ABSTRACT
States make decisions, and among the weightiest are those pertaining to the use of violence against domestic and foreign adversaries. Because violence cannot easily be undone, and because a state’s legitimacy is so bound up with its judicious use, we may expect that leaders (and their advisers) will attempt to justify its application when they talk. After an initial theorization of the logic and syntax of justification, I examine recordings, minutes, transcripts, and other records of government officials in the United States, Iraq, Poland, and China contemplating the use of military and/or police force. No leaders were immune to the need to offer justifications, though their “vocabularies of motive” differed, and though the form of these justifications challenge my initial theorization (for instance, in fusing factual and value components, and in allowing for reasons to “stray” from conclusions). The cases challenge Randall Collins’ views about historical determinacy, and more directly, his Durkheimian theory of talk. The chapter also discusses and illustrates the potential uses of, and biases in, different types of micro data.
