Killing strangers: how political violence became modern

A bewildering feature of so much contemporary political violence is its stunning impersonality. Every major city centre becomes a potential shooting gallery; and every metro system a potential bomb alley. Victims just happen, as the saying goes, to ‘be in the wrong place at the wrong time’. Killing Strangers tackles the question of how such violence became ‘unchained’ from inter-personal relationships. It traces the rise of such impersonal violence by examining violence in conjunction with changing social and political realities across Western Europe and North America since the late eighteenth century. In particular, it traces both ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors. On the one hand, the rise of the modern state with its titanic bureaucratic resources of monitoring and coercion forced the violence of opponents into niche forms. On the other hand, social and technological changes offered fresh opportunities to cause mayhem in startlingly new ways. Both forces are necessary for any understanding of why contemporary political violence takes the forms that it does.