Since the Great War of 1914-18 a recurrent feature of conflicts over national self-determination has been the rise of ‘tit-for-tat’ conflict systems in which rival political forces (often paramilitary in character) select victims according to their communal identity. Following the example of a pioneering comparative analysis of the Northern Irish conflict, I call such violence ‘representative’ in character – that is, it is violence in which victims are selected as representing groups of people. But whether this violence is labelled as representative or – more commonly – as sectarian and/or terroristic, it remains strikingly little analysed as a phenomenon in its own right. And, when cycles are considered by historians, the assumption tends to prevail that they are best explained (and, indeed, dismissed) as atavistic and unthinking in nature: in effect a throwback to some form of primitive past of tribal or ethnic antipathies.
Against the dominance of prevailing assumptions, I argue that this ‘family’ of representative violence systems is unmistakeably modern. It cannot be otherwise since the targeting principle at its heart is essentially democratic – one victim being seen as just as good as another. And the concept that randomly selected individuals can pay a debt on behalf of a whole community is also egalitarian in thrust: modern jury systems are predicated upon that very same assumption. Finally, representative violence is mobile: it depends upon developed transport and communication networks to achieve a general effect. Thus it stands for the disembodied escalation of older forms of communal confrontation: the riot is only ever local, but the drive-by shooting is (potentially, at least) everywhere. In short, to borrow Michael Mann’s assessment of the cognate phenomenon of ethnic cleansing, ‘it belongs to our own civilization and to us’.
