State Violence in East Asia

1. Interpreting State Violence in Asian Settings

1 interpreting State Violence in asian Settings Vince Boudreau In this chapter I set out to analyze state violence in terms of the social and political role it plays—seeking to uncover its logic and objectives, rather than regarding it as fundamentally aberrant. Indeed, a long and strong tradition exists in the theoretical literature that examines state violence as instrumental to a host of political processes, in ways that implicitly argue for this kind of interpretive effort. An analysis of violence is central : to Barrington Moore’s passages from tradition to modernity; to any number of state-building accounts; to the struggle for democracy, enfranchisement , and representation; and to the defense of authoritarian orders under attack.1 Here I explore the logic of state violence in Asia, paying particular attention to its relationship to larger political processes and primarily to questions of the relationship between state power and political challengers. In this account, I investigate both the conditions that produce different forms of violence and the trajectory of violent legacies in political power and contention moving forward. Where efforts to reconcile past acts of violence take place, what prompts those efforts? Where states are able to move forward without explicitly dealing with a violent history, how is that possible? And, where the unresolved memory of violence rises as part of an effort to displace unjust authority, what conditions seem to make that possible? The chapter proceeds in three substantive parts. In the first section, I set the stage for the examination of state violence, beginning by the- 20 VINCE BOUDREAU orizing the situations that influence the character and intensity of that violence and the particular elements of the Asian state-building process that drive violence in different directions from that associated with oftanalyzed European state building. In the next section, I examine in a more sustained way how violence can be expected to vary in the Asian context, situating patterns of attack against larger political processes in Asia and using that contextualization to differentiate among Asian cases. In the third section, I examine the legacies of state violence, exploring the often complicated relationship among punishment, reconciliation, and forgetfulness, all of which play a part in the varied trajectories of violence in the life of a nation. While this article represents but a preliminary discussion, I hope these ideas will help future examinations of state violence in several ways. First, we may be in a better position to make sense of state violence if we inquire after its logic rather than its magnitude. My assumptions here are twofold. On the one hand, the immediate logic of state violence reflects authorities’ efforts to deal with a challenge to existing or emergent power—to build the state, enforce its rules, or gain and defend power within that system. But because such political actors must ultimately look to construct a viable future for their regime, the question of reconciling the victims and witnesses of violence to the resulting political settlement is never too distant. Crisis and political exigency may, under conditions we will examine, suppress those considerations. But state actors cannot ignore questions of reconciliation, and such questions often shape both how violence unfolds and how it is subsequently dealt with. Three short-term factors influence patterns of violence. First, what largerpoliticalprocessessetthetoneforviolence?Stateagentsactviolently for a variety of reasons, including that individual actors are untrained or poorly disciplined. But big political processes like state building, regime construction, or crisis management also motivate and shape violence, and such processes call forth distinct patterns of violence. Second and within those processes, what specific tasks does violence seek to accomplish ? Violence may eliminate challengers and subversives, may establish hegemony by displacing loyalties, or may change political behavior. It has, that is, both instrumental and exemplary purposes: it torches and teaches. While these objectives mingle in many cases, tracing them through specific episodes of state attack helps one situate the violence politically. Interpreting State Violence in Asian Settings 21 Finally, how does the relationship between the targets of violence and the larger political community influence state attacks? Targets may represent large blocs of cosmopolitan society—as when a regime has a narrow social base—or can be smaller and more isolated groups within that society. They may also be geographically or categorically distinct from majority populations (or from populations that control the state). They may, third, be factions of the state or have a distinct organizational or...