The Social Science of Political Violence: Processual Approaches

Research on political violence has been re-shaped by what can be described as a ‘processual turn’. Instead of focusing on socio-structural conditions (‘root causes’) or individual predispositions, political violence has increasingly been analysed as emerging from—and being shaped by—processes of radicalisation, escalation, transformation, and disengagement that result from interactions between multiple actors. This chapter will present and critically discuss some of the main processual approaches in the study of political violence, focusing, in particular, on their conceptual and theoretical foundations and their explanatory logic, but also discussing exemplary empirical works that have adopted a processual perspective in their research.