In this essay, Ruth Kinna and Simon Stevens discuss their article Anarchism: war, violence and scapegoating - an analysis of power, violence and government irresponsibility. They talk about issues that inspired the article and the central claim, namely that violence does not turn solely on its performance, but on the embrace of an ethic of violence that empowers transgressive action without necessarily exposing law breakers to the punishing violence of the state. 

Ruth Kinna is a political theorist and member of the Anarchism Research Group at Loughborough University. She is the author of The Government of No One. Her co-authored book with Alex Prichard (Exeter) Constitutionalising Anarchy is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. 

Simon Stevens is a political philosopher and member of the methods in Normative Political Theory Group (ECPR). His research lies in normative political theory, with particular interests in democratic theory, political methodology, and public political philosophy. He has published on civil disobedience, homelessness, epistemic authority, and marginalisation in journals including Contemporary Political Theory, Theoria, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, and the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. He is the author of Political Theory: Why Big Ideas Matter (SAGE, 2025) and has published recent work on [https://doi:10.1017/pub.2025.10079]public political philosophy, moral sentimentalism, and live action roleplay in the Public Humanities journal published by Cambridge University Press.

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