Doing Nothing: A Politics of Violent Inaction for Positive Peace

Abstract

Doing nothing, or inaction - typically defined by things like denial, avoidance, acceptance, complicity, laziness, collusion, or fear – is commonly conceived as an undesirable response to the structural violence and injustice of contemporary liberal-democratic capitalism. Subsequently, contemporary theories and practices of nonviolent action for building positive peace emphasise notions of participation, inclusion and the democratic voice as the basis for emancipatory politics. However, this emphasis on nonviolent and inclusive participation seems to only reinforce the violence of liberal-democratic capitalism and as such, ‘doing nothing’ appears in the guise of ‘doing something’. In a further twist, in contrast to claims made by contemporary theories of power and nonviolent action that there are immanent possibilities for resistance to power, our current predicament under the hegemony of liberal-democratic capitalism is actually experienced as a lack of viable options for transforming the structural violence of liberal capitalism. In the face of this closure of the socio-political imagination, participation has become a modern day fetish that serves to relieve us of the guilt that we are not doing enough to overcome the violence of liberal capitalism. In contrast to this fetishisation of nonviolent and inclusive participation, Zizek’s ‘politics of subtraction’ hints at a radically subversive form of violent inaction, one that has the potential to transform social and political power relations. Based on Zizek’s theoretical edifice, this research project aims to critique the assumptions surrounding ‘doing nothing’ in both peace theory and the theory of nonviolent action, and seeks to claim “doing nothing” as a subversive and emancipatory means of political transformation. Further, the project applies this notion of inactive violence to a case study of the democratization process in Fiji from 2012-2014 to examine liberal and traditional understandings of silence/inaction, and to explore possibilities for transforming four-decades of political instability and building peace with justice.