Violence, Sabotage, and the Mobile Society

Dynamite’s illicit political career is a reminder that new technology can be adopted in radically unforeseen ways. Likewise, the revolutions in transport that characterized the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have transformed the patterns and practice of political violence. New means of transport—and the mobility they bring—have been used to facilitate radically new types of violence; and those means of transport have themselves become targets. Indeed, the extent to which modern political violence has become fixated on complex transport networks is one of its most distinguishing features. This chapter focuses on the rise of the motorized society and aviation: the new means of transport that distinguished the twentieth century. Finally, it turns to deliberate tactics of forced immobilism—attempts to use sabotage to attack the mobile society and its processes of production. While sabotage is broader than just attacks on transport, for reasons of analytical convenience I deal with it as an integrated subject area here.

The Means of Destruction

Chapter Five disaggregates political violence not by cause or group, but by basic technique. It identifies the key means that underpin violent repertoires: and attempt to trace their evolution in conjunction with some reference to other major social and technological changes. At heart, this is a structural approach that leans towards identifying emerging opportunities for violence. Yet, paradoxically, such a structuralist approach can also help to highlight the key roles of agency and contingency. Again and again, new and shocking trends in political violence turn out to be exploiting ideas that are not fundamentally new, though they may indeed be adapted or transformed in importantly novel ways. Likewise, violent techniques may be practised in a very limited way—and then very suddenly achieve widespread imitation. In short, contagion patterns can be very dramatic.

Introduction

How has political violence changed over the long term? This introduction makes the case for looking closely at specific acts—or ‘repertoires’—of violent action. Only through such a fine-grained approach can the distinctively modern quality to contemporary violence be isolated analytically: including its frequently impersonal nature—the killing of strangers referenced in the book’s title. The definitional and geographical parameters of the study are briskly sketched: and the overall structure delineated. An early emphasis is placed here on both ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors in shaping modern political violence. Push factors concern chiefly the rise of the modern western state undergirded by bureaucracies of extraordinary coercive power and reach. ‘Pull’ factors refer to the technological and social changes that open up radically new opportunities and possibilities for violence.

The Resources of Civilization

Borrowing from a phrase of Gladstone’s, this chapter offers thematic reflections on the long-term trajectory outlined in Chapters One and Two. It notes the general aggregation of coercive state power up until the advent of the ‘network society’ of the late twentieth century. Frustratingly for analysts, risk managers, and prophets, the early twen ty-first century looks set to remain open-ended. In any longer-term perspective, the domestic strength of Western governments remains massively impressive. Their coercive capabilities and bureaucratic information-processing capacities remain intact, if they have not actually been enhanced by the information-processing revolutions. States, in short, may not be intrinsically much weaker than they were before the 1990s. And the conspiracies they face remain, if anything, more primitive. But public moods are certainly more febrile: more alarmist, more confused, and more embittered.

Conclusion

Any survey of the evolution of political violence over the past 250 years needs to pay attention to the deep roots of stability in Western societies. Western states have successfully controlled violence through the exercise of infrastructural power over wide areas of public and private life. More than any other single factor, it has forced the prospect of insurrectionist violence from modern politics. Basic state stability endures, despite new challenges throw up by the network society. Political violence no longer seems to offer an existential threat. But there are also less comforting lessons. Before the late eighteenth-century revolutions, violent threats to political elites were limited and sporadic. They focused on the very top of society—where real power was located. But by the early twenty-first century, a general aura of threat was more democratic. While much of this violence remains fairly minor, there seems to be more of it. And it is harder to ignore.

The Modern State and the Society of Hyper-Order to 1939

For the past 200 years the defining feature of most domestic contests between Western governments and armed opponents has tended to be their lopsided asymmetry. Since the later nineteenth century a recurrent phenomenon of Western societies have been hopeless micro-insurrections mounted against stable societies: the armed utopianism of the violently delusional. Time and again, it is only society’s dreamers and deranged who have dared to mount any kind of sustained violent challenge to the state. This chapter traces the emergence of such dominant state power from the late eighteenth century up until the eve of the Second World War.

The Hazards of Social Rank

In any longer-term consideration of the evolution of political violence, it is tempting to start at the very top: with the killing of leaders. This chapter follows the general convention of treating assassination as the slaying of truly elite figures: the rulers. Next the discussion broadens out from killing to hostage-taking: another violent practice that in the more distant past tended to be directed exclusively at political elites but which has since diffused to catch holiday-makers and tourists. Finally, and very briefly, this chapter notes the general historical trend towards a ‘democratization’ of target-widening from the (upper) classes to the wider masses; preparing the way for a subsequent discussion of the specific ways and means by which the threat of political violence has come to be diffused more equitably throughout society.

The Modern State and the Society of Hyper-Order from 1939

This chapter serves as a companion to its predecessor. It surveys the temporary dislocation of state power across much of Europe during the Second World War: before turning to its reinforcement and enhancement in the decades that followed. It examines the unfolding consequences of the 1968 crisis of legitimacy across Western societies: before noting the apparently unassailable position of the Western State against all violent challengers in the post-Cold War Brave New World of the early 1990s. Finally, it introduces the strikingly open-ended juncture of the early twenty-first century, setting up a more in-depth discussion in Chapter Three.