Police Violence. Between Sovereignty and Contingency, in Democracia & Felix Trautmann (dir.), We Protect you from Yourselves . The Politics of Policing, Madrid : Brumaria, 2018.

Fabien Jobard

Among the academics, police is defined as one of the institutions in charge of the “monopoly of legitimate violence”, following then the definition of the state given by the German social scientist Max Weber. The central part of this definition is not that much the term “violence”, which is often linked with imaginaries of destruction, fear, unilateral power. The attributive adjective is the very centre of the German sociologist’s authoritative sentence: “legitimate”. What is a “legitimate violence” and to what consequences is leading such an oxymoron, such an apparent contradiction as far as police are concerned?