Sometimes violent actions, ranging from their use as a method of resolving interpersonal conflicts to geopolitical relations, may be justified by resorting to the so-called concept of a preemptive strike. In this way, violence is equated with self-defense, since the victim of the attack is allegedly the aggressor themselves, intending to carry out an attack and certainly would have done so if a preemptive strike had not been delivered. In practice, this line of thinking can easily be seen in conflict situations where, for example, violence was used in response to purely verbal threats. It is even more evident in cases where some threat of a future attack was presented as a justified reason for starting wars.
Of course, there are no preemptive strikes as a separate category of aggression, and certainly not as a form of self-defense. A certain “preemptiveness” in this case is exactly the same kind of justification as any other possible justification for violence; it in no way makes a specific instance of its use something else, qualitatively different from other cases. Certainly, if there were immediate threats of violence or a real attempt to attack, then responsive force measures can be called self-defense. But if there was no such thing, then we are dealing precisely with a violent attack, and everything else is simply speculation, invented to justify one’s violence to others.
