Palestnians in the Occupied Territories). Finally, most of
the world’ s five to eight thousand ethnic groups are considered minorities by
their own states. The United Nations has careflly and deliberately avoided
defining peoples even though it allows them certain rights (80). Peoples are
generally to be understood not in an ethnic sense but as the inhabitants of a
specific territory, and interational law is to be understood as applicable to
peoples but not to minorities. Peoples can claim self-determination; minorites
cannot (23 1 :60-70).
Except for cases of colonialism and recent occupations, even peoples must
meet minimum requirements in order to claim self-determination leading to
independence (78). First, they must be clearly differentiated in key aspects
from the dominant population in the country concered. Ethnic, cultural, or
linguistic difrences are not sufficient if there is no clear territorial division.
When group members are geographically spread out among other populations,
the UN will not usually recognize a self-determination claim. The principle of
territorial integrity, an important aspect of the principle of sovereignty, normally overrides a claim of self-determination, which is another aspect of
sovereignty. Thus, a people can claim independence only if they are under
military occupation, have historically formed a nation-state of its own, or were
once part of a different state, an occupy a clearly defined territory. The
drafters of Article 1 of the UDHR had in mind independence for various
African, Asian, and Caribbean colonies, a goal that has been long since realized. Aside from the successor states of East Cental Europe and the former
Soviet Union, which by and large met the criteria above, the Security Council
and the General Assembly are not likely to recognize self-determination demands of regional or local ethnic groups, indigenous peoples, or minorities of
any kind.
Minorities with aspirations to independence were not satisfed to be told
that those aspirations could never be considered colletive human rights and
that “whatever depredations are inflicted upon [minorites], they must attempt
to find justice witin the boundaries of existing states and be reconciled with
them. Since self determination in the sense of independence is not a right of
minorities, they must look instead to individual human rights [standards]”
(242:5). As a result of subsequent activism by minorities and indigenous
peoples, the interational community has been forced to recognize some rights
of minorities to interal self-determination, that is witin the boundaries of
existing states (231). This means the right to control some aspects of education, social affairs, welfare, and culture while defense, interational trade
relations, and diplomatic affairs are left to the cental state. Indigenous peoples, for example, often demand interal autonomy or access to land that was
once theis as well as other social rights (67, 1 84).
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128 NAGEN GAST
The message of the UN is tat states should avoid interfering with the
sovereign decisions of other states about who does or does not constitute a
people. Tis is hardly surprisig sice the UN comprises states that presumably would be disinclined to entertain independence movements within their
own borders. As far as the UN is concered, maintaining the existing tertorial
integrity of member states trumps any nascent disposition toward self-determination on the part of self-descrbed nations, . ethnic groups, or indigenous
peoples ( 1 36, 231 , 261). Moreover, the commitment to the sovereignty of
existing states in their bureaucratic and administative roles also takes precedence over, in almost all cases, the sovereignty of te individual. Individuals
can brng legal suit against their own goverment or that of another state for
human rights violations through the UN Human Rights Commission but the
proess is cumbersome, lengthy, and generally unsatisfactory (190).
Historically, the states of the UN have shown themselves willing to commit
troops to the principle of state sovereignty and territorial integrty. This is the
version of the state, however, that is in crisis in tis the last dance of the
twentet century. Consensus about the virtual inviolability of the state is
unraveling as conflicts over nationalism, ethnicity, and paradoxically a dialectic between individual and collective human rights threaten the given order of
the world, as formerly powerless individuals are able to call an allies around
the world (e.g. Amnesty Interational and the Watch Commmittees) to defend
them from their own states, and as historically perpheralized peoples assert
autonomy and demand self-determation. The sanctity of the individual person who has a set of specific rights recognized by virtue of common humanity,
rather than entitlements to be petitoned for from one’ s state, has entered the
lexicon, if not the practice of the community of nations ( 1 91). Although the
process is less than satisfactory, states no longer enjoy absolute impunity.
It is perhaps indicative of the crisis of the state that te universality of
human rights came under attack at the 1993 UN World Conference on Human
Rights, an attack led for the most part by China and other states that have most
openly failed to make consensus prevail over coercion and that have records of
especially egregious human rights abuses agaist both individuals and peoples. China’ s record in suppressing students and Tibetans, for example, needs
no rehearsal here. Nonetheless, China, Singapore, and other less well-developed states ivoked cultural relativity to justf torture and misteatment.
Cultural relativity is now code in some circles for permission to oppress
people and peoples and to maintain women as second and third class citizens
in the name of ostensible tadition ( 1 86) and lack of cultural equivalence
(218). The world community staved off threats to the universality concept, but
the attack suggests the complexity of the tcrrai faced by anthropologists
concered wit many voices and many modalites (19, 75).
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VIOLENCE AD THE STATE 1 29
Some politicians are sanguine about the continued development of a new
hierarchy of goverance, not only establshed state goverments, but also
regional associations like the European Community, the North American Free
Trade Association, and global federation under the UN. Others are less optimistic as the UN founders in Somalia, as the war in the Balkans continues, and
as violence flares i Chiapas and elsewhere. As one scholar said as recently as
December 1992, “The world is. . .in tansition from strict acceptance of sovereign jurisdiction and non-intervention to more and more readiness to undertake. . .action, up t and including military action, that would in the past have
been considered intervention in domestic affairs” (Sonnenfe1dt quoted i
260:2 1). Is the world moving away fom the nation-state as the key unit and
toward some kind of world goverment? Probably not. It is more likely that a
multtude of new linguistically and ethnically based nation-states will emerge,
even though the salient differences of languages and ethnicities must be ever
created and recreated, and that teir legitimacy might have to be maintained at
least in the short run through violence and terrorsm.
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