Violence as the Collapse of Power: Arendt, Mao, and the Limits of the Gun

Taken, dir. Pierre Morel (EuropaCorp, 2008), promotional poster. The film encapsulates the assertion that coercive organizations mistake the capacity for violence for power, but a trained adversary fighting from genuine human connection — a father, a daughter, a relationship no threat can replicate — will dismantle them every time. As Arendt writes, “violence appears where power is in jeopardy.” The traffickers were always in jeopardy.

Why Kidnapping Your Enemy’s Daughter Is Almost Always a Bad Plan

There is a scene early in Taken, the 2008 action thriller starring Liam Neeson, that most viewers experience as pure setup: bad guys take the girl, good guy goes to get her back. Simple. Satisfying. Pass the popcorn.

But watch it again through the Arendtian lens, and something more interesting emerges. The Albanian trafficking network that abducts Kim Mills does not just make a moral error. It makes a structural one — a mistake so fundamental that their defeat is essentially guaranteed from the moment they take her. They confuse violence for power. And if Hannah Arendt, one of the twentieth century’s most important political thinkers, were watching from the couch beside you, she would nod slowly and say: of course they lost. Snub out her cigarette: They never had power to begin with.

This essay uses Taken as a window into one of the most importan, and most consistently misunderstood, distinctions in political philosophy: the difference between power and violence. Along the way, we will reckon with Mao Zedong’s famous insistence that political power stems from the barrel of a gun, draw on what communication studies tells us about why threats only work until they don’t, and arrive at a conclusion that is both philosophically serious and, frankly, useful the next time someone tries to hold something over you.

What the Traffickers Actually Built

Let’s start with the villains, because Arendt would.

The Albanian trafficking network in Taken is, on the surface, formidable. It operates across international borders. It has corrupted French law enforcement. It moves human beings through layers of intermediaries , scouts at the airport, handlers in apartments, buyers at auctions, with apparent efficiency. It has money, reach, and a demonstrated willingness to kill. By any conventional measure, this looks like an organization with power.

But look more carefully at what holds it together. Every relationship within the network is coercive. The women it traffics are held by force. The low-level operatives comply out of fear or financial desperation. The corrupt police offer their cooperation because they have been bought or threatened. There is not a single person in the entire structure who is there because they believe in something, who would show up if the money stopped or the threat was removed, who has any genuine stake in the organization’s survival beyond their own immediate self-interest.

This is not a minor detail. It is the entire ballgame.

Hannah Arendt, in her 1970 work *On Violence*, draws a distinction that cuts right to the heart of what we are watching. Power, she argues, is not the ability to compel. It is the ability to act collectively, “the human ability not just to act but to act in concert.” Real power belongs to a group and exists only as long as that group genuinely coheres. It is built from shared belief, mutual investment, and willing participation. Violence, by contrast, is what you use when you do not have any of that. It can produce compliance. It cannot produce cohesion. And compliance without cohesion is a house of cards.

The trafficking network is a house of cards. Bryan Mills is the wind.

The Moment the Threat is Gone, So Is the Compliance

Here is the thing about threatening someone into doing what you want: it works exactly as long as they believe you can follow through and have no better option. The instant either of those conditions changes, you have nothing.

Communication scholars call this the coercion problem, and it maps precisely onto what we watch unfold across Taken’s runtime. In social influence theory, there is a foundational distinction between persuasion and coercion. Persuasion works by changing what someone believes or values. It produces what researchers call internalized compliance, or what HR professionals call “buy-in”. The person does what you want because they have genuinely come to want it too, or at least to accept it. That kind of compliance does not require you to be in the room. It does not require ongoing surveillance or the continuous application of threat. It sustains itself.

Coercion works entirely differently. It produces what theorists call situational compliance, behavior that is a direct response to an external pressure, and which evaporates when that pressure is removed. The coerced person has not changed their mind. They have changed their behavior because the cost-benefit calculation currently makes resistance too expensive. Change the calculation, and the behavior changes with it.

Every person in the trafficking network is situationally compliant. The moment Bryan Mills changes their calculation, by kicking down a door, or pressing a gun to a temple, or demonstrating that resistance costs more than cooperation, the network’s hold over them disappears. We watch this happen in real time throughout the film. Informants give him what he needs. Low-level operatives fold. The network cannot generate any coordinated, committed resistance because it has never generated any genuine loyalty. You cannot call on people to sacrifice for something they were never invested in.

Richard Emerson’s(1962) foundational work on power-dependence relations in sociology captures the mechanics precisely: the power of A over B depends entirely on B’s dependence on A, and that dependence can always be disrupted by a third party who offers B a better option, or simply removes A’s ability to follow through on the threat. Bryan Mills is that third party, systematically working through the network and reducing every dependence relationship to rubble.

Bryan Mills and What Real Power Looks Like

Bryan himself is instructive here, because he is not simply a more effective version of the traffickers. He is operating from an entirely different foundation.

