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James Greenwood-Reeves, "Justifying Violent Protest: Law and Morality in Democratic States" (Routledge, 2023)
01:14:23
An interview with James Greenwood-Reeves
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Hello, everybody.
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Hello and welcome back to New Books in Law, a channel on the New Books Network. I am Jane Richards and today I have the great pleasure of speaking with Dr. James Greenwood Reeves. He's a lecturer in law at the University of Leeds and his book today is Justifying Violent Protest, Law and Morality in Democratic States. It was published by Root lynch early this year in 2023. James, welcome to the show.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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Jane, it's such a pleasure. It's such a brilliant book. I really enjoyed reading it. I'm really looking forward to talking to you about it, so thank you. Now, just to get us started, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and how you came to write Justifying Violent Protest, Law and Morality in Democratic States?
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Yeah, sure thing. So I'm a lecturer in law at the University of Leeds, and this effectively was a reformulation of my doctoral thesis in which I effectively wanted to investigate whether in the strictures of liberal democratic theory, which are always very forgiving towards protest, of course, and find lots of justifications for protest in liberal democracies, trying to find something which might justify and whether it's possible to justify violent protest in the same way. Part of this came from previously, having read about civil disobedience work of Brownlee and some of the debates in the last few years regarding what does or doesn't constitute civil disobedience, but then also thinking about uncivil disobedience and particularly the work of Candice Delmar, who also ended up being my external examiner, which was very fortunate on my part, was influential in really wanting to look at a more challenging question of whether violence is something which protest might be able to, to engage with in a way that doesn't undermine our expectations of liberal democratic norms.
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C
It's so interesting. So you sort of touched on this about why violence, but can you tell me a little bit more about violence in protest?
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Yeah. So one thing which I keep saying to people and have done for years now is, oh, it's an interesting time to be studying violent Protestants. I was saying that when I was, when it was starting off in 2019 and there were the Gilets Jean protests in France, but then obviously the pro democracy protests in Hong Kong. And since then we've seen, you know, numerous different forms of violent protest across all inhabited continents of the world. And my project rounded off at the time where there was the storming of the US Capitol. So one answer to that question, sorry, is that violence is topical. It's something which is always going to be of interest and importance and I think as well it's going to be of increasing importance as we face continuing and developing challenges, particularly when we start to confront the difficulties which will emerge from ongoing climate catastrophe, for example. But I think the spark, the violent protest which sparked it for me was many years beforehand in the Ferguson unrests and seeing a largely peaceful movement, Black Lives Matter, but also seeing voices which were very supportive of an understanding of violence being used against state violence, and then wanting to think, okay, well, how do we interpret and how do we go about trying to justify that given the limitations of liberal democratic democratic theory?
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C
Yeah, that's super interesting. There's so much I want to unpick just from what you've said now.
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I do intend to add layers.
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C
Yes, yes. No, please. So let's firstly sort of think about this in the context of liberal democratic theory. Can you explain the context of sort of or the idea of legitimate state violence?
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Yeah. So you have classic ideas of liberal democracy which are tied to classic ideas of the state. So if we think about the state, our sort of verbarian notion of the state is that it's defined by the fact that it's the organization or entity that has the monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a territory or jurisdiction. Right. And as such, violence may be permitted, but it must be done so in accordance with law. So self defence, for example, may be a citizen's use of violence rather than police violence or army violence, but it's sanctioned by law. Sports violence, likewise sanctioned by law. Violent protest, by and large, and not, not all of the time, but. But mostly is not sanctioned by law, is never sanctioned by law, and is criminalized in fact. And so when we're thinking about how violent protest fits within our standard conception of the state, there seems to be a contradiction there immediately. Right. I think another thing is that liberal theory prizes autonomy and the freedom of the individual to life, limb, property, et cetera. And violence seems to be an immediate threat to that. Coercion of the individual or harm to the individual or their property seems to get in the way of that. And then in democratic theory, the idea is that we should have a free marketplace of ideas to discuss our political ideas, that we should have just and robust institutions through which to make these political decisions, and that violent protest has the capacity to intimidate or coerce individuals away from those processes or from participating in a way which is authentic in those processes. So that's the immediate problem with violent protest under our standard conceptions of liberal democratic states, I think.
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C
Yeah. Thank you. And you sort of. I want to go more into like, the legitimacy or the arguments in favor of violent protests later, but sort of, firstly, turning back to the initial part of the book, it is grounded in sort of theoretical frameworks and presumptions. And I think that helps to sort of, for listeners to contextualize the further the ideas that come, or help rather, to address some of the ideas that you've just raised now. So I'm wondering if you can just give a little bit of background in terms of the theoretical framing and the presumpt that you make in your argument.
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Yeah. So the book starts off from presuming that quite a lot of Western states in particular operate by these conceptions of liberal democracy. So again, the Weberian state, but also that we operate under liberalism so that the individual is innately free and autonomous, and that political under democratic theory, again, that our political decisions in order to resolve disputes are best resolved through democratic processes. And that can include, of course, you know, laws which are promulgated through a democratic process enforced by courts and so forth. That presumption obviously needs unpacking itself because one of the big problems in liberal democratic theory is why we obey law at all. If you have that liberal presumption that, oh, you're free to determine your own conception of the good. And no one should be able to say what that is for you. How do you in any way reconcile that with the, the coercive power of the state to say here is a law, and I don't really care what your position of the moral good is, you must obey it. And failing to do so will meet you with sanctions. And there are a number of different ways in which that's tried to be resolved in literature. Whether that's social contract theory or whether that's simply saying that there is no way of solving it and that the state is simply authoritarian, or to take anarchist approach and just say, well, the state will never be legitimate in terms of how it can force law onto us. But I take a slightly different approach of trying to see about how law could be a moral argument, if that makes sense. So I think those are most of my presumptions. I don't know whether or not there are any others that I may have missed that you wanted to raise or whether that's.
