국가와 폭력―국가가 실패하는 순간에 대한 고찰

초록

This article started with the definition of violence and then examined the views of Western thinkers about the relationship between state and violence, reflecting on the mechanism of “moment” of state failure in which the state used violence against its citizens under the pretext of law and protection of public interest, and finally introduced the latest researches on the “state terrorism”. When it comes to the definition of violence, recent studies on the definition of violence go into the two opposite directions. On the one hand, there are researches that portray violence as comprehensive as possible, such as structural violence of Galtung and “slow violence” of Rob Nixon. On the other hand, there are researchers such as John Keane, who oppose this comprehensive definition and emphasize the physicality of the concept of violence. Secondly, this article examined the ideas of Carl Schmidt, Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt. All three can be categorized as thinkers who paid attention to “the moment of state failures“. Not to mention Carl Schmidt who defined the state of exception as the moment for the sovereign’s ability to transcend the rule of law in the name of the public good and take this moment as the natural part of the state power, Benjamin linked mythical violence to the principle of power, not justice, and thereby indicated that the state failure is inevitable. In addition, Arendt, who believes that the essence of the government should be power, not violence, and that, without the will of the people to maintain power, the outbreak of violence is inevitable. Thirdly, recent empirical studies of national terrorism also show that we should not divide the global community into two groups, one that already finished the process of civilizing the violence and the other that have it as a future project. In the end, we can say that state can fail at every moment, if its citizens were not ready to defend democracy.

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