On the monopoly of violence: Ideal types of settler colonial violence and the habitus of sumud

On a spring evening in May 2021, in the city of Lydd, children played among the ashes of burned homes. They spoke casually of stun grenades, Molotov cocktails, and the M16 rifles carried by Jewish settlers who had attacked their neighborhood the night before. To an outside observer, the scene might have appeared surreal – children rehearsing the vocabulary of war as if it were the language of a video game. To Palestinian citizens of Israel, it felt chillingly familiar.

This moment, recounted by the Palestinian feminist activist Samah Salaime, captures more than an eruption of communal violence. It exposes a deeper political condition – one in which violence is neither accidental nor exceptional, but woven into the fabric of state power itself. In this sense, the events of May 2021 were not an anomaly but a revelation: a fleeting moment when the scaffolding of Israel’s settler colonial order became visible all at once.

Political sociology, however, has long struggled to see such moments clearly.

For more than a century, sociologists have relied on Max Weber’s canonical definition of the modern state as the entity that successfully claims a monopoly over the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Arendt, Bhambra, and Mamdani show how colonialism and imperialism reshape the metropole, while Steinmetz, using a Bourdieusian lens, treats the colonial state as a distinct field with its own practices. Still, those insights do not fully capture a state built on permanent settlement and dispossession.

Weber’s state theory and Bourdieu’s field approach can be sharpened by the settler colonial paradigm, but only if they account for a different logic of authority. In a settler colonial state, the binding force of sovereignty is not simply law or coercion; it is the ongoing preservation of settler supremacy against internal and external challenges. This requires repeated frontierization, the continual remaking of territory through “biospatial” tactics that demarcate, control, and ascribe meaning to space.

In this logic, violence is not occasional or exceptional; it is structural, embedded in bureaucracy, zoning, citizenship, and the allocation of rights. A settler state’s “statist capital” is partly constituted by enduring dispossession, and its claim to legitimate violence extends to expropriation, plunder, displacement, ethnic cleansing, and liquidation. The state’s authority is reinforced by a civil society of citizen-settlers, whose participation turns domination into everyday life.

Marcel Mauss’s notion of the “total social fact” helps explain how settler colonialism permeates political, economic, cultural, and institutional life simultaneously. Violence under settler colonialism exists along a spectrum – from assimilation to elimination – and the intersections between these forms reveal the system’s internal logic.

Seen through this lens, Israel/Palestine illustrates how a single settler colonial formation can produce distinct patterns of domination in different territories. Inside the 1949 borders, in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza, varied mechanisms of control operate with a shared aim: preserving settler sovereignty. These patterns can be mapped as distinct “ideal types” of settler colonial violence, each shaped by geography, population, and political stakes.

Violence here is cumulative. It settles into law and zoning, into borders and permits, into citizenship regimes and their exclusions. Over time, it becomes less visible precisely because it has become ordinary.

Settler colonialism is not a singular policy or a discrete historical episode. It is a social formation that permeates every domain of life – political, economic, cultural, spatial, and affective. It is enacted through bureaucratic procedures as much as through guns; through zoning laws as much as through military checkpoints. Its power lies precisely in this simultaneity: the capacity to govern through paperwork and violence at once.

Nor is this formation seamless. It is riddled with contradictions, competing interests, and moments of crisis. Settler colonialism unfolds dialectically, shaped not only by the ambitions of the settler state but also by the persistent presence of indigenous resistance. Its patterns repeat, but never mechanically; they adapt, fracture, and reassemble in response to struggle.

Seen up close, settler colonialism is not a unified or self-identical process. It is composed of manifold agents, desires, and mechanisms, unfolding through contingency rather than design. What appears coherent from a distance reveals itself, in practice, as a shifting assemblage of institutions, actors, and improvisations.

Israel offers a particularly sharp lens through which to observe these dynamics – not because it is exceptional, but because it condenses within a single political formation many of the logics that structure settler colonial projects elsewhere.

Across historic Palestine, Israel has developed distinct modes of governance, calibrated to different populations and geographies. These modes amount to four ideal types of settler colonial violence.

Within Israel’s 1949 armistice borders, Palestinian citizens live under a regime of racialized citizenship. Formally included in the polity, they remain subject to discriminatory laws, systematic land dispossession, and episodic militarization. The military rule imposed on Palestinian citizens from 1948 to 1966 set the template: citizenship without sovereignty, inclusion without protection. Events such as the 1956 Kafr Qasim massacre, Land Day in 1976, and the police killings of October 2000 punctuate this history, revealing how quickly citizens can be reclassified as internal enemies.

East Jerusalem operates under a different logic. Palestinians there are permanent residents, not citizens – integrated into certain bureaucratic systems while perpetually vulnerable to displacement. Settler organizations, backed by courts and municipal authorities, pursue a slow, juridical form of ethnic cleansing, one eviction at a time. The separation wall, erected in the early 2000s, intensified this regime by fragmenting neighborhoods and depoliticizing collective claims.