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No, I think that's really interesting, this idea of the concept of law as a moral argument, you know, because as lawyers we do tend to focus on the sort of doctrinal interpretation and it, you know, this is what the law is, this is how it's been interpreted, this is how we apply it. And actually thinking of a sort of moral force and actually questioning these assumptions or it helps us to question the assumptions in doctrine and particularly in liberal democratic theory. So we see then it's not settled and it's, you know, not necessarily all a shared conception of principles and norms.
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Absolutely. And I, I, I in the book on a number of occasions to avoid some sort of like pylon from positivists and non positivists on Twitter, I or X I say I don't think you need to take a positivist or non positivist stance in order to be able to make the argument that you need moral good reasons to obey law. So I don't take the view of sort of positivism, particularly sources thesis positivism that all sources in order to determine law, it must be able to be identifiable through social sources. I'm agnostic about that frankly, but nor do I necessarily subscribe to an idea that, and I think that these debates as well aren't very helpful. I feel like the understanding of the law as being a moral argument, it's a compulsion from a body, an entity, a series of people who don't know each other but are all employed by the same organization To. To require strangers, but people who are mutually dependent within a territory to obey a law. And there is a moral expectation that you will obey the law. We often talk about the moral neutrality of law, or that law doesn't need to have a moral content, but is normative, at least in the narrow sense that you are expected to obey. And if that is an expectation, the question really is, okay, well, is there an expectation not to obey? When does that arise? Yeah, for sure. And I think that in order to answer that question in full, you need to say, well, okay, well, what makes a good case for obeying the law? Right. Why should we obey the state? And there are lots of different ways of looking at that, for sure.
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I do want to sort of dig into this a little more because just to give further context into, and sort of further, you know, fuel the sort of argument of why there might be legitimate grounds to disobey the law. So can you sort of, why do we obey the law then? Sure.
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So I think that there are obviously prudential reasons why we obey the law. If you fail to do so, you will be punished. Or that if you do obey the law, there are incentives. I think that that's true, but that's not a moral reason to obey the law. I think the interesting question is what makes the law legitimate in the moral sense rather than a purely legal sense of, well, is it a real law? Is it a legal law? But is it a law that has some sort of moral grounding that that means that it is in. You can obey it in good conscience. And so this relates back to that dilemma of liberal democracy, which sort of touched upon earlier. If we're all autonomous individuals, how is it that the state can make us obey law that may not necessarily fully sit with our principles or arguments? And I look at this from the perspective of legitimacy claims. I say that any law from a state carries with it an implied moral argument that obeying it is the right thing to do. It does so by saying, well, this particular law we expect you to obey because it upholds such and such principles and those I often think of as, and refer to as principles of constitutional morality. So these are principles like fairness and justice and equality and liberty and democracy. And yet they vary. But you see, those ones tend to be frequently cited by states and governments of states as justificatory rationales for the state's existence, for its force, for obedience to its laws. And they will often, when promulgating a law, they'll say, this meets the, or this is necessary in order to attain the principle of justice, equality, fairness. There's a moral motive, a fundamental principle underpinning why the law exists and why you should obey it. Right. And this is a, you know, the idea of constitutional minority is something which I've picked up from a number of different writers, including Andre Be. But I think that the. You can see it for yourself in terms of, you know, the fact that we have ministries of justice rather than simply referring to it as a ministry of law enforcement. And if we had criminal law, but we never made reference to moral principles of justice or retribution, then it would be meaningless. It would. It would just be violence of the state. So I think that that's where we start off from, is, okay, well, the state's going to make principles a cornerstone of how it makes its argument. And then it says, well, this law will get you there. This law is coherent with or sufficiently coherent with and therefore legitimate according to these principles. This law will. This, I don't know, this particular tax law will benefit equality and redistribution, or this particular criminal law will help to achieve justice for women and therefore meet justice, inequality, and various other things besides. And as a citizen, an autonomous moral citizen, able to make your own decisions about things. But you can then. So. All right, okay, well, there is a consistent argument here. This law is not so wildly out of keeping with the moral principles that the state is making claim to, that it is irrational of me as a moral actor to obey it. If you had a, you know, put babies on Spike's law. Yeah, it would be morally irrational. It doesn't make sense according to one's own moral principles, but also the moral principles. It's a weak argument. And weak moral arguments not really deserve scrutiny. And that means that you can sometimes have laws which are just so morally incoherent, if you like, rather than even referring to them as bad, but morally incoherent that they don't justify obedience.
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Yeah, yeah. And I think that sort of touches on what I was going to ask you next, actually. So, and in your words, I want to ask you this. So does a poor legitimacy claim generate automatic duties to disobey, then?
