The Study of Political Unrest and Violence: The Middle East

In: Middle East Studies Association bulletin, Band 12, Heft 2, S. 17-31

Abstract

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.