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The introduction outlines previous definitions of the modern state as well as historians’ current explanations of state formation in early modern Europe and England. It demonstrates that earlier scholars have focused almost entirely on the state’s ability to engage in active warfare and have thus neglected an important aspect of the monopoly of violence, the restriction of non-state or illegitimate violence. The introduction also explores the medieval background of the coroner system, the mechanism designed to regulate violence in England and explains why the system had failed to achieve its proposed ends prior to the sixteenth century.

This chapter examines violence monopoly. Violence monopoly refers to whether the state is capable of establishing an order in which its claim to be the ultimate and principal employer of coercion goes largely unchallenged. The more often states are challenged, and the more intense the nature of the challengers, the less likely the state is to survive as the central institution of a political system. A poor showing in the violence monopoly category is one of the Indian state's greatest vulnerabilities in terms of state capacity. It will need to be improved upon simply to maintain order. Yet it is doubtful that the Indian state will improve in this area rapidly.

Scholars have argued that lynching--summary group attack and/or homicide seeking to punish behavior defined as deviant--against individuals often deemed socially distant, typically occurs in conditions of social flux, for example in transitions from homogeneous tribal societies to plural, heterogeneous social orders; in locales where patterns of racial or ethnic dominance have been challenged or collapsed; in settings shifting rapidly from rural to urban social arrangements; in polities where authority has effectively lost legitimacy or where multiple, contradictory legal regimes contend for popular support; amid perceptions of a crisis of legal order brought on by rampant criminality; and in contested or fragile states as opposed to settings where the state is able to, in Weberian terms, successfully claim a monopoly of violence.

Scholars have argued that lynching--summary group attack and/or homicide seeking to punish behavior defined as deviant--against individuals often deemed socially distant, typically occurs in conditions of social flux, for example in transitions from homogeneous tribal societies to plural, heterogeneous social orders; in locales where patterns of racial or ethnic dominance have been challenged or collapsed; in settings shifting rapidly from rural to urban social arrangements; in polities where authority has effectively lost legitimacy or where multiple, contradictory legal regimes contend for popular support; amid perceptions of a crisis of legal order brought on by rampant criminality; and in contested or fragile states as opposed to settings where the state is able to, in Weberian terms, successfully claim a monopoly of violence.

The essay traces a sequential history of violence of the Indian nation state, marking the Partition and the Bengal famine as its repressed inaugural events, its ‘creation myths’. Outlining the vision of the nascent Indian state which internalized and fetishized development, planning and related economic rationality, he argues how we need ‘iconographic meditation’ and ‘conceptual reflection’ to understand the genocidal violence of these categories. Further, reflecting on the paradigmatic moments of violence in the post-independent India—Emergency, Narmada, Naxalbari, Bhopal, and Gujarat—the essay unravels hidden layers of statist and developmental violence. As the state marvelled in the ‘new possibilities of evil’ in its systematic apathy to the phenomenology of suffering, there was routinization of disasters and normalization of riots. The essay concludes with an articulation of an urgent need for a new language, a new discourse to understand the routinization of violence and fragility of citizenship that are built into the value system of the current political regime.

This chapter is dedicated to Radbruch’s seminal text on “The Origin of Criminal Law in the Class of Serfs.” It contains a number of counter intuitive insights on the relationship between public punishment and private revenge, derived from the domains of legal history and anthropological research in non-state societies. Radbruch’s aim was not to provide a historiography of punitive interventions in tribal Germanic society, but to remind his readers of the constitutive importance of sovereignty for the emergence of criminal law. This relates to Radbruch’s concern for legal certainty, and explains his inquiries into the continuity and discontinuities between the pater familias of the Germanic clan and the institution of the sovereign. My own investigations could similarly be understood as a kind of “historical jurisprudence,” highlighting the significance of the mutation that occurred when punitive interventions between equals (private revenge) were prohibited and became themselves punishable as criminal offences.

This chapter explores the dialectic of power and law as exemplified in the ambiguous status of sovereignty, in particular in the Charter and practice of the United Nations Organization. One of the main challenges for the rule of law, whether domestic or international, is how to enforce legal norms without privileging the enforcers. This is where sovereignty has revealed its dual face in relations between states. Unlike domestic constitutional systems, the framework of norms of the United Nations lacks basic elements of a separation of powers, granting special status to states that were the most powerful upon the Organization’s foundation. The Charter’s principle of sovereign equality stands in direct contradiction to the norms regulating the use of coercive powers by the UN Security Council. Analyzing multilateral as well as unilateral sanctions regimes, the chapter explains how the antagonism between equality and “coercive privilege” has enabled major global players to evade scrutiny of their conduct, and proposes an amendment of the wording of Article 27(3) of the Charter.