(Dis)entangling (Non)violence in Resistance: Four Areas of Contestation

Both ‘violence’ and ‘nonviolence’ are contested terms. Naming ‘violence’ or ‘nonviolence’ in resistance struggles can often be at the core of what the struggle is about. Such contestations are therefore inevitably inherently political and normative, never just scientific or theoretical. This paper demonstrates this by discussing four areas of contestation of these terms: firstly in the variety of phenomena that can be labelled ‘violence’; secondly in the importance of public perceptions for ‘nonviolent’ resistance; thirdly in the extent to which even ‘nonviolent’ struggles seek to cause discomfort that can be received as ‘violent’; fourthly in the way in which ‘nonviolence’ can become entangled in the (re)production of various types of ‘violence’, both within resistance and beyond. Mapping these areas of contestation helps demonstrate why seeking to settle definitions is an inevitably political but also Sisyphean task, even though how the label is applied remains important to resistance.