ABSTRACT
Violence often is a critical factor in the emergence, development and success or failure of social movements. American scholars in particular have been reluctant to acknowledge the role of violence. The long history of protest movements is in fact mainly the history of mobs and riots. In the United States, this particularly meant identification with the civil rights movement, known of course for its public profession of a commitment to non-violence. It is customary to define violence as the destruction of things or human bodies. In this sense, violence is like the human capacity for caring or helping or loving, a capacity that can be tapped by many diverse conditions. All of which is to say that violence and the threat of violence are complexly intertwined with the efforts of social movements to exercise power, and to study movement power. Mass defiance is indeed the great, untapped source of popular power on which movements draw.
