When domination ceases to shock and begins to function
Introduction
Political violence does not operate solely through visible brutality, armed confrontation, or spectacular repression. In many historical and contemporary contexts, violence becomes effective precisely when it abandons excess and adopts order. Rather than erupting as an exceptional act, it settles into procedures, regulations, and administrative routines. This process, which may be described as the bureaucratization of violence, represents one of the most durable mechanisms through which domination is exercised and sustained.
Bureaucratized violence does not present itself as chaos or rupture. On the contrary, it claims legality, predictability, and normality. It is executed in the name of rules rather than passions, and justified through institutional necessity rather than ideological fervor. Understanding this transformation is essential for analyzing how systems of power endure, how responsibility is diluted, and how morally unacceptable practices come to be socially tolerated.
I. Theoretical Foundations: From Brutal Force to Rationalized Domination
The concept of bureaucratized violence draws on a long tradition of political sociology and critical theory.
Max Weber’s analysis of bureaucracy remains foundational. In Economy and Society, Weber defines bureaucracy as a system governed by written rules, hierarchical authority, and impersonal obedience. Its efficiency lies precisely in its capacity to separate action from moral judgment. The bureaucratic agent does not act out of conviction but in compliance with procedure. This formal rationality allows power to operate without requiring personal cruelty.
Hannah Arendt deepened this insight in her analysis of totalitarianism and in Eichmann in Jerusalem. She demonstrated that extreme violence can be administered by ordinary individuals who neither hate nor question, but simply execute their assigned roles. The horror, in Arendt’s account, lies not in fanaticism but in obedience emptied of reflection.
Michel Foucault further shifted attention from overt repression to the everyday mechanisms through which power is organized and normalized. In Discipline and Punish, he shows how modern power abandons spectacular punishment in favor of continuous regulation embedded in institutions. Violence, in this sense, becomes less visible but more pervasive.
Together, these perspectives reveal a central paradox: violence becomes most effective when it appears orderly.
II. Defining the Bureaucratization of Violence
The bureaucratization of violence refers to a process through which coercive practices are:
- codified within legal or administrative frameworks,
- fragmented into routine institutional tasks,
- detached from individual moral responsibility,
- normalized through repetition and procedural legitimacy.
In this configuration, violence no longer appears as an exception or abuse. It is processed as a case, a file, or an administrative decision. Harm is inflicted not through impulsive acts, but through orderly implementation. Responsibility is dispersed across offices, departments, and regulations, making accountability difficult to locate.
III. Three Empirical Illustrations
1. Nazi Germany and the Administrative Organization of Extermination
The Holocaust represents the most extensively documented case of bureaucratized violence.
As shown in Raul Hilberg’s seminal work The Destruction of the European Jews, genocide was not only the product of ideological hatred but of an elaborate administrative apparatus. Jews were identified through censuses, classified through legal definitions, stripped of citizenship, transported through meticulously organized railway systems, and dispossessed through formal economic procedures.
Each participant performed a limited function: drafting regulations, scheduling trains, managing property records. Few were directly involved in killing. Yet the cumulative effect of these administrative acts was mass extermination. Violence was rendered efficient precisely because it was organized, compartmentalized, and routinized.
2. Apartheid South Africa and Legalized Structural Violence
The apartheid regime in South Africa offers a different but equally instructive example.
Racial domination was enforced not only through police repression but through an extensive legal framework governing residence, employment, education, and movement. Laws such as the Group Areas Act and the pass laws regulated everyday life in minute detail. These regulations did not necessarily kill, but they systematically deprived millions of people of dignity, opportunity, and security.
Violence was embedded in legal norms. It appeared as administrative necessity rather than coercion. Officials enforcing these laws often perceived themselves as neutral executors of policy, not as agents of oppression. This normalization allowed apartheid to persist for decades with a veneer of legality.
3. Contemporary Regimes and the Regulation of Exclusion
In several contemporary contexts, violence is bureaucratized through regulatory systems that institutionalize exclusion without constant physical repression.
Restrictions on access to education, employment, healthcare, or public space may be imposed through decrees, permits, and administrative requirements. These measures often target specific groups while maintaining a formal appearance of order and legality. The harm inflicted is cumulative rather than spectacular, producing long-term social and psychological damage.
Because such practices are dispersed across institutions and justified through official language, they are difficult to contest. Violence becomes a condition of governance rather than a visible act of force.
IV. Political and Social Consequences
The bureaucratization of violence produces several enduring effects:
- it weakens resistance by eliminating clear moments of rupture,
- it relieves agents of moral responsibility by binding them to procedure,
- it exhausts victims through continuous administrative pressure,
- it transforms injustice into a stable social environment.
Over time, institutions lose their protective function and become instruments of domination. What was once intolerable becomes routine.
Conclusion
The bureaucratization of violence is among the most dangerous forms of modern domination, not because it is excessive, but because it is orderly. It does not rely on chaos, but on routine; not on passion, but on regulation. It presents itself as governance rather than brutality.
Recognizing this process allows analysis to move beyond cultural or psychological explanations and toward a structural understanding of power. The most enduring violence is often not that which shocks, but that which quietly functions.
References
- Weber, Max. Economy and Society.
- Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem; The Origins of Totalitarianism.
- Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish.
- Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews.
- Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust.