Introduction to the Special Issue on Political Violence

In this chapter we focuse on non-state actors as perpetuators of political violence. In particulare we focus on organized and higher-level forms of political violence, rather than on smaller-scale and less organized forms of violence that occur during street demonstrations or in the form of riots. Yet we explicitly emphasize that different forms of political violence are interlinked and are part of a continuum of violent tactics – rather than representing discrete and mutually exclusive types – and often occur successively or simultaneously during processes of escalation. We introduce how social movement scholars have during the past decades approached and analyzed political violence introducing a perspective which entails the contextualization of the phenomenon. We also trace the development of the field in cognate areas of research dealing with political violence, such as: terrorism studies, research on militant Islamism and civil. In the concluding section we will suggest a possible direction for future research on political violence recognizing the achievements produced so far from the social movements field.

Political violence by non-state actors, whether in the form of clandestine groups, riots, violent insurgencies, or civil wars, often emerges in the context of social movements, can shift back to non-violent methods of contentious collective action, and in many cases does not mark a new and separate phase of contention but proceeds in parallel with street protests, marches, boycotts, and strikes. At the same time, different forms of political violence are interlinked and are part of a continuum of repertoires of actions-rather than representing discrete and mutually exclusive types-and often occur successively or simultaneously during processes of conflict escalation (when violence increases in scale, type, and scope) or de-escalation (when violence overall decreases).

Qualitative Sociology, 2008

Attention to extreme forms of political violence in the social sciences has been episodic, and studies of different forms of political violence have followed different approaches, with “breakdown” theories mostly used for the analysis of right-wing radicalism, social movement theories sometimes adapted to research on left-wing radical groups, and area study specialists focusing on ethnic and religious forms. Some of the studies on extreme forms of political violence that have emerged within the social movement tradition have nevertheless been able to trace processes of conflict escalation through the detailed examination of historical cases. This article assesses some of the knowledge acquired in previous research approaching issues of political violence from the social movement perspective, as well as the challenges coming from new waves of debate on terrorist and counterterrorist action and discourses. In doing this, the article reviews contributions coming from research looking at violence as escalation of action repertoires within protest cycles; political opportunity and the state in escalation processes; resource mobilization and violent organizations; narratives of violence; and militant constructions of external reality.

Resistance to Political Violence in Latin America: Documenting Atrocity (pp. 161-196). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan., 2019

Bernasconi, O., López, L., & Ruiz, M. (2019). The Repertoire of Political Violence: Naming, Defining, and Classifying. In O. Bernasconi (Ed.), Resistance to Political Violence in Latin America: Documenting Atrocity (pp. 161-196). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

Government and Opposition, 2014

Oppositional violence and repression are closely related. In fact, repression often produces an escalation of violence rather than controlling it. Bridging social movement studies and research on violence, the article uses a small-N, most-different research design to analyse the working of a specific mechanism at the onset of different types of political violence: escalating policing. In particular, it indicates specific causal mechanisms, related to interactions between social movements and the state, which create the conditions for some splinter groups to move underground. In order to compare left-wing, right-wing, ethno-national and religious violence, the article presents empirical references to the author's own empirical research on Italy and the Basque Country as well as a secondary analysis of the conflicts that preceded the rise of al-Qaeda.

Political Violence in Context: Time, Space and Milieu (2015) will become an essential work for the study of both the emergence and decline of political violence within social movements. Editors Lorenzo Bosi, Niall Ó Dochartaigh, and Daniela Pisoiu offer a an inherently dialectical collection that exposes different structures for understanding violent developments within diverse temporal, spatial, and social contexts of myriad social movements. The work explores political violence in Northern Ireland, Italy, China, Japan, the United States, West Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere. The collection is at times frustratingly vague regarding the specific meanings the authors assign to questions of temporality, spatiality, and the radical milieu, but the editors can be applauded for engaging difficult and sometimes provocative analyses of how political violence emerges from both context and contention. Their scholarship follows on the work of Stathis Kalyvas’ The Logic of Violence in Civil War (2006) and the essays collected within Martha Crenshaw’s Terrorism in Context (1995).

Slides of the seminar "Problematizing ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorism studies’: critical approaches to the study of political violence", that I gave at the Florence University of Arts–American University of Florence, November 18, 2024 (as part of the course on Ethics in a World Context, Adj. Lecturer: Alessandra Lo Piccolo)

Qualitative Sociology, 2011

This course addresses the broad phenomenon of political violence encompassing: processes of individual and collective radicalization, civil war dynamics, communal violence, armed movements' consolidation and rebel governance, and the role of the state in exacerbating or diminishing conflictual dynamics. Building on relationally informed social movement studies, it will discuss phenomena as distinct as the significance of mental illness in radicalisation, the role of friendship in mobilization, the IRA's urban mobilization, state violence and torture in Turkey and Tamil Tiger state building efforts in Sri Lanka and much more. It can be roughly divided into three overlapping focuses: a) Radicalization – relational dynamics which lead to a progression from non-violent activism to the endorsement and/or use of violence at the individual and collective levels. b) Armed conflict and Insurgent movement emergence and consolidation – under which structural conditions do groups turn to violence and how do they survive? c) Rebel Governance – the broader repertoire of insurgent contention, what importance should be attributed to the non-armed actions (service provision, revolutionary courts etc.) of insurgent groups The objective of this course is to obtain a general understanding of political violence, when it emerges and which forms it takes? At the end of the course students will have a strong familiarity with literature on violence from the areas of social movement studies, the field of terrorism and the literature on civil wars. The course will draw heavily on the conflicts on which I have most expertise; the conflict between the PKK and the Turkish state, in Ireland and in Colombia. It will however draw in historical and contemporary examples from across the globe. The research findings of a recent research consortium (PRIME) of which I was a member, on Lone Actor Extremism will also be featured. Students are strongly encouraged to apply the theoretical debates covered in the course to conflicts or case studies of their own interest that are not directly featured in the syllabus.