What sustains Bryan through the film is not violence. He is certainly capable of violence, but so are the traffickers. What sustains him is genuine collective investment. His daughter. His history. His former colleagues who assist him, not because he threatens them, but because they have real relationships with him built over years of shared experience. His ex-wife and her husband, who are folded into the stakes of the situation despite their complicated history with Bryan. Even his own identity as a father, the thing he has been trying to rebuild throughout the film, gives him a source of motivation that no external pressure could replicate or extinguish.

Arendt would recognize this immediately. Bryan has power in her sense of the word, not because he is more violent than his enemies, but because he is acting from a web of genuine human connections and shared stakes. The traffickers can escalate their violence against him, but they cannot match his power, because power of this kind cannot be manufactured through threat. It has to be built, over time, through real relationship and mutual investment.

This is why the film’s emotional logic works even when its action logic strains credulity. We do not believe Bryan succeeds because he is a better fighter, though he is. We believe he succeeds because he has something to fight for that his enemies simply do not. The traffickers are protecting a revenue stream. Bryan is protecting his daughter. These are not equivalent motivations, and they do not produce equivalent resilience.

Was Mao Watching the Wrong Movie?

This brings us to the most famous counterargument: Mao Zedong’s 1938 declaration that “political power comes from the barrel of a gun.”

Mao was not being poetic. He was making a strategic claim in the context of the Chinese Communist revolution/civil war, arguing that a movement without state institutions or economic resources could nonetheless seize power if it controlled sufficient military force. And in a narrow historical sense, he was not wrong. The People’s Liberation Army did win. The Communists did take power.

But here is what Mao’s formulation misses, and what Taken illustrates in miniature: the gun can take something. It cannot hold something, not without eventually building the very thing it initially displaced. The trafficking network takes Kim. The gun gets her into the auction house. But holding her, and holding the entire coercive structure together, requires the continuous application of threat across every relationship in the chain. The moment that continuity is broken anywhere, the moment one scared operative decides Bryan Mills is a more pressing threat than his boss, the chain collapses.

The Communist Party of China (CPC), to its credit, understood this intuitively even while Mao was crediting the gun. Alongside military campaigns, the Party invested enormously in propaganda, civic education, land reform, and mass mobilization, all of which are, at bottom, persuasion campaigns aimed at generating genuine collective investment in the Communist project. The gun opened the door. Decades of ideological and social work tried to furnish the room. Mao’s aphorism describes how you seize power. It says nothing useful about how you keep it, because keeping it requires transitioning away from pure coercion toward something closer to Arendt’s model of collective consent, and which Mao actually wrote about, extensively.

The trafficking network in Taken makes no such transition. It stays in pure coercion mode from beginning to end, which is why it is so brittle. A criminal organization that had genuinely cultivated loyalty, that had given its members something to believe in, real stakes in the organization’s survival, would be far harder to dismantle than one held together only by threat and money. The Mafia understood this, which is why it invested in neighborhood relationships, codes of honor, and family ties. It was building, however “underclass” and subversively, something closer to Arendt’s collective than the trafficking network ever does.

“Violence Appears Where Power Is in Jeopardy”

Arendt’s most striking claim in On Violence is this: “Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance.”

Rewatching Taken with this sentence in mind and something clarifying happens. Every act of violence the trafficking network commits is not a demonstration of its power, it is a symptom of its powerlessness. Taking Kim in the first place is an act of coercion, not an act of power. Killing the friend who was with her is an attempt to eliminate a witness, to manage a situation that is already threatening to escape control. Selling the women at auction is the monetization of pure compulsion, the extraction of value from people who have been reduced to objects precisely because the network cannot generate anything from them as willing participants.

The escalating violence as Bryan works through the network follows the same pattern. Each killed operative, each burned safehouse, each failed attempt to stop him represents the network reaching deeper into its only available resource — force — to compensate for the fact that it has no other resource. It has no reservoir of genuine loyalty to call on. It has no people who will go the extra mile because they believe in what they are protecting. It has only guns and money, and Bryan Mills is systematically neutralizing both.

This is, in compressed and cinematic form, exactly what Arendt describes happening to governments that have lost their populations’ consent. They reach for riot gear. They reach for curfews. They reach for disappearances and detention. Each escalation is framed publicly as a demonstration of strength, and each one is actually a confession: the consent is gone, and all that remains is the desperate substitution of violence for the power it can never replace.

The Martyr Problem: What Happens When You Shoot the Spokesman

There is a version of this error that is less obviously villainous than running a trafficking network, and therefore more dangerous. It is the error of believing that if you could just remove the right person — the most visible, the most vocal, the most irritating spokesperson for a movement you despise — the movement itself would collapse.

Consider a figure: a prominent, polarizing commentator on the political right. Young, telegenic, institutionally connected, with a talent for translating ideological grievance into campus theatre and viral content. He is not himself a policymaker. He does not write legislation. But he is extraordinarily effective at building collective investment in a particular political identity — at making young men, in particular, feel that they belong to something, that their resentments are legitimate, that there is a movement with them in it. He is, in Arendt’s terms, helping to generate power: not his own power, but the collective power of a constituency that is learning to act in concert.

Now imagine someone decides to remove him. Physically. Permanently.

What happens?

Not what they hoped. Not even close.

