Political Violence

A collection of original case studies of different types of political violence in the 20th and 21st century inspired by the pioneering work of Robert Conquest. It focuses on the origins, manifestations and legitimation of such violence and includes the former Soviet Union, Mao's China, Castro's Cuba and radical-militant Islam.

"Political Violence focuses on some of the lowest points of a 20th century marked by extremes, where ideological storms - primarily but not exclusively Marxist - drove human beings in large numbers onto the wildest, and most deadly, shores of politics. Untangling various strands of violent political contestation among would-be leaders, accounting for and memorializing millions of their victims, and making sense of the sources of such horrors and the ways in which, in some cases, they ceased - but in others, persist - are tasks of importance. In this book, a distinguished and sophisticated group of scholars and analysts takes them on. Their efforts yield impressive results, worth the attention of those who wish to understand the roots of some critical 21st-century problems." - Walter D. Connor, Boston University

"At a time when political violence is spreading ominously around the world, both between and within nations, and with the Russo-Georgian war now added to bloody conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, this book is particularly welcome. By analyzing not only violence, in places and times as varied as Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, China, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, but the beliefs that help to engender and legitimize it, Paul Hollander and his colleagues brightly illuminate a darkening landscape." - William Taubman, Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science at Amherst College, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning biography, Khrushchev: The Manand his Era

"As far as Conquest's "Great Terror" is concerned it is not too much to invoke Horace (and Pushkin) Exegi monumentum - I have reared a monument..." - Walter Laqueur

PAUL HOLLANDER is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, USA.