Editor(s): Luca Alteri, Xenia Chiaramonte, Alessandro Senaldi
This work aims to fill a “gap,” however paradoxical that may seem despite the abundance of theories and reflections on the role of violence within politics and society, these have rarely managed to analyse this topic without succumbing to sensationalism or morbidity. Even the social sciences are caught in the inability to break the binary thinking: identifying violence simply as criminality, or, more rarely, downplaying it in order to present a benign and softened image of those who have practised or continue to practise it. However, in the twentieth century, political violence was not a taboo subject; rather, it was a sort of Janus-faced issue, since it simultaneously fuelled one of the legitimacy criteria of the state (“holder of the monopoly on legitimate violence”), while also underpinning the demands of the radical political organisations that, in the 1970s and 1980s, sought a kind of “right to violence.” And today? Within a seemingly “pacified” political landscape, this volume offers the reader a series of empirical cases and theoretical reflections on the relationship between politics and violence in contemporary society.
Publisher: Meltemi
Year: 2021
