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.

Walter Benjamin’s 1921 Critique of Violence offers a radical lens through which to examine how law, power, and legitimacy are entwined with violence—revealing that the state’s claim to authority often rests not on justice but on force, and challenging us, as peace advocates, to confront not only acts of violence but the legal and symbolic structures that sustain them.