ABSTRACT
Political violence refers to all collective attacks within a political community against the political regime, its actors, including competing political groups as well as incumbents, or its policies. The basic model of the conditions leading to political violence used in this chapter incorporates both psychological and societal variables. However good the prospects seem for a general analysis of political violence, research on it has been quite uneven, both in substance and in disciplinary approach. There is considerable European historical scholarship on segments of the subject, notably the peasant rebellions of the twelfth through nineteenth centuries and the great revolutions of England, France, and Russia. This chapter analyzes testable general hypotheses about, three aspects of political violence: its sources, magnitude, and forms. The processes by which the potential for violence develops and the kinds of conditions and events that channel its outcome are examined as part of this analysis.
