ABSTRACT
Violence is at the centre of theoretical elaborations around the creation of identities, the establishment of the law and the shaping of authority. In this Introduction, the author argues that the analysis of political violence can explain how power is formed and distributed within society and how such distribution can be altered. Attempts to formulate general theories of violent conduct are discussed, as are micro-situational theories of individual or group violence. Both, it is contended, encounter some difficulty when collective violence is analysed. The violence addressed in this book is characterized by political objectives and communicative content. Ideally, politics should consist in a project of autonomy involving subjects capable of self-understanding, self-consciousness and mutual recognition. It should, and sometimes does, lead to the achievement of agreement through communication. However, often politics takes violent forms and is performed by a variety of actors to defend or consolidate their social position or to improve it. The Introduction lists the different forms of political violence on which the book is focused.
