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Purpose – Research on terrorism has demonstrated the importance of state violence as a factor in the adoption of terrorism. This chapter seeks to clarify this previous research by examining the process through which state violence contributes to violence through groups’ narratives and appeals for action.

Methodology – To study how state violence contributes to terrorism this chapter uses qualitative methods that are ideal for clarifying social processes across cases. This chapter uses a mixed-methods approach, first using a comparative-historical analysis of groups involved in the anarchist, anti-colonial, and New Left waves of terrorism. Examining this diverse set of groups highlights the common role and process through which state violence contributes to terrorism. This study is combined with an in-depth analysis of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’s online propaganda, which provides a detailed picture of how state violence is featured in terrorist texts.

Findings – This chapter reaffirms the previous research on the role of state violence as a grievance and indication that alternative methods are unavailable. In addition to this, this chapter demonstrates the symbolic importance of state violence, which provides a moral justification for terrorism and martyrs to aspire to and avenge.

Value – This chapter clarifies the role of state violence in the development of terrorism by describing how it is integrated in the narratives of terrorist groups to justify and inspire violence.

This chapter examines the dynamic of state-society interaction during the events of the winter 2013–2014 Ukrainian Maidan Revolution. Using a new dataset, containing responses from the activists of the dissent movement, the study uncovers the “tipping point” at which revolutionaries were much more likely to support violent tactics. The study adds to the scholarly debate on repression-dissent, showing that social interpretation of state repression is essential in affecting social support for political violence. In addition to the theoretical contribution, this article presents the first systematic scholarly account of the repression-dissent dynamic of the 2013–2014 Ukrainian revolution, implementing original empirical and interview data.

This chapter draws on feminist theorizing on rape culture and victim blaming, and proposes a concept, racialized victim blaming, as a useful tool for understanding discourse on state violence.

The concept of racialized victim blaming is applied to historically analyze the genesis of the carceral state, and deconstruct public debates on police shootings and immigration crises.

This chapter argues that racialized victim blaming is used as a discursive tool to legitimize and mystify state violence projects. Officials and the media use racialized logics and narratives to blame the victims of state violence for their own suffering, justifying continued or increased state violence.

The concept of victim blaming is most often associated with violence against women. Here I demonstrate that victim blaming is also a useful tool for understanding state violence, particularly when attention is given to the place of racializing narratives.

Colombia has one of the highest levels of inequality in landholding in the world. This inequality has persisted in spite of numerous state-led land reform efforts, which leads to the question: why has it been so difficult to reverse unequal land distribution in Colombia? To answer this question, the chapter examines the role of the state, non-state armed groups, land inequality, land reform efforts, and a history of violence to reveal the relationship between land, inequality and violence in Colombia. This chapter explores the nature of this relationship to understand Colombia’s enduring inequality and to inform theoretical approaches to statehood and power. Rather than reducing state capacity to common Weberian binary constructions of state and statelessness, I explore how state capacity takes on different forms in different regions of Colombia – analyzing how various actors shape land inequality and violence across the territory. Using a comprehensive longitudinal panel data set of displaced persons, I use a negative binomial regression model to demonstrate how land reform, land inequality, and a history of violence have directly affected current displacement of citizens. I argue that several constellations of powerful social actors have at various points converged to control land, through non-state armed groups, to exert a local form of logistical control outside the scope of the federal state, deeply affecting the dynamics violence across different territories. These groups have subsequently engaged in a land grabbing process that has resulted in a reverse form of land reform – leading to persisting inequality in Colombia.

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss how routine violence seeps into the interstices of social life. Routine violence is part of a continuum of violence that extends from intimate violence to large-scale wars. It is gendered/racialized/classed and it is often invisible because it is normalized in everyday life.

Using cases from India we illustrate facets of routine violence and then use the frame to discuss some examples from the United States.

We discuss the social implications of routine violence including the significant harm on large sections of people in today’s world.

We meld theoretical discussions about violence associated with states with scholarship on violence against women; we use Indian activists’ concepts of routine violence and examine routine violence in the United States.

The prevalence of domestic violence in Nigeria may be described as epidemic. To address this scourge, several pieces of legislation have been enacted in the past decade at state and federal levels in Nigeria. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the emerging legislation on domestic violence. This paper thus examines the contents of these laws in a bid to determine the potential of these laws to prevent domestic violence, deter perpetrators from further incidents, punish perpetrators, compensate survivors and provide them with the necessary interventions for their rehabilitation.

