Abstract

The issue of violence and strategies for its attenuation present perennial conundrums for those seeking to reduce the quantity of avoidable suffering in the world. Despite the best efforts of committed practitioners, activists, and scholars, violence its various forms remain rife at all levels of social life. Paradoxically and tragically, at times, the proliferation of violence accompanies those very efforts aimed at its eradication or resolution. Education – understood in its narrower sense as a set of formal institutions as well in its broader sense as a ubiquitous sociocultural process – is perhaps exemplary of this paradox, being cast variously as a cause or instrument of violence on the one hand, and as a panacea to violence on the other. In this essay review of Etienne Balibar's Violence and Civility: On the limits of political philosophy (2016), I draw on the author's imaginative attempt to theorise the relationship between different forms of violence and link this to existing scholarship on violence more broadly, and studies that consider the role of education within economies of violence more specifically.