A commitment to non-violence is not merely a matter of personal moral choice. For Butler, it should instead be understood as a ‘social and political practice undertaken in concert, culminating in a form of resistance’. In this sense, non-violence is conceived as a global project, requiring mass participation to enact its lofty aims. The book also reframes the non-violent position as capable of harnessing the qualities of passion, vigour, and even aggression, in the spirit of ‘militant pacifism’ once espoused by Albert Einstein. Butler’s text refutes the idea that these qualities are the preserve of violence, thereby eroding the association between non-violence and passivity. It is clear that Butler is summoning inspiration from the feminist movement, a cause to which Butler has dedicated much thought and writing. For decades, that movement has relied on the non-violent yet assertive instruments of public protest, information sharing, and community engagement, among others, to champion gender equality and non-discrimination.

Butler’s thesis is inextricably bound up with a demand for social equality, motivated by a ‘new egalitarian imaginary’. Violence is objectionable precisely for the reason that each life has inherent value. To do violence is to cause injury or death, and the resultant loss of every life is regrettable. This argument is sensitive to the horrors of contemporary injustices, in which ‘nameless groups of people’, including refugees, the poor, and the stateless, are ‘abandoned to death’. In particular, Butler is concerned with critiquing the ‘phantasmagoria of racism’, a psychosocial system that portrays black people as a threat, without a claim to life and protection. Butler draws on the killing of Black American men – Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Walter Scott – to illustrate how devalued and dehumanised lives are systematically subject to acts of severe and often deadly violence. Butler conceptualises this existing inequality through the prism of ‘grievability’, an idea rooted in Butler’s past work, such as Frames of War: When is life grievable? (2009). The equal grievability of lives – both in life and death – is instrumental to realising a non-violent society.

Moreover, the interdependency of life grounds the abovementioned claim of equality. Persons are ‘dependent, or formed and sustained in relations of depending upon, and being depended upon’. The coronavirus pandemic – and its concomitant measures of face masks, hotel quarantine, and lockdowns – reveals the concurrent vulnerabilities and duties of citizens. This view repudiates the model of individualism, which is itself predicated on the myth that persons are atomised, self-sufficient, ‘saturated in self-love’. For Butler, ‘our fates are, as it were, given over to one another’, establishing ‘social obligations’ that extend across national borders. Thus, violence represents a violation, an affront to this state of interdependence among humans and other living beings.

A limitation of The Force of Nonviolence concerns its form, both linguistic and substantive. In an epoch of fractured political landscapes and ideological echo chambers, the need for a healthy exchange of ideas has become increasingly pronounced. In this regard, it seems Butler has missed an opportunity with this book. It is unmistakably directed towards the academy, though it should also appeal to highly educated progressives. Butler writes that ‘nonviolence requires a critique of egological ethics … in order to open up the idea of selfhood as a fraught field of social relationality’. Butler’s prose can be unnecessarily esoteric and rigid. Moreover, some of the chapters lack focus, veering into analyses of adjacent ideas (and the histories of them) expounded by critical theory darlings such as Walter Benjamin, Melanie Klein, Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Sigmund Freud. The final chapter, on Freud, is particularly guilty of such wandering. Ultimately, this means The Force of Nonviolence is not a moral or political manual for change but a sometimes abstract treatise. However, the book’s insights might find currency in the public sphere. Butler’s seminal text Gender Trouble (1990) certainly shrugged off similar issues of inaccessibility to achieve widespread recognition.

The Force of Nonviolence exists at the ‘crosscurrents where moral and political philosophy meet’. It is a text with a vision for another kind of world, one that refuses to take refuge in the comfort of moral platitudes. Still, Butler concedes that ‘non-violence is not an absolute principle but the name of an ongoing struggle’. This represents a forthright acknowledgment of the ‘fundamental political and ethical ambiguities’ that render the task of distinguishing violence from non-violence fraught with difficulty. Such problems are compounded by powerful states distorting the meaning of violence for their own ends, to stifle dissent. Butler remains undeterred, constructing an ethos of non-violence from the building blocks of equality, albeit via some theoretical detours.