Introduction: The politics of violence - Modalities, frames and functions

Abstract

In these days when terrorists, insurgents and militants have replaced freedom fighters, jacqueries and anarchists among the first order of public enemies, when wars on all kinds of terror have become ubiquitous elements of everyday political life, it is worth taking a step back to consider and evaluate the nature, roots, meanings and consequences of political violence. As the chapters that follow show, we do not seek in this volume to “explain” political violence, but to understand it better: when, where and why it is found, and the interaction between violent and non-violent politics. A consciously interdisciplinary framework enables this wide-ranging sweep, even if empirically our coverage cannot possibly be fully comprehensive. Understanding or evaluating political violence requires diverse methods and lenses, from close ethnographic readings to more macrolevel historical and social scientific analyses. A deep debate among anthropologists, political scientists and historians has been fundamental to this project: over the course of two workshops and many discussions, different approaches have informed our reading of the nature, practice and victims of violence, the role of “scientific” approaches to understanding conflict and the institutional and cultural legacy of past experience of political violence. Most importantly, we analyse state and non-state actors together, and include external and subnational actors within the same frame.