Can violence be put into words? A question that is much more difficult than it appears at the moment of a judgement, a report or a simple narrative. As a phenomenon, violence can be depicted, it is then raw or refined, experienced directly or only in a roundabout way, it is experienced intensely or carried out at a cool distance. As an experience, however, violence is not transferable and only belongs to the person to whom it happens. Violence is therefore first of all a philosophical problem that we can approach with the help of psychological introspection, but apparently never get to its actual core.

That talking about violence presents such a difficulty is surprising given the rich body of writing that sociology and philosophy, historiography and politics have produced. Violence is a subject of the utmost seriousness and yet speaking about violence seems to face various barriers. This has not only to do with the fact that violence forms a phenomenological prism that expresses both a relational event and a structural problem. Rather, the problem goes back to the complex relationship that connects violence with the discourse about violence.

One can basically distinguish between two forms in which violence is talked about. The first possibility takes the form of a social diagnosis in which the extent of de facto violence is mapped. With the help of statistical methods, if one draws a line from the past to the present, a decrease in de facto violence could be determined. Looking at complex statistics, historical evidence and theories of civilisation, the twentieth century then receives a surprising description. This century laid the foundation for an age in which violence as a means of politics was noticeably declining, writes Steven Pinker (Pinker, 2011). The dwindling importance of violence has many sources: developmental psychology and brain physiology, education and moral theory, historical chronicles and even countable death rates all contribute to this judgement.

The other form in which we can approach violence in history and the present is the discourse on violence. While the sober analysis of historical violations relies on predictability, such as the average probability of a violent death, the discourse on violence finds itself entangled in the violence of language. It begins with the fact that it remains unclear, must remain unclear, what ‘counts’ as violence (Liebsch, 2014).