Violence and Social Movements

Abstract

The study of social movements raises a range of very interesting questions in relation to the politics of violence. On the one hand, violence can be associated with movement activity (whether in the form of rioting, of clandestine or paramilitaryactivity, or in revolutionary situations) and with state repression of movements (whether in the form of protest policing, the use of political police and unofficialparamilitaries, or in military clampdowns). On the other hand, there is often an overt or covert negotiation, or even choreography, around the limitation of violence, in situations where its use is symbolic more than instrumental, such as where the real issue is that of the respective legitimacy of state power and movement activity; and the use of overtly or supposedly non-violent methods (in "non-violent direct action", hunger strikes, "non-lethal weapon" use by state forces, "defensive violence" by paramilitaries etc.) is almost always a political as well as a practical question. We can also note some global and historical shifts in the meaning and deployment of violence, which are as yet poorly understood and theorised. While social movements research has produced some fine studies of individual areas, such as protest policing, revolutions, rioting, urban guerrillas, and non-violence, it has rarely integrated the question of violence as such in any systematic way. This panel welcomes proposals from any relevant discipline, in particular those which set their empirical material in a wider historical or comparative context.

Title	Details
Political Violence, Politics of Violence and Mobilisation	View Paper Details
Violence in Riots and Social Movements	View Paper Details
Social Movements and the Politics of Violence in Indonesia''s Transition	View Paper Details
The Micro-Mobilisation into the Provisional IRA, an Armed Struggle for Recognition?	View Paper Details
On the Organisation of Political Violence: Theoretical Synthesis and Application	View Paper Details