Introduction to Political Theory

majority of fellow Americans, but to the judiciary; in effect, they were forcing test cases for the legitimacy of state law. On ...

Sabl, A. (2001) ‘Looking Forward to Justice: Rawlsian Civil Disobedience and its Non- Rawlsian Lessons’ Journal of Political Phi ...

Chapter 20 Political violence Introduction Since 11 September 2001, when the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon were de ...

9/11 and its legacy E veryone (above a certain age) can remem- ber where they were when September 11 happened. There was saturat ...

Liberalism and the question of violence We normally define political violence as the use of violence against individuals or the ...

Laqueur, who has written numerous works on the question of political violence, argues that Iran has sponsored the Hizbullah grou ...

(1993: 18). This indirect violence may also take the form of what Salmi calls ‘mediated’ (1993: 19) violence which occurs when i ...

the Thatcher government was wrong to describe the African National Congress (ANC) which resorted (among other tactics) to violen ...

The just war Proponents of war have always presented their case in moralistic terms. Just war theory has been developed by Catho ...

of anarchism, and violent outrages do not advance, but set back, the cause of democracy. The movement against the Vietnam War (1 ...

the virtues of a third way between capitalism and communism was, in the early 1990s, eagerly distributed by the British National ...

but Harris’s argument is questionable. For Marx does not regard the exploitation of labour by capital as violent, and in Capital ...

London would not strengthen this cause. Even under repressive regimes, where political violence can be justified, terrorist-type ...

A general theory of political violence? Laqueur argues that there will perhaps never be an authoritative guide to political viol ...

The roots of political violence There is certainly no simple explanation for political violence, but finding its roots can only ...

To argue, as Laqueur does, that ‘there are no known cures for fanaticism and paranoia’ (2003: 10), is to suggest that psychologi ...

states use force against those who are deemed to break the law. This force can be characterised as political violence. The polit ...

The force/violence distinction and the analysis of political violence In characterising the force of the state as violence, we a ...

than an explicitly authoritarian one, but what makes the state inherently arbitrary is its use of force. In the same way, the po ...

the state itself. He insists that to understand political violence is not to justify it, and that to identify political violence ...