Non Violent Politics: Rethinking State Order and Legitimacy in the 21^st Century
2^nd Innsbruck Peace Lecture by Prof. Jenny Pearce, London School of Economics 
Moderation: Prof. Wolfgang Dietrich, University of Innsbruck

Thursday 14^th of February 2019, 19:00 at the Tirol Panorama and Kaiserjäger Museum, Bergisel 1-2, 6020 Innsbruck 

Is a non violent politics a utopian ideal or a realistic and urgent necessity for a world in flux and increasingly beset by polarising narratives, horizontal and vertical inequalities of wealth and power, humanitarian crises and threats from climate change? This public lecture seeks to open up this debate.

It has been a century since Max Weber gave his lecture on Politics as a Vocation and introduced one of the most influential definitions of the state in history: The legitimate monopoly of violence (Gewalt) over a given territory. He also told his radical student audience, that their ethics of conviction would have to deal with the reality, that violence was an unavoidable part of politics and of human nature. Assumptions around the ’inevitability’ of violence, the right to use it and the multiple forms it takes across all the socialisation spaces, overshadow our capacity to build a peaceful world. Based on our knowledge about the differences between aggression and violence and the emotional and material triggers to violence, we will explore the possibility of rethinking the Weberian proposition and imagining a state which reduces violence.

Prof. Jenny Pearce is Peace Scholar and Research Professor at the London School of Economics.  

For further information please contact: innpeace@uibk.ac.at