Donald Trump’s boast of striking a “drug boat” off Venezuela exposes how America’s border has become a theatre of lethal sovereignty, where the state redefines law through violence and turns open seas into instruments of exclusion and death.

Hannah Arendt’s insights into the nature of violence, power, and moral responsibility expose how modern cruelty often stems not from hatred but from thoughtlessness. To see violence as such gives us a powerful philosophical perspective, which can help us confront the systems that make such violence possible.

The Royal Marines’ latest recruitment film, Raid, sanitises the act of killing through a cold, clinical language that distances violence from its consequences, reducing war to a formulaic execution devoid of pain, doubt, or humanity.