There has been a long-running debate in societies around the world whenever issues or protests arise that question our way of life and our value judgements: is violence justified when seeking justice?

That debate has been rekindled by the deaths or injuries suffered by black men at the hands of US police in recent months, and the subsequent violent response. Systemic racial injustice following generations of failure to deal with or even acknowledge the problem has become a political issue. It seems like the elephant in the room was not only in plain view, but was being well fed and watered.

In a more generalised context, the unrest has raised the question of whether violence can ever be a legitimate tool in the quest for justice, particularly when that quest is denied or goes unanswered?

Those who wanted to condemn violence and rioting during protests quoted him as saying “I will always continue to say, that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating,” while those who wished to justify rioting quoted him as saying “a riot is the language of the unheard.”

Every protest movement must decide which “weapons” it will use and how to use them effectively. If it chooses violence, then it must understand that it will be met with violence and the full force of the law so that any moral advantage it might have achieved will be lost – despite, perhaps, the rightness of its cause.

In Hong Kong, this factor played out negatively for the protest movement. Even though many people still believed in the rightness of the cause, the weakness of violence allowed the government to exploit the moral and legal failure to its advantage. If the protest movement is to succeed, it must re-evaluate its “weapons” more critically and, choose those that more directly target the injustices it wishes to redress, and use them in a way that will regain large-scale public support.