Are Violence and the State Separable? (No)
Crimes of the State | Week 1, Lecture 2
April 1, 2026
Attempts at defining the state
Max Weber (1919)
“a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. […] Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence.”
Attempts at defining the state
Douglass North (1981)
“an organization with a comparative advantage in violence, extending over a geographic area whose boundaries are determined by its power to tax constituents”
Attempts at defining the state
Charles Tilly (1985)
“relatively centralized, differentiated organizations, the officials of which more or less, successfully claim control over the chief concentrated means of violence within a population inhabiting a large contiguous territory.”
The nation and the state
- Nations are how individuals identify themselves and distinguish between in- and out-groups
- Benedict Anderson (1983): nations as “imagined communities”
- Nationalism: the belief that the state and the nation should overlap
- Helpful for war: common threat, common pool of soldiers
- Helpful for commerce: common markets, common pool of labor
- Closely tied to culture: identity \(\rightarrow\) authority
States vary
State capacity: the ability of the state to make and implement its decisions
- Variation in organization, territorial/violence control, taxation ability, and legitimacy
- High capacity: state can enforce laws, collect taxes, and project power throughout its territory
- Low capacity / state failure: the state can no longer perform basic functions
State building is the process of increasing state capacity
The social contract: a solution to the state of nature
- Hobbes: create a sovereign powerful enough that individuals would stand in “awe”
- A social contract is an implicit agreement among individuals in the state of nature:
- To create the state, empower it, and define its rights and responsibilities
- Under this contract citizens give up their natural rights
- …in exchange for civil rights that would be protected by the sovereign
- Because the sovereign can punish individuals who violate the social contract, i.e., “steal”
Tilly and the predatory view of the state
- War-making (eliminating external rivals)
- State-making (eliminating internal rivals)
- Protection (eliminating enemies of clients)
- Extraction (acquiring the means of war-making, state-making, and protection)
- Like the mafia, the state uses violence externally and internally
- Organization and sophistication come about because of the expenses of that violence
- Sovereignty and legitimacy are essentially a “might makes right” outcome
