The Study of Political Unrest and Violence

The Middle East

Bibliographic Data

ID11567364
AuthorsFarhad Kazemi (New York University, corresponding author)
Year1978
Volume12
Issue2
Pages17-31
Publication date1978-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueMiddle East Studies Association Bulletin (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0026-3184 • E-ISSN: 2329-3233
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0026318400006180
OpenAlexW2586632004
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited105

The late Hannah Arendt once observed that “violence itself is incapable of speech, and not merely that speech is helpless when confronted with violence. Because of this speech-lessness political theory has little to say about the phenomenon of violence and must leave its discussion to the technicians;” (Arendt, 1963, p.9). This may have been true at the time of Arendt’s writing. The situation, however, dramatically changed when the violence of the sixties began in earnest. The academic market was soon lost in a maze of articles, books, and analyses of political violence from the perspective of not only political theory but practically every discipline in the social sciences and humanities. These new works supplemented the traditional and earlier studies of violence by the Marxist school and others. Thus by the turn of the decade, the student of political violence was faced with the difficult task of trying to evaluate and sift his way through an ever-expanding plethora of concepts, theories, definitions, explanations, and models of political violence which abounded in the field

Criminology · Epistemology · Marxist philosophy · Phenomenon · Political science · Political violence · Politics · Social science · Social unrest · Sociology · Unrest · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · History · Law · Philosophy · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence · War, Ethics, and Justification