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This paper explores why new ways of "knowing" and acting on violence could lead to a reconsideration of Weber's pessimistic coupling of politics and violence. This coupling remains hugely influential almost a century after it was formulated. It has become possible to revisit it, firstly, because of the potential for new interdisciplinary conversations. These have opened up ways of understanding violence as a properly social phenomenon and the significance of our vulnerable, social bodies to its reproduction. Secondly, social action on violence has led to recognition as "violence" of varied acts of somatic harm previously not named as such. In the process, expressions of violence reproduced over time and through spaces of socialization (from the intimate to the construction of the nation state) are socially and politically de-sanctioned. Politics and the State could be reconceptualised as essential for reducing (rather than monopolizing) violence and creating conditions to live together without it.

ABSTRACTThis article is about the alternative forms of power emerging in contemporary activism. It conceptualizes this new form of power as 'non‐dominating', and puts forward six propositions which characterize this form of power. It builds on work about power with eight diverse communities in the North of England, to argue that this form of power does exist in practice at the neighbourhood level, even though it is not articulated as such. While neighbourhood activists have difficulty in making this form of power effective, at the level of the 'square' and global activism, new understandings and practices of power are under conscious experimentation. This contribution therefore suggests that better connections need to be built between these levels of activism. At the same time, non‐dominating power should be recognized as enhancing the debate about effective and transformative change and how it can avoid reproducing dominating power.