Politics is essentially protocolized war.
Something unstable in it; it threatens to break out into actual war.
War itself (at least the old-fashioned kind) is already a bit protocolized; its not fullout violence but carefully planned and structured violence.
- This is a rich cluster of ideas. Here's a synthesis connecting your notes to the relevant literature:
Politics as Protocolized War
- Your framing inverts Clausewitz's famous dictum. Clausewitz said
- war is the continuation of politics by other means.
- Your idea reverses the direction: politics is the domestication of war — war first, protocols later. Politics doesn't transcend violence; it contains it, imperfectly.
- This inversion has real support.
- Tilly sees collective violence as emerging from "the ebb and flow of collective claim making and struggles for power" — violence weaves in and out of politics and cannot be separated from it.
- Politics and violence aren't opposites on a spectrum; they're co-constitutive.
The Instability: Politics Threatening to Break into War
- This is precisely Tilly's central concern.
- With collective violence we enter the terrain of contentious politics, where people make discontinuous, public, collective claims on each other. By no means all contentious politics generates violence — the problem is precisely to explain when contention takes a violent turn. But all collective violence involves contention of one kind or another.
- The protocols (laws, elections, institutions) are what hold the violent potential in check — but they are fragile.
- Tilly argues that the activation of latent political identities that separate people into "us" and "them" often triggers violence, and that violence emerges less from preexisting hatred than from sudden uncertainties and shifting social conditions, particularly the declining capacity of authorities to enforce agreements or police existing boundaries.
War Itself as Already Protocolized
- This is well-supported. Clausewitz himself distinguished between idealized total violence and actual war:
- he distinguished between "absolute war" — an idealized total clash of annihilation — and "real war," always limited by political objectives, economic resources, and social constraints.
- Even Clausewitz acknowledged the structuring of violence within war:
- he noted that "in the soldier the natural tendency for unbridled action and outbursts of violence must be subordinated to demands of a higher kind: obedience, order, rule, and method." Regulating this and defining character is the reason rules governing a military's conduct in war were created — it is the reason why the modern military employs Rules of Engagement.
- And from international law:
- war itself is not abolished — it is regulated. Aggression is prohibited, certain uses of force are illegal, but the conduct of hostilities is codified with meticulous precision.
The Spectrum
- What emerges is something like a violence-protocol continuum:
Level Form Protocol Density Raw violence Murder, riot Minimal Regulated war Conventional warfare, laws of war Moderate Politics Elections, legislation, diplomacy High
- But your core insight is that this isn't a clean ladder — it's unstable at every joint. Tilly confirms:
- the argument underscores the importance of collective action, organization, and the behavior of political brokers and violent entrepreneurs in shaping outcomes. With theoretically limitless social boundaries and grievances through which people can be divided and spurred to violence, it is these actors that actually determine when outcomes turn violent.
- The protocols don't eliminate the war-logic underneath politics — they just give it a dress code.