“There is no way to name something as either violence or nonviolence without at once invoking
the framework in which that designation makes sense. That may seem like a form of relativism—what you call violence, I do not call violence, and so on—but it is something quite different. In Benjamin’s view, legal violence regularly renames its own violent character as justifiable coercion or legitimate force, thereby sanitizing the violence at stake. Benjamin documents what happens to terms such as “violence” and “nonviolence” once we understand that the frameworks within which these definitions are secured are oscillating. He remarks that a legal regime that seeks to monopolize violence must call every threat or challenge to that regime a “violent” one. Hence, it can rename its own violence as necessary or obligatory force, even as justifiable coercion, and because it works through the law, as the law, it is legal and hence justified.”