The approach adopted is a content analysis of the provisions of the legislation, using salient parameters that have been drawn from documented best practices, specifically the key components for framing of domestic violence legislation around the world.

The author finds that while there is significant attempt in extant legislation to ensure that women are protected within domestic relationships, there are still gaps. Further, the protections are uneven across the states. In addition, there are systemic and contextual challenges that hamper the effectiveness of existing legislation in Nigeria in providing the necessary protections to women.

This study analyses the provisions of some of the legislation currently in place to protect persons from domestic violence. The impact, potential effect and overall utility of these pieces of legislation continue to require examination.

We examine why some groups use violence while others use nonviolence when they push for major political change. Nonviolence can be less costly, but nonstate actors must mobilize a large number of people for it to be successful. This is less critical for violent rebellion, as successful attacks can be committed by a small number of people. This means that groups that believe that they have the potential to mobilize larger numbers of people are less likely to use violence. This potential is related to the lines along which the group mobilizes. Campaigns mobilized along ethnic or Marxist lines have fewer potential members and are most likely to use violence. Prodemocracy campaigns have a higher number of potential members and are more likely to use nonviolence. For movements against a foreign occupation, campaigns in larger countries are more likely to use nonviolence. These predictions are supported in a multilevel logit model of campaigns from 1945 to 2006. The mechanism is tested by looking at the interactive effect of democratic changes on the likelihood of nonviolence and looking at a subsample of 72 campaigns that explicitly draw from certain ethnic or religious groups.

The Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence was adopted by the Council of Europe and opened for signature in Istanbul in 2011 (the Istanbul Convention). The Istanbul Convention offers a treaty-level protection against domestic violence to all people, including LGBTQs, that is, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer persons. Intimate partner violence (IPV) occurs in same-sex relationships as well as different-sex relationships. In addition, LGBTQ persons face the risk of violence in homophobic and transphobic family environments. The Istanbul Convention has faced significant backlash, a process driven by the global anti-feminist movement that also calls for the protection of traditional family values. In the Convention, “gender” is described as “the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for women and men” (Article 3(c)). The opponents of the Convention suggest that gender roles are not “given” by the society but inherent in different natures of women and men. The dissatisfaction of many States, such as Bulgaria, Armenia, Ukraine, and so on, is related to the perceived excessiveness of rights given to LGBTQ persons in the Istanbul Convention. This research paper sets aside the issue of political campaigning against the Convention in Eastern Europe, which has already been well reported. Instead, it aims to reveal how the protection against domestic violence under the Convention raises normative, conceptual, and substantive challenges in States entrenching the ideology of traditional family values in law.

African feminist scholars and activists have made major contributions to our understanding of gender-based violence. This is especially the case in southern Africa, which has a long history of high rates of violence against women and girls. Their rates of gender-based violence are among the very highest in the world. While there are many forms of gender-based violence, this chapter will explore the important contributions of African gender scholars and activists to our knowledge concerning domestic violence and rape. These issues will be interrogated using Zimbabwe and South Africa as case studies, with some reference to Namibia. In the region, domestic violence and sexual assault have deeply rooted structural explanations linked to the long history of colonialism, apartheid and white minority rule, political transition, economic crises and adjustment, changes in expected gender roles and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. In the past 25 years, Zimbabwe and South Africa attempted to address violence against women through the development of laws as well as the creation of non-governmental organizations. Although these important efforts have not resulted in a major decrease in violence against women, they clearly demonstrate the long history of African women’s actions in resisting state power and patriarchy. African women as citizens, scholars and activists are responsible for bringing to the fore the critical importance of reducing gender-based violence in order to establish strong, just and sustainable societies in southern Africa.

Purpose: The chapter aims to analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on levels of domestic abuse at the global level; examine the responses of international and regional human rights bodies; and identify lessons which can be learnt with regard to responding to domestic abuse in a post-pandemic context.

Methodology/Approach: The chapter discusses the increase in rates of domestic abuse since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and proceeds to examine this form of abuse as an issue for international human rights law. The chapter then focuses on the responses of international and regional human rights bodies to the increased levels of domestic abuse in the context of the pandemic.

Findings: There is a danger of viewing the recent issues surrounding domestic abuse as simply being caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, in reality the pandemic has served to expose and exacerbate pre-existing difficulties with the responses of States to this form of abuse.

Originality/value: The chapter adds to the literature on domestic abuse as a human rights issue by focusing on the specific context of the COVID-19 pandemic.