The war on Iraq was justified by the US government and its allies as a wholly ‘legitimate’ and necessary form of violence, as if it had been sanctioned by international opinion. The purported aim of the war was to bring democracy to a repressed people and to pre-empt worse violence that Iraq might perpetrate through abuse of weapons of mass destruction. But democracy is proving hard to implement in Iraq. Moreover, the abuse of prisoners by US forces seems to have deeper roots than just the psycho-pathology of individual soldiers. Abuses of this kind raise questions about how liberal democracies can and do perpetrate shocking and cruel forms of violence: what form do these take, and how do we recognize and interpret them? Anthropology has proved resistant to coming to terms with violence perpetrated from within our own society. Indeed, despite pioneering work by some authors, we have yet to understand and incorporate into anthropological theory serious studies of violence perpetrated by states and communities (including our own) whether it be torture, mutilation or ‘ethnic cleansing.’ In policy terms, the failure to appreciate how violence can be culturally sanctioned, even in our own society, leads to intractable political quagmires, like those in Iraq or Afghanistan, Ireland or the Middle East, where the violent insertion of external political ‘solutions’ only serves to induce even fiercer opposition using violent means.
