That Europe's twentieth century was a period of exceptional violence is certainly not a novel insight. For decades, historians, social scientists and anthropologists have investigated the various forms of more or less organized political violence that occurred in Europe's diverse cultures, ranging from war to genocide and expulsion, from revolution to state repression. Yet no study exists that attempts to explain the emergence and manifestations of, and interconnections between, different forms of political violence within the confines of one volume. In addition, the emphasis which has often been placed on the role played by national political contexts, or more strongly by national peculiarities, in explaining violence has tended to preclude examination of common European trends in the emergence of political violence.

Against this background, the book differs from the existing scholarship in three distinct ways. First, it adopts an inclusive approach to political violence. After an opening chapter that seeks to establish general patterns of causation and periodization in political violence across what we term the ‘long twentieth century’, the volume systematically examines four expressions of political violence, each of which contains its own dialectical dynamics: the violence of military conflicts; the violence generated by projects of genocide and ethnic cleansing; the violence of terrorism and of state repression; and, finally, the violence of revolution and counter-revolution. The volume locates each of these manifestations of political violence in transnational and comparative contexts, and seeks to relate them to each other, and, in turn, to broader trends in European history.