The history of the analysis of social movements, which though relatively short has produced a particularly dense body of conceptual work since the late 1960s in particular, reveals a peculiar paradox. Everything, in militant vocabulary, refers to war, starting with ‘militant’, which shares the same Latin root as ‘military’, but also ‘enlist’, ‘mobilization’, etc.; indeed, in its early stages and its first formalizations, the analysis of social movements typically associated collective action with violence. And yet, during the same 1960s, an extremely prejudicial split separated the analysis of social movements from the analysis of violence. The reason for this lies essentially in a rejection in social movement scholarship of so-called collective-behaviour approaches, which addressed social mobilization through the lens of ‘aggression’; another reason is the resonance which has more recently been acquired by the term ‘terrorism’. At the intersection of these two theoretical issues, lie hidden the political stakes involved in the link between 1968 and terrorism, a blind spot which has until recently contributed to concealing the mechanisms of radicalization during the 1970s.

Violence and Social Movements: Fragmented Analytic Traditions

Before social movements emerged as a field of study, attention had been focused on violent behaviour, whether as part of ‘crowd psychology’, where crowds were considered to be causally linked to criminal behaviour, or as part of the revolutionary situations predicted by Marxism. This link was maintained in the first true tradition of collective action analysis, in that psychosocial or collective behaviour theories maintain a focus on ‘aggression’. These theories stress the social condition of the group and its community of experiences, understanding a group's violent behaviour not as a part of human nature, but as a set of reactive behaviours responding to external stimuli, such as frustration and/or a learning process.

According to Bandura (1973), learning theories tell us that violent behaviour, like any other behaviour, is learned and will either be excluded or welcomed depending on the cultural and subcultural context. Although generally disapproved by the dominant culture, violence is more or less actively valued by certain social groups.