5 - A Processual Approach to Political Violence

Summary

The long-term tendency in the scholarly literature has been to approach political violence as an outcome, as a discrete event in its own right, coming out of nowhere and relatively disconnected from history. Scholars have generally preferred to search for the most powerful predictor for a large number of cases, in an attempt to explain why collective actors adopt violent forms of action at a specific moment in time. They have thus shown an interest in the synchronic or ‘snapshot’ view of the studied phenomena, in search of a ‘magic formula’ for stopping political violence, rather than a means of explaining it. This chapter, rather than focusing on causal factors, explains political violence as a process, where the actions of differently situated actors are embedded in complex webs of sociopolitical relations, which are formed and transformed, in a constant state of flux. A processual approach allows us to counter the ahistoricity and lack of context that characterises much of the work on political violence, instead moving towards a dynamic, gradual and procedural perspective on how and when political violence develops. The processual approach adopted in this chapter aims to reconstruct the historical understanding of how and when the Brigate Rosse decided to adopt political violence as a form of action, leading to its first premeditated political assassination.