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So, yeah, this is the question of if you've got, if you've got a legal argument, sorry, a moral argument in a law that just doesn't make sense, what do you do? Right. Do you immediately start setting fire to government buildings? And if, for example, we have a law, let's say, to take a topical example, or policy, let's take the recent delay that Rishi Sunak is saying with regards to the phasing out of being able to sell petrochemical cars in the United Kingdom, a lot of people were looking at that and say, well, that is morally unjustifiable. The planet is on fire. The government has routinely said that one of its few remaining justificatory rationales is that we are one of the world leaders in terms of our commitment to net zero. They can't both claim ecological justice and try to enforce a policy like this. So what do we do next? Do we go straight to violent protest? Not necessarily. You have options. Because if you think about law and these moral claims as being moral dialogue, which is a phrase which I've picked up from numerous different writers, but it's not dissimilar to how we think about protesters. Or again, Kimberly Brownlee has referred to civil disobedience and protest more generally as democratic dialogue, a conversation with people and the government as to pointing out these moral inconsistencies, arguing that they need redress, and then putting forward or trying to make ways of resolving those conflicts and trying to resolve that moral incoherence. Now, that can be obviously through mainstream democratic processes and institutions, provided that they function. Write to your MP, put up a poster, make a funny video on YouTube, any number of different ways of engaging, or it could be actions of protest. So marches, assemblies within the law. If you think that those methods are not available or will be insufficient or won't work, or the case merits and justifies it, and I'll come to whether or not it's justified, then you could even start thinking about unlawful forms of protest. So civil or uncivil, if the case may be forms of disobedience, on that question, then of what justifies breaking the.
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Law.
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On the one hand, if a law is sufficiently unjust that it doesn't really give good, strong moral reasons for obedience, then actually a lot of jurisprudential writers, you know, not just people who talk about civil disobedience at length, a lot of people like Dalmason and Brownlee, but, you know, also, you know, traditional writers like Raz would say that if you have something which is sufficiently morally incoherent, then there are good reasons to not obey that law. But then there's another step as well, which is, okay, well, how do I disobey the law of phasing out of diesel? Like, it's not possible for an individual to break that law in protest of that law, and so instead you have secondary law breaking, like in civil disobedience, this phrase of secondary lawbreaking or secondary Civil disobedience, you break other laws in order to be able to demonstrate your disapproval or to identify and engage in moral dialogue over the failures of that other primary law with which you take issue. So you know, that could be anything from smashing windows, you know, to when you're com in in Hong Kong protest against the extradition bill, for example, 2019, no way of directly trying to break that law. So instead what you might see is expressions of anger which represent as law breaking in other methods.
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C
And so then I'm interested sort of two things that struck me when you said that the sort of, you know, what is the critiques of the legitimacy of breaking laws in this way and how, you know, can we assess the effectiveness of whether violent protest does engage in this sort of. Or press forward for dialogue with the state or sort of challenge these illegitimate laws?
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Yeah, it's a tricky one. It's a tricky one. I think that the, the first thing to say is, and this is before we even start the problem of defining violence, I think one thing to note is that we start off with all of our presumptions about liberal democratic theory like we started off with. And I think a lot of people, myself included, are immediately uncomfortable with the notion of violence in order to get what one wants and not for. Not without reason. But I think there are a number of other presumptions that, you know, some of those presumptions are not that they deserve interrogation. So they're not fully true barriers to this. One thing to note is that a lot of the arguments against violent civil disobedience, sorry, for violent uncivil disobedience or actions of that nature mirror closely arguments which were used against peaceful law breaking during the civil disobedience movements, particularly with relation to the civil rights movement, that it would break the bonds of civil fellowship, that it would undermine just institutions to break to, to try to hold oneself above the law in this way, even accepting arrest, even accepting anything else, bearing in myself, as I say, civil law breaking faces all of these accusations, but then even lawful law breaking faces accusations that it's not an appropriate method of engaging in dialogue. Whether that's take the knee protests or, or whether it's just stop oil lawfully obstructing briefly a, a pride parade or anything else like that, where there's no obvious breach of the law, that's. That that's immediately problematic. You will have people who say, well, this is not the right way of going about things. You're just going to disincentivize People from. So. So I think that we shouldn't be precious about violence to quite the extent that we often fall into. Because a lot of those arguments, as Howard Zinn pointed out, with regards to the nine fallacies, was it nine fallacies of civil disobedience, a lot of those arguments were used against movements which we all intuitively understand were very much justified. And then it's just a question of whether or not there's anything about violence which makes it particularly dangerous or bad in liberal democracies. Is there anything about violence which is specially bad that means that we shouldn't be treating it as democratic or moral dialogue in the same way that we would for peaceful protest.
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C
So then I'm going to take you back and just ask you to then define violence and what is violence in protest?
