To paraphrase the famous science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, the source of true power for a nation is the ability to get your way without having to resort to violence. Few observations better capture the crisis of our time. Across continents, leaders increasingly confuse coercion with strength, fear with authority, and destruction with victory. Yet, history repeatedly demonstrates the opposite: violence may compel submission for a moment, but it rarely produces legitimacy, stability, or lasting success and peace.
The political philosopher Hannah Arendt made this distinction with great clarity. In her seminal work, On Violence, Arendt argued that power and violence are not the same thing. Genuine power emerges from consent, collective legitimacy, and the willingness of people to act together. Violence, by contrast, appears when power has already begun to erode. “Power and violence are opposites,” she wrote. “Where one rules absolutely, the other is absent.” In other words, regimes resort to violence precisely when they can no longer persuade.
Bangladesh’s recent history offers a painful illustration. The regime of Sheikh Hasina relied increasingly on coercion to maintain control: enforced disappearances, intimidation of critics, suppression of dissent, politicisation of institutions, and repeated crackdowns on opposition movements. For years, these tactics appeared effective. Fear silenced many voices. Elections lost credibility. Public institutions weakened under partisan interventions.
But violence did not strengthen the state; it weakened it. A government may suppress opposition temporarily, but it cannot indefinitely suppress public resentment, institutional decay, and the gradual collapse of trust. The very dependence on coercion revealed the political weakness of an inability to command voluntary legitimacy. Ultimately, violence could not protect Hasina or save her regime, because the lid of the boiling pot of accumulated resentment flew open, causing a mass uprising after the so-called election of 2024.
Had Arendt been alive, she would have recognised the pattern immediately. Violence can destroy power, she argued, but it cannot consolidate it. Once rulers become dependent on force, they enter a vicious cycle: the more violence they use, the weaker their legitimacy becomes; and the weaker their legitimacy is, the more violence they require.
The same logic now shapes global politics everywhere. In terms of the Middle East, Israeli and US policymakers appear to have increasingly embraced a worldview rooted in raw coercion, one influenced by simplistic readings of ancient power politics. A recent opinion piece by Lydia Polgreen in The New York Times argues that senior officials in Washington invoked the Greek historian Thucydides to justify confrontation and domination while fundamentally misunderstanding his deeper warnings about hubris, fear, and strategic overreach.
The so-called Thucydides Trap—the idea that rising and established powers are destined to be in conflict—has become fashionable among geopolitical hawks. But the lesson from Thucydides is often dangerously misunderstood: that force is inevitable and, therefore, preferable. In reality, Thucydides chronicled how fear, arrogance, and the pursuit of domination pushed Athens and Sparta into catastrophic war.
The consequences of such thinking are visible today. Military escalation in the Middle East has produced catastrophic human suffering while solving few underlying political problems. Bombing campaigns may demonstrate destructive capacity, but they rarely create durable peace or democratic legitimacy. The US should have learned it from Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel, unfortunately, continues to demonstrate it tragically. Violence often creates precisely the instability it claims to eliminate by creating enemies rather than friends.
The war in Ukraine offers perhaps the starkest contemporary example. Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion, expecting swift submission. Instead, Russia faces prolonged war, economic strain, diplomatic isolation, and mounting domestic costs. Ukraine, meanwhile, has expanded strikes deep into Russian territory, including attacks on oil infrastructure. These operations have disrupted refining capacity and inflicted serious environmental damage inside Russia.
Recent reports describe toxic smoke, oil spills, contaminated coastlines, and “black rain” falling over Russian communities after refinery strikes. The war has not only devastated Ukraine; it has brought destruction home to ordinary Russians who had once felt insulated from the conflict. More seriously, in recent times, Ukraine appears to be gaining ground on the war front.
This is the paradox of violence: it rarely remains contained. Once normalised, it expands geographically, politically, and morally. States that rely excessively on force often become trapped by it.
Even when violence achieves temporary tactical gains, it frequently fails strategically. Russia may occupy territory, but it has lost enormous international standing and long-term economic security. The US may project military might, but coercive diplomacy increasingly undermines its global credibility. Authoritarian governments may temporarily silence dissent, but repression eventually corrodes the institutions necessary for stable governance.
True power works differently. A genuinely powerful nation does not need to terrorise journalists, imprison critics, bomb civilians, or silence opposition to maintain authority. It persuades more than it coerces. It builds institutions rather than personal cults. It commands trust rather than fear.
This is why democratic legitimacy ultimately proves more resilient than authoritarian force.
Democracies certainly have their failures and hypocrisies, but systems grounded in public consent possess a regenerative capacity absent in coercive regimes. They can self-correct because they permit criticism. Violence suppresses criticism until reality itself becomes impossible to suppress.
Bangladesh now faces the choice of continuing to normalise the politics of intimidation and vengeance, or rebuilding political legitimacy through institutions, accountability, and democratic inclusion. Arendt’s warning remains urgently relevant: violence appears where power is in jeopardy. Leaders who govern primarily through fear are not displaying strength. They are revealing weakness and insecurity.
The strongest nations are not those that can inflict the greatest damage. They are those who can secure cooperation without brutality, resolve conflict without repression, and earn loyalty without violence. That is real power. We hope the ruling BNP will take note of it.
Dr Badiul Alam Majumdar is secretary at SHUJAN: Citizens for Good Governance.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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