Violence or Non-Violence? Gandhi and Fanon on International Conflict

Non-Violence or Violence?
 Gandhi and Fanon on International Conflict

Popular struggles for freedom, such as struggles for self-determination or ones for expanded civil and human rights within an existing state, are often, if not always, marked by violence. I propose to seek an explanation of why this is so, with the aim of understanding the relationship between violence and politics more generally. I will examine two cases in point: the theories of M. K. Gandhi and Frantz Fanon. While both set similar goals – freedom and liberation, independence of the colonized nations of India or Algeria, fighting injustices, racism and brutality, and the restoration of dignity and humanity to the oppressed – they proposed opposing methods with regard to the use of violence to achieve these goals: nonviolent resistance and revolutionary counter-violence, respectively. In my presentation I will analyze how both contribute to the conceptualization of political action and what insights they can give us on the tension between ethics and politics stemming from their preoccupation with the problem of violence in political struggles. Through this reconstructed debate I will expose the possibilities and predicaments of both ways and the implications of ethical argumentation.in politics.