Violence, Terror, and The Crisis of The State

Abstract

Among the primary goals of the modem, post-Enlightenment state are assimi­ lation, homogenization, and conformity within a fairly narrow ethnic and political range, as well as the 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 success­ ful 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 constlUcted and the manner in which those constlUctions 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-