This journey through the history of the groups that pursued an ideological commitment born in the 1960s to engage in armed struggle shows the considerable variety of their trajectories, despite initial similarities. Perhaps the most prominent particularity is provided by the Italian case, whose scale was unique, even compared to Germany. In 1989, nearly 400 far-left militants in Italy were in jail (including 60 with life sentences), compared to 40 in West Germany in 1992. Nearly 5000 people in Italy were detained for crimes of ‘subversion’, 20,000 were charged, and a thousand were on the run in 1980, numbers which dwarf the few dozen militants of the groups in the other countries.

The JRA is singular from the very different point of view of strategy. The fact that the JRA undertook violent action is not in itself a distinguishing feature, especially as the use and representation of violence varied across time and space. However, the extreme left's deployment of revolutionary violence was in general governed by a set of rules, which the Japanese breached from the start, in two ways: by immediately deterritorializing their actions, and by their modus operandi, where the target was unconnected to the group’s military objectives. We can thus regard the JRA as a forerunner (along with the PFLP branch of the PLO, with which it had such close links) of a radically new kind of strategy that distinguishes it from its apparent counterparts.

Thus, the evolution of the JRA towards a sectarian and decontextualized mode of action (which the group sought to compensate for through the spectacular nature of its actions) anticipated the ‘third age of violence’ of the twentieth century, which began symbolically with the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989. The end of the bipolar world order brought about deep transformations in this area: the abandonment of the reference to Marxism, which had legitimated the use of violence; and the disappearance of material support (both financial and logistical) which had been provided to armed groups by each bloc, seeking to use them to serve their power games. A new rhetoric has appeared, taking the path of identity-based mobilizations, stressing ‘traditional’ values and opposed to Western modernity.