Book review: Violence and Political Theory by Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings, Polity Press, 2020, 229 pages. ISBN-13:978-1-5095-3671-9

On 6 January 2021, a mob of right-wing extremists stormed the Capitol building in Washington, DC, to challenge the final certification of the electoral victory of President-elect Joe Biden.1 Inspired by the morning speech of then President Donald Trump, the supporters made their way to the Capitol building to ‘stop the steal’2 and to ‘take back their country’. During the attempted insurrection, five people were killed, including a police officer, and the historical premises of the Capitol were seriously damaged. Pipe bombs and other weapons were also found nearby, demonstrating a premeditated potential use of deadly force. In this context of this political uprising and right-wing populist attempts to overturn the election results, it is truly interesting to read ‘Violence and Political Theory’, written by Elisabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings. The book examines in detail the conceptual relationships between politics and violence, and how different political theorists attempt to settle and resolve these ties. This discussion paves the way for the political theory of violence that the authors propose at the end of the book, based on an analysis of the practice and meaning of violence. Moreover, the authors show that it is common to aestheticise violence in political theory or to incorporate it into some other category ‘such as resistance, revolution, justice, punishment, self-defence, sovereignty, the gendered martial virtues and vices of courage or cowardice, or the aesthetic categories of tragedy and beauty’ (Frazer and Hutchings 2020, 176). Violence, as Fraser and Hutchings argue, ‘becomes more palatable when it takes the form of rectifying egregious wrongs and is provoked by a sense of immediate injustice in the innocent oppressed’ (Fraser and Hutchings 2020, 177). Indirectly, the book also shows how these strategies of justification materialise and come alive in events such as the storming of the Capitol, as the Trump supporters perhaps believed that they were justified in their actions for the purpose of ‘taking back the country’.