Violence, Sabotage, and the Mobile Society

Abstract

Dynamite’s illicit political career is a reminder that new technology can be adopted in radically unforeseen ways. Likewise, the revolutions in transport that characterized the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have transformed the patterns and practice of political violence. New means of transport—and the mobility they bring—have been used to facilitate radically new types of violence; and those means of transport have themselves become targets. Indeed, the extent to which modern political violence has become fixated on complex transport networks is one of its most distinguishing features. This chapter focuses on the rise of the motorized society and aviation: the new means of transport that distinguished the twentieth century. Finally, it turns to deliberate tactics of forced immobilism—attempts to use sabotage to attack the mobile society and its processes of production. While sabotage is broader than just attacks on transport, for reasons of analytical convenience I deal with it as an integrated subject area here.