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A
This is. Yes, lawyers and academic philosophers, we love this stuff, don't we? But yeah, it was easily the trickiest bit, is defining violence because it is, as with all of these core concepts, what has been referred to as an essentially contested concept. It is a social construct the nature of which can never objectively be measured. The definition of violence has changed from culture to culture from century to century. And reasonable people can disagree as to its limits. So a good example of this is damage to property. Does that constitute violence? People can reasonably, I think, disagree. There are a number of different studies, for example on non violence as a method, as a successful method. In their study, Stefan and Chenoweth defined violence entirely through harm to persons rather than harm to property and justify doing so in terms of the fact that harm to persons is a technique which is particularly prone to controversy. And whether you include property or not in your definition of violence will depend upon whether or not you treat property as an extension of the individual in a kind of Lockean or Nozick based way. Or whether you think that property should be something that is protected by laws against violence and should theoretically be treated as violence. If you destroy property because you need property in order to have a liberal democratic economic system that provides prosperity to everyone. There are lots of different arguments, but they're not all universally accepted. And I think one of the big problems is again thinking about these targets is that, yeah, what, whether it's persons, I think unambiguously a lot of people would treat persons as a potential target of violence. But then beyond property, even we have new emerging problems. Data. Can you commit violence to data when you have the capacity to using code and when targeting code to ruin or end millions of lives or to alter the entire reality of the world to bring the world to its knees. When we think about what violence, what's wrong about violence is its immediate risk to the freedom of other people and for them to be able to live well. And as such, why not include data? If the problem of violence is that it's risk to people living freely and well, why not include data as such? So circling back, I found that there were definitions which were much broader and much more interesting. So Johann Galtung's idea of structural violence, of course, so that you know, any insult to basic human needs which is avoidable is a form of violence and that those can be institutionalized and that's good, but it's a bit too broad for defining violence per violent protest. In the end, to a certain extent I took a cheat sway out. I said I'm not going to put hard limits because I don't think you can put objective limits on a social construct like violence. Instead, to take what is referred to by Audi as a paradigmatic approach, that there are certain features of violence which are key to it, and you could say that certain instances may be closer to that paradigm than others. Things which make it closer to the paradigm are that it's directed at persons or maybe their personal property, that it's coercive, that it causes physical harm. And then with that in mind, you can find instances which are maybe closer to the paradigm, like punching someone in the face or further from the paradigm, like squirting a milkshake on a politician. And then ultimately I leave it to the individual to determine whether or not they think anything does or doesn't constitute violence. But in a way, whether it is violent or not isn't as important as the moral consequences of the action. And I think that's the key thing is to what extent does that action genuinely deprive people of liberty? To what extent does it genuinely coerce, to what extent does it actually do the evils of what we think of as violence?
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C
That's really interesting. And it sort of, it feeds into my next question. And this is something that came out in the book. So you wrote about, you know, caveats to the legitimate theories of protests and especially, you know, this idea that multiple individuals will, can stand behind the same banner. And, and yet on the one hand some will be proponents of violence depending on the sort of, you know, what the protest is about and the, the sort of state violence being imposed by the government. At the same time there will be, and you reference genuine, I can't now say it. And Tenerife, you think, you know, There are these proponents of civil disobedience that sort of argue in favor of non violence, generally speaking. And you, you know, you wrote about the anti urbanization protests of Hong Kong in the 90s. And you know, of course you knew I was going to ask you this question because I was in Hong Kong during the 2019 anti extradition protest. And that was quite a sort of decisive thing at that time. Notwithstanding, you know, a massive proportion of the population came out to protest. There were really strong proponents in favor of using violence in protest. And there was another camp, probably just as big, if not bigger, who were against the violence used by other protesters. So how can you address this issue of what you describe in the book of Moral Aggregation and is it solvable?
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A
Yeah. So looking at a crowd and thinking, okay, well, does a crowd have a coherent moral argument against the government? And as you say, like, there'll be some people in that crowd who are there, you know, peacefully waving a flag, and others who fully want to, possibly for good reasons, but do want to commit violence. And how do we, you know, how do we talk about moral arguments which are usually so singular? How do we, how do we do that in this aggregate? How do we. And I think that the long story, the long story short is I, I think I'm persuaded by Avia Pasternak here in that you probably ought not to. And as a shorthand, I would say these protests or protesters in Ferguson or in Paris or in Hong Kong or wherever, as a shorthand for referring to some of the arguments that a number of different individuals are making. But really we need to look at each individual's motivations and their moral arguments for why they act as they do in reacting to a state's poor legitimacy claim in terms of the laws that they're making. So if you like, each protester makes their own individual legitimacy counterclaim their own argument, justifying why their actions are legitimate or not. And that way you avoid necessarily, depending on your metaphor of choice, lassoing everyone together or tarring everyone with the same brush. You could say, well, what did you do? And is that coherent with the morals that you're proposing and the immoral arguments you're making as against the states. So that's the, the way of doing that. And I think Pasternak makes a good point, which is that when it comes to criminal trials where we're prosecuting crowds of people, we prosecute them one by one. The state, when it's trying to make arguments about people's states of mind, even in mob cases, we'll have to find the individual's moral, as it were, aspects when it comes to the ments rea. Likewise, you know, by analogy, it's a different thing we're doing, but by analogy, we should look to the individual as their own moral arbiter. Yeah.
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C
So then I guess the million dollar question that goes sort of to the crux of your book is when is violent protest legitimate?
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A
Yeah. So no simple answer to that one, I'm afraid, as the endeavor is with these things, but where you have a legitimacy claim, a law by government that is incoherent, and to the extent that it demands disobedience of that law and potentially of, as I say, secondary disobedience to other laws in order to be able to demonstrate through democratic dialogue, disapproval and where, ultimately, where use of violence is justified in terms of its instrumental or communicative role. So if we're thinking of protesters, dialogue, violence can form part of that dialogue. We think about the way that, for example, graffiti paints a message. You know, we've got excellent writers like Young and, you know, Butler's done this as well, talked about thinking about graffiti as a. As it's a criminal act and defaces property, but it can be expressive, it can have political salience. Well, you know, and again, going back to that thing of violence.
