So I’d reverse the question actually — organized force and violence realy are dependent on soldiers’ notion that there is some pre-existing collective subject that they are ‘part of’.

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I guess also I would just add, apropos M’s comment about NATO, that the global order of nation-states, sovereign, self-determined, etc. (as enshrined in the macro-organization the United Nations) was very much elicited through the threat of force/military power. The long list of states without militaries does not obviate this question.

Can you theorize the state today, or government, without an integral or systematic appraisal of relations of force or violence?

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Maniaku is right — there are lots of types of macro-actors other than states, and there are lots of ways to impose a macro-actor’s ‘will’ (however we figure out what that is) than a standing citizen army. And of course there is a complex interrelationship between between ‘legitimacy’ (which is what we’re talking about, in some sense) and the organized use of force.

But there are lots of states with ineffective militaries or even fear for the threat an organized military poses to the people who claim to speak in the name of the state — Papua New Guinea being a classic example. The inability of ‘corrupt’ or ‘weak’ states to form effective militaries — or to be unseated by a strong military which does not consider its rules legitimate — is an example of exactly the phenomenon I’m talking about: the failure of a network of actors to put the ontological existence and legitimacy of ‘the state’ into, as the scienc studies people would say, a ‘black box’.

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Also, the Iceland example is misleading, being a memeber of NATO and all. Can you name a state that does not rely on the threat of violence to legitimate its existence? Like David Graeber’s image… we like to think that we don’t live under that threat, but try to access the stacks at the library without showing the proper identification, and a man with a stick will come and hit you ;)

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If ours is the age of the “strategic corporal” (Krulak), ncos and
junior officers will need a different kind of “situational awareness”
than in the past — and that, in itself, will call for a radical
transformation of professional military education (pme). Of all the
social sciences, anthropology is the one that can offer the most
useful insights (psychology, by contrast, can only lead to a “babble
for hearts and minds.”) That said, the “strategic corporal” will have
to keep in mind that, just as a military officer can be brilliant at
the tactical or operational level and less than stellar at the
strategic level (or vice versa), area studies specialists can offer
invaluable expertise at the tribal and regional levels, yet display a
total lack of judgment at the global level. At the interagency working
level, and for the foreseeable future, “know thyself, know thy enemy” will continue to be more important than “know thy Clausewitz.” So will “know thy Trotsky” (institutional infiltration), “know thy Gramsci” (cultural hegemony), and “know thy Schmitt” (intra and international lawfare) — for this is the remarkable trinity on which the “operational code” of the Fifth Column is based today.

The above is a nearly concluding remark from a long, rambling, complex but
immensely productive essay found at the
Hoover Institution website, following a link from Arts & Letters Daily.

Please put aside the instant prejudice aroused by “Hoover Institution” and
take a look. Lots of immensely debatable but also challenging material
here.

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Gailey, Christine Ward. Kinship to Kingship: Gender Hierarchy and State Formation in the Tongan Islands. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1987.

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