Conference Program

This paper offers a critical analysis of pacifism and nonviolence as ideologies that can define legitimate forms of political action and set the acceptable limits of conflict. By shaping what is deemed thinkable and practicable, these ideologies can narrow repertoires of contention and, in doing so, contribute to the reproduction of domination.

The argument is developed in two parts. First, a dialogue is established among Giovanni Cosi (1985), Günther Anders (1991 [1984]; 2008 [1979; 1987]), Lev Trotsky (2000 [1917]), and Frantz Fanon (2007 [1961]) to expose the aporias of pacifism and nonviolence as principles and to trace their links to dominant interests. Cosi highlights the contradiction of radical pacifism when self-defense is denied. Anders stresses the limits of benevolent action and admits counter-violence as self-defense. Trotsky reads pacifism as rhetoric that manufactures consent and legitimizes imperialism. Fanon treats nonviolence as a colonial dispositive that disciplines revolt and makes decolonization compatible with new domination.

Second, in the case of the U.S. civil rights movement (Churchill, 1998; Gelderloos, 2015 [2005]), it is shown how nonviolent rhetoric can align with white ideology and how, once institutionalized, it can govern conflict from within. Three functions recur: contention is confined to orderly forms; internal control is enabled through respectability, moral surveillance, and censorship; deviance is regulated (De Giorgio, 2013) by drawing a moral boundary between legitimate and illegitimate protest.

Following Berger and Luckmann, nonviolence is treated as a partial symbolic universe anchored to a core universe of values and interests: tolerance integrates compatible universes, while incompatible ones are turned into objects of “therapy” or “annihilation” (Berger and Luckmann, 1969 [1966], p. 173). This helps explain how pacifist repertoires can be incorporated through adjustment and adaptation, neutralizing conflictual force while leaving the dominant universe intact.
This critique is not an endorsement of violence; analytical vigilance is called for, in line with Quirico and Ragona’s Panzierian perspective (2018: 36): «the necessity of perceiving the adversary and discerning whether these struggles reveal the objective, characteristic features of capital».