- [37:34]
C
Well.
- [37:34]
A
Well, if you think about damage to property as violence, other forms of damage to property other than graffiti or beyond, and including graffiti, defacement, destruction can have this effect as well. Now, this is separate to the question of whether it's justifiable in other senses, whether it's too harmful or whether it is too dangerous to democracy or what have you, and we may come around to those questions later, but it is justifiable, at least to the extent that it successfully performs those functions of expressing of dissent or alternatively being instrumental, achieving an aim of justice. So if I'm protesting against, for example, state brutality and police racism, and the police throw tear gas at a crowd, and I am, as part of that process, I pick up that tear gas and throw it back. That is, strictly speaking, an act of violence, but it's one which is coherent with the moral message that I'm making as against the state's claims. Other forms of instrumental violence, of course, can involve things like. So again, like defacement of public buildings, removing of statues, the Edward Colston statue, for example, that was taken from Bristol Dock and plunged, sorry, plunged into the docks. An excellent example of instrumental and symbolic use of, yes, violence to property, but violence nonetheless, in a way which was, I think, in retrospect, deemed to be highly justified. It was controversial at the time, but I think history has already, in a small number of years demonstrated the impact that that has had in terms of widening understanding of the colonial legacy of Bristol. So those are the sort of the main ways in which violence might be justifiable as a form of dialogue or as a form of self help, as a form of achieving justice, as a form of addressing the injustices which the state's failed legitimacy claims are pressing upon one's life.
- [40:02]
C
So then would you say that violence has the same power and potential to speak a moral message to us in the way that nonviolence can as well?
- [40:10]
A
Yeah, I think one thing which springs to mind here, and I'm conscious that listeners will be thinking of the powerful message of nonviolence of leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And Mahatma Gandhi. And there's a force of nonviolence which again, Butler, Judith Butler, wrote a book which is simply called, I think, the Force of Nonviolence recently, which goes a long way towards saying that nonviolence can have this powerful message which is attached to its possibilities of efficacy. Nonviolence doesn't necessarily mean inefficiency. Nonviolence can work and can not just work in terms of being a powerful communicator, but can affect real change. But there are a couple of things which we should bear in mind here. One is that neither the Indian revolution nor the civil rights movement would have been possible without years of violence and suffering. That's an overlooked aspect of this. Another thing is that not for Martin Luther King Jr. Himself, but for a number of other people who were leaders within the civil rights movement, the reason to go for nonviolence was prudential rather than moral, so as not to frighten the white majority too much, whose support they needed in order to sustain long term political change. So nonviolence can be extremely powerful, but it sometimes isn't enough. I think in terms of whether violence can sometimes be as powerful a message as a communicator, I think it depends upon the act of violence in question. Violence against persons poses such disdain that it is difficult to win over the populace particularly. And this is something that again, Stefan and Chenoweth talked about. Violence against persons. They found in a study which I think still lasts as a legacy, has the problem of alienating members of the public and preventing those violent groups from being incorporated into future political processes needed for sustained change and for winning concessions. Terrorism as a method of violence is so unpalatable, it's very counterproductive and very few instances of things which are termed. Of course, we have to be careful because terrorism itself is a highly contested phrase and is one which is written by the state, of course. So you know, we have to be careful there. You know, you do have your, you know, Nelson Mandela's and you have that freedom fighter aspect which is important there. So in short, there are methods of violence and there are aspects of violence which can be appealing. What the individual would need to do is to think what is going to tactically work, what is justifiable, what is in line with moral argument and what will resonate with other members of the public and ideally with leaders, as well as being evidence of the moral weight and consideration that justifies and explains why they're acting in violent protest. Yeah.
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C
So then I guess that leads to my next question. You've sort of started to touch on this, but I want to ask you, are there any justifiable limits to violence in protest?
- [44:08]
A
Yeah. So I think that the sort of limitations of violence will naturally be contextual as well. And I think that, as I say, destruction of human life, particularly because it's something you can't go back from and it so utterly obliterates the freedom of the individual and is so coercive to the community by the fear that it causes, is something which is incredibly difficult to justify. It's really hard to think of arguments, strong moral arguments that come from that that don't immediately boil down to self defense against an immediate aggressor. In terms of other potential limitations of violence. I think it has to boil down to context. I don't think that violence to property, for example, is one homogenous thing. It may well be that violence to personal property of innocent bystanders, so arson, for example, or looting is less justifiable. I'm not saying it's never justifiable. There were a number of people who were interviewed after the Ferguson unrests, including shopkeepers who were looted, who said that those forms of looting had a form of justification because particularly when it was a big mega corporation that was looted, that it was a method of communicating dissent against the neoliberalization and the impoverishment of the local community, money being hoovered out and local businesses being crushed that maintained a cycle of socioeconomic oppression alongside the political socio oppression of the. Of police, racial violence within that space. So, so I again, sorry, somewhat rambling there, but the prime notion of there are certain forms of property violence which may in context be more justifiable than others. For sure. So whether it's corporate or government property, for example, where there's no immediate loss to anyone's specific freedom or liberty in its, in its defacement or destruction, in comparison to my house, for example, or, you know, that I, I rent a little property, if it was destroyed by a fire, that would be quite a lot of my life ruined. Whereas tearing down the statue of Edward Colston ruined no one's freedom. And again, if we think of the, the evil of violence as the, the liberty lost and those social ills, that is a good way of trying to then assess what those limits of violence might be in context.
- [47:08]
C
And so is this the same as sort of thinking about the general limitations and the specific limitations of the legitimacy of violent protests?
- [47:17]
A
Yeah, so this last bit of the book, limitations, I think. So to put this in context and explain for those who have not yet read this excellent book, is something that was mentioned earlier which is. Okay, well, violence might be justifiable as a form of moral dialogue, but surely it poses a number of problems which have been very well raised in liberal democratic literature for hundreds of years. And, you know, there's a number of them in turn which need to be addressed. Right. So there's arguments that the fact that it's illegal is itself a reason for it to be immoral. The idea that violence is innately immoral, either for deontological or utilitarian reasons and so therefore can never be justified. The idea that violence is needless or counterproductive and so therefore can't be justified. The idea that it threatens the social bonds, per John rules that bind us together and so therefore cannot be justified. Those sorts of arguments I refer to as general arguments against violence. They apply whether it's in a liberal democratic context, really, or across countries. There's nothing. Those are sort of arguments that violence is bad in and of itself. And those arguments are usually presented in ways which say that there is never, therefore, a justification for violence. But what I do is I turn those, as it were, general prohibitions of violence and show that none of them are 100% effective. None of those arguments that I've just mentioned are fully without exception. And there are ways of demonstrating that these arguments aren't really prohibitions on violence, but might be used as limitations by those who want to commit violent protest as to what factors they should consider in terms of the level and type and target of violence that they might engage with. Does that clarify things?
- [49:43]
C
Yeah, it does, it does. And it's fascinating to think about it both in sort of specific Contexts and more broadly in a sort of theoretical framework in terms of sort of reaching to and referring to moral arguments and the moral legitimacy of law and state coercion. And. And then on the other hand, when those laws and moral arguments, as you say, sort of stretch into being arbitrary or unjustified or illogical.
- [50:15]
A
Yeah. And there are a number of examples which I could give. Like, I know that we probably don't have time to run through all of them, but as a good example, the idea that violence is illegal and so therefore should be always considered prohibited, morally prohibited. Right. That argument is, I think, one of the weaker ones. So basically put, if your argument is that something being unlawful means it is immoral, then you have failed to recognize that law often does not have a necessary moral content. Right. And again, we could go the full positivist way here and say there's no real connection between law and morality, or, you know, that there are, but they're limited. Or you could just say, well, there are laws which contain morally horrible things. And we know, again, our liberal democratic understanding fully supports civil disobedience, so illegal protest. So if that's the case, then the. You can't say the problem with violence is it's illegality. Otherwise you'd say, well, civil disobedience is. And the civil rights movement is illegitimate, and that's a position which is largely untenable. Right. I think another problem that that argument makes is it presumes that all violence is unlawful. And although, as I said at the beginning, because of our theory and understanding of the monopoly of force, often violent protest is unlawful, it's actually it. I don't think it's helpful to define it that way. You can have acts of violence which are later found to be lawful. So, for example, the Edward Colston statue is an excellent example of this. They were prosecuted that the Colston Four were prosecuted under the Criminal Damage Act 1971. And it wasn't until trial that the prosecution realized that they were going to raise a series of defenses, including the fact that they had the consent of who they thought the owners were, the people of Bristol, that they were preventing the crime, which was the. The demonstration of an obscene image and so on and so forth. And, you know, at least some of the. At least one of those defenses persuaded the jury, and that being the case, that form of violence and what everyone at the time was referring to property, everyone who hated the Colston statue going into the. Into the harbour called it violence, didn't stop them calling it violence. When the jury found that they were not guilty. So, again, so there's just one example of these arguments against the moral arguments against violence often, often actually do not work. So, so, so I, and you know, I think that I'll leave, I'll invite people to read those chapters and see whether or not they agree with my various ways around some of those. But, yeah, I feel like a lot of people are very squeamish about forms of violence which actually perhaps achieve more good than harm. And we may need to be more critical about whether we want a 100% prohibition against violence in protest in order to be able to achieve justice.
- [53:42]
C
Yeah, it's a really interesting topic which has hit the news in the last few days, thinking about, you know, violent protests and whether it might be legitimate. And, you know, this has come up in the context of climate advocacy. So I'm wondering if you can just comment on the news in the last few days sort of grounded in your theoretical and sort of pragmatic findings based on your book.
