No Justice, No Peace: The Ethics of Violent Protests

In the summer of 2020, angry citizens took to the streets of Minneapolis after a recording of the murder of George Floyd went viral. They set fire to a police station, destroyed cars and shops, and clashed with police. In the summer of 2023, violent disorder broke out across France after police killed a seventeen year-old boy. In 2011, protests spread from London across England after police murdered a young Black man during a police arrest. State authorities were quick to denounce such uprisings as callous lawlessness. Were they right? Are violent protestors unscrupulous criminals, or might their revolt be justified despite its lawlessness and the heavy costs it imposes?

In No Justice, No Peace, Avia Pasternak highlights the political nature of such protests, offering an in-depth examination of these pressing questions. Violent protestors, she argues, disrupt the peace in order to achieve justice, and to express their defiance of an unjust political order. Pasternak shows that even in liberal democracies, resorting to violence on behalf of these important goals can be necessary and proportionate. Combining empirical analysis of political oppression in contemporary states with a normative assessment of ordinary citizens’ duty to resist oppression, Pasternak asserts that violence in protest against state injustice can be permissible, while also acknowledging its key limits.

Avia Pasternak is a Professor of Political Philosophy in the University of Toronto Department of Philosophy. She previously held permanent positions at University College London and The University of Essex, and visiting positions at Stanford University and Princeton University. She earned her PhD in Politics from the University of Oxford. She is the author of Responsible Citizens, Irresponsible States (Oxford, 2021), and the co-editor of a forthcoming volume on the ethics and politics of protest.