Deep Thought: A Monopoly on Violence

Who is allowed to decide on whether we live or die? Max Weber named the state as the sole grantor of the ‘right’ to physical force, deployed with the blessing of the polity. In whose interest is that right exercised nowadays?

Periodically in Brussels our lives are disrupted with barbed wire and helicopters hovering overhead, as Europe’s leaders congregate to decide on the future of hundreds of millions. It is they who decide that Russia’s violence is wrong but Ukraine must fight it with one arm behind its back, its defensive violence constrained, deployed by exclusively Ukrainian flesh. It is also they who decide Israel’s defensive violence can be unconstrained and absolved of criticism, all collective rulebooks flushed down history’s toilet.

It is they who declare, like Ursula Von der Leyen, the dawn of a new era of selfish interest in which our collective safeguards are trumped by the imperative need for all to serve the very richest – in whose honour and interest all the protections of our collective acquis can be burned down in a bonfire of simplification. It is they, like Bart de Wever, following the same logic, who take it full circle by calling for relations with Russia to be normalised.

Are societal cleavages still situated between left or right, between woke and populist, between nationalist and globalist? Or do we find them now between an unaccountable elite burning our collective assets without permission, and a silent mass being sacrificed at the altar of exploitation, greed, and yes, unhindered violence.

Has the time come to file for a divorce, to recognise our elites as ‘other’ and plan for their replacement, as we did in Eastern Europe in 1989? Join us for an unconstrained discussion.


* Open to everyone *Reservation required *Bar Open

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ABOUT The Host
andreea Petre-Goncalves was 8 years old when totalitarian Communism collapsed overnight in her native Romania. She saw then how quickly yesterday’s absolute truth can become tomorrow reviled atrocity. She knows that societal narratives can shift fast, and when they do, they make deep system re-set possible. For two decades she worked for international development, human rights, health and sustainability in the eu institutions and international Ngos. In 2019 she set up Flare, a Brussels-based think-and-do tank that experiments with practical ways of shifting the collective ideas we hold of what is normal and desirable. This work builds on 15 years of her researching and writing about societal narrative shifts. She is a Bmw Foundation Responsible Leader and a member of Global Diplomacy Lab.