In the West Bank, Palestinians are stateless subjects of military occupation. Here, violence is administered through a dense assemblage of army units, civil administration offices, settler councils, and private militias. Settlements now exercise direct or indirect control over roughly forty percent of the territory. Settler attacks on Palestinian farmers and shepherds – often conducted in broad daylight and in the presence of soldiers – have become routine.

Gaza stands apart, yet remains integral to the whole. Since 2007, Israel has subjected the strip to siege, enclosure, and infrastructural domination, controlling borders, airspace, water, electricity, and population registries. Gaza’s residents are governed at a distance, reduced to what Giorgio Agamben termed “bare life.” Since October 7, 2023, this regime has escalated into mass killing and destruction on a scale that many scholars describe as genocidal.

Across these sites, the objective is consistent: In Israel, the variegated symbolic and material mechanisms of settler colonialism share the common objective of eliminating the native from desired space, ensuring the permanence of settler sovereignty.

One of the most unsettling claims concerns the state’s monopoly on violence – or, more precisely, its strategic dilution. In settler colonial contexts, the monopoly on legitimate violence is not centralized but shared. Citizen-settlers are not merely beneficiaries of state power; they are among its most reliable agents.

From the early Zionist militias to contemporary armed settlers and civilian guards, non-state actors have played a central role in territorial conquest and control. This is not lawlessness but a sanctioned disorder: a system in which violence is formally disavowed yet practically endorsed, outsourced without ever being disowned.

Settler-citizens have been actively sharing this monopoly. In the West Bank, this sharing is literal. Settlers attack Palestinians, torch fields, seize livestock, and erect outposts, often in full view of the army. When violence escalates, it is Palestinians who are arrested, while settlers enjoy near-total impunity. Even within Israel proper, Jewish civilians are increasingly armed and deputized in the name of “governance” and security.

After the May 2021 uprising, national guard units were expanded and thousands of firearms distributed to civilians. Following October 7, 2023, more than 100,000 new gun licenses were approved. The distinction between citizen and combatant – never stable in a settler society – blurred almost entirely.

The events of May 2021 marked a rupture. Triggered by threatened evictions in Sheikh Jarrah and police incursions at Al-Aqsa, the unrest spread rapidly – from East Jerusalem to Gaza, from the West Bank to Israel’s so-called mixed cities. For eleven days, Palestinians across fragmented legal and geographic categories acted in concert.

“The Dignity Intifada”, represented the contiguity in a single moment of the colonization process against all Palestinians. In cities like Lydd, Acre, and Jaffa, Jewish mobs attacked Palestinian homes and businesses while police stood aside or joined in. The state responded with “Operation Law and Order,” arresting over two thousand people – 91 percent of them Palestinian.

Yet amid the violence, something else emerged. Emergency committees formed. Mutual aid networks sprang into action. Lawyers camped in courthouses. Artists, activists, and ordinary residents organized night watches and food distribution. What appeared was not chaos, but an alternative social order –fragile, improvised, and defiant.

Settler colonial rule is sustained through a permanent state of emergency. Legal norms are suspended not temporarily but structurally. Rights are granted conditionally and withdrawn selectively. The law operates not as a shield but as a weapon.

After October 7, 2023, this emergency intensified. Palestinian speech was criminalized. Public figures were arrested for posts or silences deemed suspect. Jewish Israeli citizens began monitoring colleagues and neighbors, reporting them to authorities. Violence extended beyond bodies to thoughts.

In Gaza, the emergency reached its extreme form. Access to food, water, medicine, and shelter became matters of sovereign discretion. Life itself was rationed.

And yet, despair never quite settles. Against the machinery of settler colonial violence stands a historically cultivated Palestinian disposition: sumud – steadfastness. Not passive endurance, but an embodied repertoire of survival, care, and resistance. Theirs is a habitus of sumud, wherein they accumulate – through their daily interactions – embodied knowledge structures for negotiating with quotidian violences.

Sumud takes many forms. It appears in popular protest and legal advocacy, in mutual aid and professional solidarity, in the refusal to be atomized by fear. It is sustained by memory and reactivated in crisis.

During the May 2021 arrests, Palestinian women lawyers in Haifa worked day and night to free detainees. “You will not break us,” one of them said. It was not a slogan. It was a method.

This intervention ultimately forces a rethinking of the state itself. In settler colonial formations, violence is not monopolized but distributed; sovereignty is not singular but networked; legitimacy is asserted through force rather than consent.

Yet domination is never complete. The persistence of Palestinian resistance – material, symbolic, and affective – continually exposes the arbitrariness of power. Attending to these dynamics is not only a way of sharpening sociology, but also of recognizing hope as a political practice rather than a moral abstraction.

In settler colonial states, the struggle is not only over land and life, but over the meaning of the state itself – and over who it is ultimately allowed to serve.