This book brings together two volumes initially published in French in the Presses de Sciences Po's Contester series: Isabelle Sommier's La Violence révolutionnaire, here translated from the original by Marina Urquidi, and Graeme Hayes and Sylvie Ollitrault's La Désobéissance civile, here revised and translated by the first author. Both focus on the emergence and evolution of new and radical modes of activism in what we might call the ‘long 1960s’, from the emergence of the civil rights movement as a mass movement in the USA in the mid-1950s through to the protest cycle of 1968 and its aftermath, in which movements adopting forms of armed struggle, and movements adopting forms of non-violent direct action, challenged state power.

In the first part of this book, Sommier discusses the ‘Years of Lead’ that followed the revolutionary moment of 1968. Sommier's account provides a fascinating overview of the key groups in Europe, North America, and Japan, with particular focus on the Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army Faction in West Germany, Action directe in France, the Japanese Red Army, and, in the USA, the Weather Underground Organization. She argues that there is an ‘unsolved crisis of memory’ concerning these groups, and more generally concerning the relationship between 1968 and the subsequent development of movements espousing armed struggle in these countries, noting that these groups cannot simply be delegitimized as terrorist, insofar as they refused to carry out indiscriminate attacks (privileging instead a form of action centring on political assassination) and recognized in their ideology and group culture the importance of public accountability. Sommier's analysis thus has wide conceptual importance for the study of social movements in general: where social movement theory developed from (and arguably continues to privilege) instrumentally and rationally based accounts of movement organizations operating within highly structured political contexts in order to explain their patterns of emergence, mobilization, and demobilization, Sommier argues that the contrasting trajectories of armed movements can best be understood through the cultural lens of clandestinity, and thus of group identity.

In the second part, Hayes and Ollitrault focus on the multiple and various legacies of the civil rights movements of the 1960s, charting the emergence of civil disobedience as a historicized form of ‘heroic’ social movement action in Western (post)industrialized democracies.