It is of utmost importance to examine how dominant societal opinions judge the morality, usefulness, and applicability of violence and nonviolence respectively. These issues are more than just exercises in abstract theorizing, they are of seminal practical importance to activists and provide valuable guidelines about how to fight oppression and how to work towards a more just and nonviolent society. I will try to illustrate this claim by presenting Michel Foucault's concept of discourse in a langauge that is, hopefully, accessible to readers who do not have a philosophical background. In one of his early lectures at the College de France, the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault presented discourses or discursive practices as mechanisms that set the boundaries to our thought processes. In any society, no matter how democratic, there is always a process of exclusion going on.
Some ideas prevail over others.
Some actions are considered legitimate and moral, some not. Although for us the boundaries between them seems objective, they are in fact arbitrary and in constant flux. It is the existing dominant discourse, the most widely accepted way of looking at the world, that decides through what lenses we look at the environment that surrounds us. Dominant discourses not only influence the way we look at the world, they also construct it. Practices of domination and patterns of conflict are not immutable facts of life.