Violence and social justice Vittorio Bufacchi Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke, 2007, pp. xi, 218, hardcover £55.00, $32.95, ISBN: 0230552951 Contemporary Political Theory (2010) 9, 513–516. doi:10.1057/cpt.2010.13 ‘No justice, no peace’, threatens the bumper sticker and rally sign, raising in this popular form a serious question for contemporary political theory: What is the connection of violence and justice? Does injustice justify violence? Is violence, by its very nature, unjust? Vittorio Bufacchi attempts to clarify some of the conceptual puzzles surrounding our thinking about violence. Even if one demurs from some of his conclusions, the clear exposition of his liberal position makes this book a valuable contribution for political theorists trying to understand these critically important questions. Bufacchi offers a new definition of violence. He distinguishes between two common accounts of violence, which he labels the ‘minimalist approach’, which sees violence as an act of ‘intentional, excessive force’ and the ‘comprehensive approach’, in which violence is ‘a violation of rights’ (p. 26). The first of these approaches, Bufacchi argues, views violence more from the perspective of perpetrators, and the second, more from the perspective of victims. Arguing that the distinction between these two approaches is more ideological than logical, Bufacchi suggests his own alternative, as a way to provide an account of the nature of violence that ‘aspires to be universally valid’ (p. 29) and which can be seen to be from the perspective of a third-party observer. According to Bufacchi, then, violence is best understood as a ‘violation of integrity’, ‘used here in a strictly non-philosophical sense, meaning wholeness or intactness’ (p. 40). ‘An act of violence is fundamentally a violation of the integrity of the subject or object that suffers the violence, to the extent that the act of violence takes something away from the victim, therefore shattering the pre-existing psychological and/or physical unity that was in place before the violence took place’ (p. 46). For Bufacchi, this definition combines elements of both of the previous two understandings, but allows a third party to make the judgments about when violence has occurred. This allows him to identify four faces of violence: ‘when integrity is violated intentionally by means of a direct action; when integrity is violated intentionally by means of an omission; when the violation of integrity is foreseeable (even if not intended) as Book Reviews 513 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1470-8914 Contemporary Political Theory Vol. 9, 4, 508–516