Chapter 11: Political Violence

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Chapter 11 Political Violence
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Defining Political Violence

• Remember the Weberian definition of the state.
• Public war v. Private War
• Basic definition violence outside the control
  of the state which has political goals.
• Not simply crime.
• We are mainly concerned with CPV.

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Why Political Violence?

• Institutional
• Ideational
• Individual

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Forms of CPV

• Revolution
• Rebellion, Revolt, Riot
• Civil War
• Guerrilla War
• Terrorism
• Other

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Terrorism

• No widely accepted definition of terrorism.
• A difficult political and academic question.
• Can noble ends justify terrorist means?
• One can discuss terrorism in three ways
  Academic, Political and Policy

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Three Ways of Looking at Terrorism (Taylor 2005)

• Academic
• The pursuit of a workable ideal type for the
  purpose of discussion and analysis.
• Examples
• ONeil the use of violence by nonstate actors
  against civilians in order to achieve a political
  goal (289).
• Cooper terrorism is the intentional
  generation of massive fear by human beings for
  the purpose of securing or maintaining control
  over other human beings.

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Three Ways of Looking at Terrorism (Taylor 2005)

• Political   the term has deep political
  implications and usages. There really is no
  specific political definition of terror, rather
  it tends to be in the eye of the rhetorician. To
  put it somewhat glibly (yet still accurately)
  terrorism is whatever a given government wishes
  to call it. So, when there is violence that a
  state (or whomever) does not like, it calls it
  terrorism but when that violence is considered
  to the benefit of the state of group, then it is
  not terrorism. This semantic fact is especially
  true in the post-9/11 world, in which it
  sometimes seems that all political violence is
  defined within the rhetoric of terrorism.

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Three Ways of Looking at Terrorism (Taylor 2005)

• Policy  Beyond just the usage of the term to
  attract attention (and perhaps dollars) is the
  fact that the politicking itself is linked to
  actual political action, i.e., policy on
  terrorism. Certainly the way a given state or
  administration defines the term will affect its
  policy actions in this arena.

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