When Violence Tries to Occupy the Meaning of Power
This article examines non-violence beyond the simple refusal to use force, asking where the responsibility for non-violence should begin when weapons, prisons, law, and institutional power are distributed unequally. Through the concept of “the occupation of response,” it explores how violence can attempt to reshape a person’s understanding of power and resistance, and how liberation also means reclaiming the right to decide what kind of human being one will become while resisting oppression.
On the International Day of Non-Violence — 2 October 2026
On the International Day of Non-Violence, we should begin with a question that comes before moral instruction: who should be called upon to practice non-violence first — the human being subjected to force, or the authority that possesses the weapons, the prisons, the law, and the resources? Why does moral discourse sometimes concern itself with the limits of the oppressed person’s response before examining the structure that produced the oppression?
Non-violence loses its justice when it is applied in only one direction. If the weaker party is required to restrain its resistance while state violence is treated as an administrative measure or a matter of sovereignty, a distortion emerges that can be called “asymmetrical non-violence”: intense scrutiny of the victim’s hand, coupled with an implicit exemption for the hand that possesses the organized capacity to inflict harm. This does not justify violence by the oppressed; it restores responsibility to where it first belongs.
In Ahwaz, this question is not a philosophical exercise. Since the independent Arab rule of Ahwaz was overthrown by military force in 1925 and Iranian occupation was imposed upon the country, the Ahwazi Arab people have lived within a coercive relationship that has not relied on direct force alone. Across different cases and periods, UN mechanisms and human rights organizations have referred to arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, allegations of torture and coerced confessions, denial of fair-trial guarantees, and executions. They have also documented longstanding injustices involving discrimination and economic and cultural rights. These realities need no exaggeration to be grave. Nor do they place the Ahwazi under accusation; they reveal who monopolizes the instruments of coercion and who bears their effects.
The model of violence administered by the authorities of the Iranian occupation has not stopped at the borders of Ahwaz. It has extended through military support, networks of influence, and armed groups across arenas in the Arab Mashreq and the Red Sea. Nor has the effect of weapons been merely physical. Sectarian identity has been used across the region for mobilization, polarization, and the construction of loyalties that cross state boundaries. A fundamental correction is necessary here: sectarianism is not inherent in Arab nature, nor is it a culture latent within the Arab human being. It is a political process that can be produced by different authorities and forces when they turn religious difference into fear, fear into loyalty, and loyalty into an instrument of influence. Holding the Iranian authorities responsible for the armed forces they have supported, the sectarianization they have fuelled, and the erosion of state authority to which they have contributed does not require us to claim every cause of the tragedy as part of that responsibility or reduce it to a single actor. Precision does not diminish the crime; it prevents the actor from escaping through the opening created by exaggeration.
Violence has layers, and they do not all become visible at the same moment. It may be direct, striking the body; structural, operating through institutions and the distribution of rights and opportunities; or cultural, giving coercion a language that justifies it and makes it appear natural. When a human being lives for a long time under a real threat, the effects may extend to trust, the sense of control, the perception of danger, memory, the construction of meaning, and social relationships. The word “may” is essential here: violence has effects, but it does not inevitably determine what follows. The victim is not condemned to become a copy of the perpetrator, and the transmission of violence’s effects to the victim does not transfer responsibility to the victim. The effects fall upon the victim; responsibility remains with those who created, exercised, and sustained the violence.
But between injury to the body and the reshaping of the space within which resistance itself is understood lies another level, one that needs a more precise name. I call it “the occupation of response.”
The occupation of response is the attempt by prolonged power to narrow the space within which a human being imagines the meaning of power and the forms resistance can take, until the instruments used to oppress him begin to appear to him as the only possible instruments with which to answer that oppression. Violence then does more than determine what it does to a human being; it attempts to determine what that human being can imagine as possible action: cruelty begins to look like resolve, eliminating those who are different like victory, branding others as traitors like awareness, mercy like weakness, and imposing one’s will like the only meaning of power.
This concept does not say that the Ahwazi Arab people have become violent, nor does it turn the victim into the accused. It describes a deeper objective of coercive power: to make its language the only language in which the oppressed can imagine liberation. From this, the following law can be formulated:
“Violence does not reach the height of its power when it forces a human being into submission; it does so when it makes him imagine power in the language taught to him by those who oppressed him.”
This is why I propose that we understand non-violence at a level deeper than merely refraining from harming an opponent. Non-violence is the liberation of the human being from violence’s capacity to reproduce itself through him. It is the recovery of human sovereignty over one’s own response, so that the violence of an adversary does not decide what kind of human being one will become.
This sovereignty is neither silence nor submission. A human being can refuse, organize, protest, engage in civil disobedience, withdraw cooperation from an unjust structure, document, pursue legal action, build institutions, protect language, memory, and identity, and demand freedom and self-determination. Organized non-violent action can broaden participation, devise instruments of pressure, and separate authority from some of the sources of its power. Non-violence, in this sense, is not the extinguishing of resistance; it is the liberation of resistance from the model the occupier seeks to impose upon it.
From Ahwaz emerges a standard that applies to humanity and to the United Nations: do not ask only the human being subjected to force, “Did you resist without violence?” Ask first, “Was the structure governing that person’s life itself non-violent?” Under international human rights law, states have obligations to respect, protect, and fulfil rights. Does the state use law to protect the human being or to subjugate him? Are its armed institutions subjected to the same accountability demanded of the protester? A state does not become non-violent merely by calling its violence law, and any policy of non-violence that does not begin by holding accountable the actor with the greatest capacity to produce harm remains incomplete.
Dismantling the Iranian occupation in Ahwaz does not mean ending its authority over the land alone; it also means dismantling what it has attempted to implant in the human being’s understanding of himself, and recovering language, memory, trust, and the capacity for organized action. We do not ask the oppressed to remain silent in the name of non-violence. We do not make the violence of the stronger party an exception to its standard. And we do not allow violence to achieve its final victory by reproducing its logic within the human being who resists it.
Occupation may be able to constrict a human being’s life and choices, but it must not possess the last space within him: his right to define the meaning of power. Liberation is not complete when a human being merely regains the ability to resist those who oppressed him; it is complete when he also regains the right to decide what kind of human being he will be while resisting them.
— Hamid Shayea Al-Ahwazi —
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2 October 2026