- [54:07]
A
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, when I was writing the book, the organization which was annoying the conservative government at the time was Extinction Rebellion. And there was a lot of talk about, well, you know, a lot of this is peaceful lawbreaking, but it's law breaking. But there's also damage to property, which they would often engage with, whether that was pouring fake oil as a form of criminal damage in Shell's London headquarters or gluing themselves to infrastructure. And I found it interesting because their manifesto, the Extinction Rebellion Handbook, clearly says things which reflect the legitimacy claim dynamic. So things like, because this government has failed its duty to moral principles of justice, to fairness to safety and security of this and future generations, we must act in pursuit of those principles instead. Right. That reflects a lot the kind of legitimacy claim dynamic that I've discussed previously. And now to the more recent protests that we see particularly just stop oil. But you know, there are a number of different organizations as well. The ultimate rhetoric and the moral argumentation is very similar once again, that there are, it's, there are deep moral failures, hypocrisy, holding up certain principles and failing them which need to be redressed. The additional problem, of course, is that you would say, oh, well, why can't you, if you have these problems, why don't you write to your MP or try to solve these through institutional means? Well, the reason why it's got this far is precisely because those institutional means of redress have not worked, are insufficient, do not allow for climate change to be addressed in a way which is prompt Particularly fast enough for the rate of climate destruction which we're seeing. And so therefore, that these forms of protest are necessary not just to effect change directly, but in order to raise awareness, to make that argument of necessity clear and present and palpable, and to persuade members of the public as well as leaders in government of the urgency of this. And I think that, you know, at the time of recording, only very recently, I think last night there was a Channel 4 documentary with Chris Packham asking the question, is now the time in order to save the environment where we should consider breaking the law? And his answer was, yes. It's a remarkable situation and one which I think really speaks to the importance of thinking about law as legitimacy. You cannot expect obedience from subjects who routinely see those moral arguments hidden in law fail to materialize.
- [57:41]
C
Yeah, it's really fascinating when you do apply the sort of theories and calls to moral arguments to these very real situations that are changing day to day. So in your conclusion, I just want to ask you about one more of your examples because in your conclusion, you do write about the US Capitol Hill incident, and I'm wondering if you can comment on that just to sort of. And think about some of your sort of key findings in the book as well.
- [58:11]
A
Sure. So, again, I. I was so fortunate with the timing of when I was finishing my thesis and therefore finished the first draft of my book, that the. The January 6th capital riot happened just as I was rounding things off. And it just made such an interest because I was going to conclude with just my main findings, which are, you know, and I'll run through those quickly first, I think. But those main findings are that states at least make claim to these grounds of constitutional morality. Whether they exist, whether justice, peace, mercy. Whether these things exist or not, is. Is, as it were, academic states claim these things and must make claim to these things in order to seek obedience from us as morally rational actors. Second, that they do so through, whether they know it or not, through legitimacy claims, their acts, their policies, their laws, latently try to say we are justified based on these moral principles that the state holds dear and which are part of our constitutional morality. And some of their arguments will be more coherent than others. Thirdly, the members of the public in legitimacy counterclaims, through their various forms of protest or dissent, will identify those flaws and will act in ways which themselves may need moral justification. Are the protesters methods of protest themselves morally coherent? And how does that look like? What does that look like? But this forms part of a moral dialogue. I'm making a moral Claim and acting, I'm making a moral claim in acting, and so on, so forth, then, that violence is a form of moral dialogue. It is communicative, it is instrumental. It has the ability to persuade morally. It has the ability to raise these issues and perform. Perform the functions of dialogue, sometimes more coherently than others. A good piece of graffiti or a particularly vivid riot even, can sometimes paint a better picture than an incoherent and seemingly unjustifiable form of vandalism against a third party who's not really the object of dissent. Finally, I look through various different ways in which we argue that violence is unacceptable and unjustifiable, and I can do a whirlwind tour of debunking them, saying that the utilitarian and deontological total prohibitions of violence often fail to convince that actually it can be good for social bonds for there to be violent protests if there are laws which are bad for social bonds, that violence can be of instrumental value, just depending upon the method used and the conscientiousness of the individual who's engaging in that protest, and so on and so forth. Now, when it comes to Hill, I applied these conclusions to this effectively, like a mini case study. At the end, you've got the US election called for. The Democrats who won the states also won the popular majority. Donald Trump says there's a shadowy conspiracy that renders these votes illegitimate. They're trying to steal the vote. Right. And that this is unacceptable and we need to rest power away from these corrupt vandals of democracy. A good number of Trump supporters come to the Capitol in order to precisely do that. And the way that I look at it is. Okay, well, you've been spending the entire book seeming to justify violent protest. Right? Can you justify this? And I say, actually, my theory shows that this is not justifiable, partly because it's incoherent legitimacy counterclaim. It's based off of misunderstanding as to what actually happened to political reality. The methods used and employed were excessive and inefficient and probably would have caused more instability than anything else. And I think that really, if there had been a shadowy conspiracy, if the vote really had been stolen from Donald Trump, then it would have been more justifiable, perhaps, to stage a violent protest in or around the Capitol. But given the factual matrix, it was simply not. And in fact, it was morally reprehensible to make claims that it was morally justifiable to lie and to effectively cause violence to happen in pursuit of one's own political agenda. The ways which we could try to prevent these forms of violence from occurring. Obviously include things like avoiding this level of. Of discourse, having coherent moral and political discourse, allowing people to feel like they can trust their public institutions more so that they don't need to revert quite so immediately to violence. I also think that there's a potential problem in the Republican with a capital or small case are American attitude to violence as a necessary form of response to tyranny? There's a long history of that and although it's not my expert area, there was something that kept coming up in the literature. But yes, so, so far from my book, justifying violent protest being used to justify all in any forms of violence, really, it's a toolkit for saying, well, violence itself in the abstract isn't the problem, it's how violence is used and whether it's justifiable in context.
