ABSTRACT
Violence has been an ineradicable part of human history from its very beginnings. So has war, which is simply an organized form of collective violence. Blackmail is clearly an instance of violence; a hunger strike, intended perhaps to force concessions of some kind from a government, is a less obvious case. There are people, however, who condemn all forms of violence, including the use of force by the state, although it is hard to imagine a world in which nothing was punishable by law. A tyranny, for example, can only be fought with violence, and even Christian theologians have argued that the killing of a tyrant is justified. To commit an act of violence is to use force or the threat of force to make people behave in a certain way, or to prevent them from doing certain things, or just to do them harm for the sake of it.
