Slavoj Žižek’s Violence is not an easy book, but one of its central ideas made me look at political violence differently. When we see a riot, a terrorist attack, a building burning or somebody throwing stones at the police, we immediately recognise violence. Žižek calls this subjective violence because there is a visible act, an identifiable perpetrator and usually an identifiable victim.

But Žižek asks us not to become so absorbed by the violence in front of us that we fail to look at what was already happening in the background. He calls this objective violence: violence that can be contained within the normal economic, political and social functioning of society. There may be no burning cars or smashed windows, yet people may be experiencing poverty, inequality, exclusion, discrimination or political repression.

This is what I find powerful in Žižek. We normally think of violence as something that disturbs normality. He asks us to consider whether normality itself can contain violence. His deliberately provocative statement that “sometimes, doing nothing is the most violent thing to do” makes more sense from this perspective. If existing social relations continually produce suffering, leaving those relations untouched cannot automatically be considered a neutral position.

Žižek goes even further. If by violence we mean a radical upheaval of basic social relations, he provocatively suggests that some historical monsters who slaughtered millions were, in another sense, “not violent enough”. He obviously does not mean that they should have killed more people. His point is that enormous physical destruction can occur without fundamentally transforming the social relations that supposedly made radical change necessary. Killing people and transforming society are not the same thing.

I find Žižek convincing up to this point, but it leaves me with another question. What happens between objective and subjective violence? If economic inequality, political neglect or social exclusion creates resentment, what determines where that resentment is eventually directed?

Recent racial disorder in Northern Ireland made me think about this. We can examine deprived communities and ask whether people feel economically abandoned, whether housing and public services have deteriorated, or whether sections of the working class believe government no longer represents them. These may be genuine grievances. But economic deprivation cannot by itself explain why somebody attacks the home of an ethnic minority or labels a person an immigrant simply because of the colour of their skin.

A person who believes that life is becoming worse still needs an explanation for why it is becoming worse. This is where politics, ideology and media become important. Different political movements can offer completely different explanations for the same suffering. They can direct resentment towards government, economic structures, immigration, religion, race or another identifiable group. Material conditions may help create the grievance, but they do not automatically tell people whom to blame.

Social media has made this process even more complicated. During the disorder in Britain in 2024, Elon Musk declared that “civil war is inevitable.” It would be wrong to claim that such a statement caused the violence. But it is reasonable to ask what happens when someone with enormous influence presents social conflict not as something politics might resolve, but as an inevitable confrontation. Words do not merely describe the political atmosphere; they can also become part of how people interpret it.

This question reminds me of experiences from my time in India. The mobilisation around Ayodhya was experienced by many Hindus as cultural and religious revival, while for many Muslims the same mobilisation could carry a very different meaning: anxiety, fear and exclusion. Later, while travelling through the tribal areas of northern Sabarkantha around the period of the 2002 Gujarat violence, I remember seeing communal slogans effectively telling minorities to go to Pakistan. What disturbed me was not simply the hostility of those words, but what they were doing politically: turning people who belonged to India into imagined outsiders.

This mechanism does not belong exclusively to the political right or left, to one religion or another, or to majority or minority communities. Human beings can have genuine grievances and still be persuaded to misunderstand their causes. Throughout history, political movements of very different kinds have tried to give suffering an explanation, identify who is responsible and persuade people that their interests are threatened by somebody else.

This is where I think we need to take Žižek’s question one stage further. Looking behind the burning building for poverty, inequality or political exclusion is necessary, but it is not sufficient. We also need to examine the interpretation of grievance. Who explained the suffering? What explanation did they offer? How was it communicated and repeated? When did an individual become representative of an entire community? And who gained politically when that interpretation was accepted?

This is also where my recent reading of Hobbes becomes relevant. Hobbes describes how experience leaves memories, how we recognise signs from previous experience and how those signs shape our expectations about what may happen next. But he also reminds us that such expectations are presumptions, not knowledge of the future. That should make us particularly suspicious whenever anyone tells us that conflict, collapse or even civil war has become inevitable.

Perhaps, then, there are three questions worth asking whenever political violence appears on our screens. We should ask who committed the violence, because individual responsibility matters. We should ask what conditions existed before it, because Žižek is right that the visible act may not be the beginning of the story. But there is another question between the two that we too easily overlook.

If there was genuine anger behind the violence, who taught the angry person where to throw the stone?