- [64:46]
C
Yeah, and that's sort of a perfect way to, to sum it up. It is this brilliant toolkit. I do want to ask you, though, at the very end you offer this really moving reflection. And you know, you wrote that you yourself are a pacifist, and yet your book seems to demonstrate that there may be space for violence in protest. And so there were two sort of key takeaways in your last paragraph. So you first sight Audrey Lord and you write that we cannot rely on the logics of liberal democracy to address its inherent failings. And then, as you've mentioned, you turn to Judith Butler and you ask readers to imagine a society that does not base itself on the flawed logics of liberal democratic theory, which does not reinforce itself through legitimate and acceptable brute force. And she says that she asks, can we be radical and rebellious enough to embrace a radical and rebellious peace? So then, to bring together the sort of key threads and these key takeaways that run throughout your book, are there any final words you wish to offer to listeners on the legitimacy of violence in protest in the context of a radical and rebellious peace?
- [65:53]
A
Yeah, for sure. I think that violence is something which has never, whenever it has emerged in my life, it has been detrimental. I myself am squeamish with regards to violence. However, I'm also a middle class white CIS man living in academia in the United Kingdom and have never been confronted with the levels of violence and oppression and deprivation which immediately justify violent responses on behalf of those individuals. I think that you have therefore to be careful before condemning those who use violence because they are often the victims of violence, structural or otherwise. And the state, we must remember, is the supreme machine of violence. Whether through its, again employment of the police or whether it's simply through its ability to cause deprivation and to avoid. And again, to go back to Johannes Galton, if we think about violence as any avoidable deprivation to human dignity, the state is easily responsible for a great deal of potential violence there. With that said, the problem of liberal democracy is that it's based on violence. Thinking about Walter Benjamin and the idea that the state uses violence to establish itself, but then uses violence to maintain itself at all times, we think of liberal democracy as being something that tries to purge violence from it. But no, it's perpetual, it's necessary, it's. It's the engine of liberal democratic governance. And what I think Audre Lorde and what Judith Butler tried to say is again, to go to a different writer but Philip Larkin, to look at high windows, to try to imagine a different and better politics. My little book looks at liberal democratic theory and says, well, within these narrow, dangerous prison walls of liberal democracy, what can we do to try to strive for a shaft of light? Whereas what Audre Lorde and Judith Butler tried to do, something much bolder and more ambitious than I could achieve, which is to say we need to break entirely free from this architecture. And I feel like that would be a much bolder and more important project.
- [68:41]
C
That's some really powerful and moving words to think of to sort of wrap up. But maybe, maybe that can be your next project. I think having read your little book a couple of times now, I wouldn't say it's little and I would also say it's definitely. You definitely got it to do that next.
- [69:00]
A
Thank you.
- [69:01]
C
So on that topic, James, I just want to ask you before you go, what are you working on now?
- [69:09]
A
So, amongst other things, I'm working on an article with a psychiatrist friend of mine on considering and conceiving of self harm and violence in protest. How liberal democracy fails to recognize and problematize harm to oneself as a form of violence. And instead of using liberal democratic logics, it medicalizes and uses patriarchal systems of governance instead. So that's an ongoing work in progress. I'm also to take a more joyous approach to things. I'm now also starting up the the Laws of Drag network with my colleague Dr. Rosie Fox here at Leeds, and also with our friend Joy Twemlow up in Durham. The aim of which is to explore and work with drag artists in order to be able to see the overlaps between lived experience of drag and where the law helps and hinders them. Part of a project of hoping to empower sometimes misunderstood and certainly underrepresented and marginalized group within the United Kingdom. So watch this space and try to follow us on Twitter if you can. Laws of Drag.
- [70:32]
C
Laws of Drag, that's the one.
- [70:35]
A
And yeah, when it comes to violence and violent protest, I think how that fits in in the future, I want to start working with drag performers and then work on the bigger question of pride and protest and whether, and to the extent to which we can still say that pride is a protest and how law and pride conflict or overlap or reconcile. So that's. Well in the future though. So watch this space.
- [71:08]
C
Well, I can't. I cannot wait to see what comes out of all of those quite different but really exciting projects. Yeah, the, the Laws of Drag is. It's super exciting. I've heard a little bit about it already. But yeah, definitely, definitely stay in touch and hear about what you do there.
- [71:24]
A
You'll always be welcome to join us for any of our workshops. We get drag performers together with academics across disciplines. So not just law, in order to be able to see what is, you know, how we can talk about drag and justice. And, you know, you'd be surprised the number of fields which can talk about whether it's tax, employment, even things like local authority and administrative law, can touch upon drag in a number of ways which, you know, could be really beneficial to talk about in future. And there's so much possibility for impact with it, but it's also just good fun. So, yeah, thanks.
- [72:01]
C
Yeah, no, that sounds brilliant. And I just want to thank you, James, for coming on the show today. So I'm Jane Richards. I've been speaking with James Greenwood Reeves. We've been chatting about his book Justifying Violent Protests, Law and Morality in Democratic States. You've been listening to New Books in Law. It's a channel on the New Books Network. James Greenwood Reeves, I should say, Dr. James Greenwood Reeves. Thank you so much for your time.
- [72:26]
A
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