Existential Risk and Political Violence

Political violence is shocking. Everyone should be grateful for this fact, for a world in which political violence is not shocking is a world in which political violence is common. It is not by accident that most people alive today do not live in such a world. We must remember that political violence is rare today only because humanity has discovered, after long processes of trial and error, certain strategies for preventing it. The strategies we have discovered rest on shared assumptions about the state of the world. If the world changes in particular ways, the strategies we currently depend on will lose their efficacy, and political violence may drastically increase. The Old Tools All successful strategies for preventing political violence necessarily fall into one of two categories.  The first category contains strategies intended to raise, from the perspective of would-be perpetrators, the costs associated with committing an act of political violence. All strategies belonging to this category take the form of a credible threat. A state that can credibly impose a cost of death or imprisonment on individuals who commit acts of political violence will prevent all individuals unwilling to pay such a cost from committing such acts. The threats made by states today are more credible than ever, given the extent of modern surveillance technologies. As a result, political violence is far less common than it was even fifty years ago.  The second category contains strategies intended to reduce the benefits accrued by perpetrators of political violence. In the United States, where I live, three such strategies have enjoyed great success: 1) Unlike other global superpowers, the U.S. has succession protocols which align the ideological commitments of its head of state with those of their potential successors.[1] As a result of this, assassination (the quintessential form of political violence) is generally ineffective at changing the direction of governmental power. 2) T