Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State: A Comparative Analysis of Italy and Germany (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics)

This book presents empirical research on the nature and structure of political violence. While most studies of social movements focus on single-nation studies, Donatella della Porta uses a comparative research design to analyze movements in two countries--Italy and Germany--from the 1960s to the 1990s. Through extensive use of official documents and in-depth interviews, della Porta is able to explain the actors' construction of external political reality, and to build a theory on political violence that synthesizes the various interactions among political actors.

This book presents empirical research on the nature and structure of political violence. While most studies of social movements focus on single-nation studies, Donatella della Porta uses a comparative research design to analyze movements in two countries - Italy and Germany - from the 1960s to the 1990s. Through extensive use of official documents and in-depth interviews, della Porta explains the actors' construction of external political reality. The empirical data are used to build a middle-range theory on political violence that incorporates an analysis of the interactions between social movements and the state at the macro-level, an analysis of the development of radical organizations as entrepreneurs for political violence at the meso-level, and an analysis of the construction of "militant" identities and countercultures at the micro-level. By studying the social movement families from within which violence emerges, linking social movements to institutions, and, finally, providing a systematic analysis - firmly grounded in history - of the nature of political violence, the author has created a masterful synthesis that will help secure a place for the study of political violence in the study of systemwide politics.