Hannah Arendt, the German-American philosopher and political theorist, did not set out to write a theory of violence. And yet, her reflections on totalitarianism, power, and the nature of evil – forged in the crucible of fascism and exile – are perhaps some of the most piercing insights into the machinery of modern cruelty ever written.
To read Arendt today is to be confronted by that hardest of truths: that violence, far from being always monstrous and mad, is often administrative. It is procedural. It is, terribly, unthinking.
For Action on Armed Violence, which seeks to understand the structures (and strictures) that enable (and prevent) state and non-state harm, Arendt’s work on power and violence, on evil and responsibility, helps frame the questions that lie just beneath the statistics and the casualty data. Not just who pulled the trigger or ordered the strike – but how the world made that finger twitch or let that order to attack be handed down so easily.
Violence and power: they are not the same
Arendt’s foundational insight, laid out in her essay On Violence (1970), is that violence and power are not synonymous. Indeed, they are opposites.
Power, she argued, arises wherever people act in concert. It is relational, dialogical, and grounded in consent. Violence, by contrast, is instrumental – it is the means employed when power is absent or has broken down. For Arendt, violence is not strength, but weakness. A government that rules by fear is not strong, but brittle. The tyrant needs guns because he has lost words.
In Donbas, in Yemen, in Sudan – we do not simply see the overuse of violence. We see the absence of legitimate power. And where violence becomes routine, it marks not the authority of the state, but its failure to secure consent.
This is a sobering challenge to the language of “legitimate force” used by governments to justify missile strikes, raids, and “surgical” assassinations. Arendt would say: if it must be enforced by violence, it is no longer legitimate.
The banality of evil
Perhaps Arendt’s most enduring – and perhaps misunderstood – idea came from her report on Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Jerusalem. Eichmann was not, she wrote, a fanatical monster. He was an obedient bureaucrat, more concerned with promotions than ideology.
This, for Arendt, was evil in its modern form: not demonic but banal. A failure to think. An abdication of moral judgement in the face of routine. And here, Arendt speaks directly to the functionaries of violence – the policy-makers who sign off drone strikes; the military lawyers who approve arms exports to known human rights abusers; the engineers who code surveillance algorithms used to target civilians.
The horror, Arendt reminds us, is not always in the hate. It is in the shrug.
This is why AOAV investigates not only battlefields but also boardrooms. Because violence today is often a product of systems designed without imagination, without ethics, and without pause.
One other thing: Arendt did not think Eichmann was stupid. But she did believe he had stopped thinking
This, too, is crucial. For her, thinking is not mere intelligence. It is the inner dialogue with oneself – the capacity to question, to doubt, to judge. Without it, obedience becomes easy. Atrocity becomes logistics. It is easy to be subservient to the power of violence. In our age of AI and automation and datafication, where targets are flagged by predictive models and decisions made at algorithmic speed, Arendt’s warning is clear: when thinking is outsourced, responsibility collapses. You cannot put a computer on trial.
Whether it’s a British official approving weapon exports to Israel during its bombardment of Gaza, or an American analyst authorising a strike from a desert compound in Nevada, the danger becomes the same: violence becomes antiseptic. Dehumanised. And by many, in the end, unquestioned.
Arendt’s warning is just as vital when confronting the slow corrosion of moral responsibility through market mechanisms. Take the rise of self-defence insurance in the United States, where companies like USCCA offer policies that pre-emptively shield gun owners from criminal and civil liability should they shoot someone. In the case of Joshua Huston—a veteran who shot a man on his property with an AR-15—his first instinct after dialling 911 was to call the insurer’s emergency hotline. Lawyers were dispatched, fees were covered, and eventually, the case was dismissed under Florida’s “stand your ground” law. But what Arendt would have seen in all this is not just a personal tragedy or legal drama, but a system that outsources moral judgement to corporate contracts, reducing deadly force to a matter of subscription tiers and policy fine print. In such a world, where responsibility is not assumed but deferred – where the ability to kill is protected, incentivised, and commodified – her call to think, to judge, and to resist the lure of convenience becomes all the more urgent.
For AOAV, this is why ethics cannot be an afterthought in all forms of security policy. It must be embedded at every stage – because the consequences of thoughtlessness are often fatal.
Totalitarianism and the mobilisation of violence
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt mapped how easily totalitarian regimes convert fear into rule. Their genius, if one can call it that, lies in their mass mobilisation of violence. Not just to punish dissent but to destroy the space where thinking – and thus resistance – might occur.
They make unpredictability a weapon. By punishing both the guilty and the innocent, by shifting laws midstream, they atomise society. No one can trust anyone. No one knows the rules.
This description, hauntingly, finds echoes in both modern politics and modern conflict zones. In areas controlled by militias or authoritarian regimes, civilians live in conditions where rules are opaque, punishments arbitrary, and fear ubiquitous (even if the fear is of ‘the other’).
In such contexts, violence does not just silence dissent. It destroys the possibility of solidarity. And for Arendt, that is the real terror: the breakdown not of politics, but of the very conditions that make politics possible.
Judgement, not certainty
Arendt, ever wary of systems that promise too much, did not offer clear ethical formulas. She distrusted moral blueprints, totalising ideologies, and above all utopian programmes. The promise of Paradise, to Arendt, was a pathway to Hell.
What she did call for was judgement.
Not the legalistic kind, but the human kind – rooted in the capacity to see the world from another’s perspective, to hold competing claims in tension, and to resist the lure of easy answers. This is perhaps her most vital message today. In a world of polarised media, fake news, black-and-white narratives, and simplified language of “target killed”, “collateral damage” and “operation successful,” Arendt calls us back to complexity. To doubt. To thinking. To the opposite of orders and compliance.
At AOAV, where we document the messy, human consequences of state violence – the ideologies behind the numbers, the lives behind the kill lists – Arendt’s insistence on judgement offers both a challenge and a guide.
Take, for instance, the Grad missile strike in Mariupol, Ukraine, on 24 January 2015. Dozens of civilians were killed when rockets fired from separatist-held territory slammed into a market, a school, and residential buildings. Official rhetoric framed it as part of a military offensive; what AOAV documented were the bodies of shoppers, schoolchildren, pensioners. The language of “military necessity” does not hold when set against the reality of shrapnel wounds and burned homes. To judge this, as Arendt would have it, is not merely to ask whether it broke international law—but to ask who gave the order, what political ends it served, and what human costs were deemed acceptable in the process.
This is the kind of moral clarity Arendt championed—not purity, but the refusal to look away.
Conclusion: resisting the machinery
In the end, Arendt’s contribution to the philosophy of violence is not to explain why violence happens. It is to show how easily it does – when we stop thinking, when systems take over, when the individual abdicates responsibility.
She offers no programme for peace. No manifesto. But she does offer a stance: to think, to judge, to resist abstraction. And for those who seek a world less marred by armed violence, her words still resonate: “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
So, if we are to resist violence in the 21st century, it will not be with slogans alone. It will be with thought. With moral courage.
And, above all, with the refusal to let brutality become banal.
Further reading:
- Arendt, Hannah. On Violence (1970). In Crises of the Republic. Harcourt Brace, 1972.
- Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Harcourt, 1973.
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