Because the removal of the spokesman does not dissolve the constituency. It galvanizes it. The movement that was learning to act in concert now has a martyr — a concrete, undeniable proof that its enemies are exactly as dangerous as it always claimed. Every person who was on the fence, who found the movement a little too aggressive or a little too paranoid, now has a reason to move toward it. Every piece of rhetoric about persecution and existential threat is retroactively validated. The collective investment that the spokesman was carefully cultivating through speeches and debates and provocations is now supercharged by his death into something far more durable and far more dangerous than anything he could have built alive.

This is the martyr problem, and it is not new. The Roman state executed a preacher in Jerusalem and produced Christianity. The British Empire imprisoned a lawyer in South Africa and produced Gandhi. The FBI surveilled and harassed Martin Luther King Jr. and produced a civil rights movement whose moral authority only grew under pressure. In each case, the application of violence against a person who had genuine collective power — or was in the process of building it — did not destroy that power. It transferred it, purified it, and made it permanent.

Arendt’s framework explains exactly why. The spokesman’s power was never his alone. It belonged to the group that had invested in him, believed in him, organized around him. Resist the temptation to think this is only true for “good causes”. What’s being described here is independent of the cause and its agenda. You cannot kill a constituency. You can only give it a flag to rally around. And a martyr is the most powerful flag there is.

The person who raises a gun against a political spokesman, however certain they are of the righteousness of their cause, is not acting from power. They are acting from its absence, from the desperate recognition that the argument is not being won, that the movement is not being stopped, that persuasion has failed. They are the trafficking network, reaching for the only tool they have left. And like the trafficking network, they will find that it makes everything worse.

Why This Matters Beyond the Movie

It wouldn’t be easy to take all of this as an argument that violence never works, that the traffickers were doomed to fail and Arendt is simply correct. The picture is more complicated, and it is worth being honest about that.

Violence does work, in the short term, in specific contexts, against people who have no recourse. The trafficking network successfully operates for a long time before Bryan Mills arrives. Many coercive regimes last decades. Mao’s gun genuinely did produce a revolution. The lesson is not that violence is ineffective. The lesson is that it is structurally incapable of generating the one thing that makes any organization, institution, or government genuinely durable: the willing participation of the people within it.

Communication studies gives us the precise vocabulary for why. Internalized compliance — the kind produced by genuine persuasion, by people who have been brought to actually want what the institution wants, is self-sustaining and resilient. Situational compliance — the kind produced by coercion, requires constant maintenance, is brittle under pressure, and collapses the moment the threat calculus shifts. The trafficking network is entirely dependent on situational compliance. Bryan Mills shifts the calculus. The network dissolves.

For a contemporary audience living through an era of renewed authoritarian politics, intensifying state surveillance, and the militarization of domestic policing, this distinction is not academic. When governments display military hardware in their own streets, when they respond to protest with force rather than engagement, the instinct is to read this as power. Arendt asks us to read it as the opposite, as a sign that genuine collective consent is eroding and that those in authority are reaching for the only substitute available.

And for those on the other side of that equation, those who feel the democratic experiment slipping away and are tempted to reach for shortcuts, the lesson is the same, and equally unsparing. Removing a spokesman does not remove a movement. Silencing a voice does not dissolve a constituency. And the political violence that feels, in a moment of desperation, like the last available tool is almost always the thing that hands your opponents exactly what they needed: a story, a symbol, and a reason to act in concert that is more powerful than anything they had before.

The trafficking network had guns. They never had power. The distinction cost them everything.

Conclusion

Bryan Mills gets his daughter back. The trafficking network collapses. And the reason, underneath all the action sequences and Liam Neeson’s magnificent gravelly menace, is philosophical: you cannot build anything durable on coercion alone. You cannot govern through pure threat. You cannot hold together an organization whose members are there only because leaving is too costly. The moment someone changes the cost-benefit calculation — and someone always eventually does — everything falls apart.

The same logic applies to political violence in the real world, whether it flows from the state downward or from a desperate individual upward. Shooting the spokesman does not end the speech. It ends the argument, and the side that resorted to violence loses it, permanently, in the eyes of everyone who was still undecided.

Mao said power grows from the barrel of a gun. Arendt said violence is what you reach for when power is already gone. Taken spends ninety-three minutes dramatizing who was right.

The trafficking network had guns. They never had power. And there is all the difference in the world.

References

• Arendt, H. (1970). On Violence. Harcourt, Brace & World.
• Mao Zedong. (1938). “Problems of War and Strategy.” Speech at the Sixth Plenary Session of the Sixth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.
• Cialdini, R. B. (1984). Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Harper Collins.
• Habermas, J. (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1: Reason and the Communicative Action. Beacon Press.
• Emerson, R. M. (1962). Power-dependence relations. American Sociological Review, 27(1), 31–41.
• Aristotle. Rhetoric. (Trans. G. A. Kennedy, 2007). University of Chicago Press.
• Morel, P. (Director). (2008). Taken [Film]. EuropaCorp.
• Lukes, S. (2005). Power: A Radical View (2nd ed.). Palgrave Macmillan.
• Dahl, R. A. (1957). The concept of power. Behavioral Science, 2(3), 201–215.