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How do historians explain political violence? The question itself has a history. For much of the modern era, the study of political violence was a chronicle of events—battles, assassinations, revolutions—narrated from the perspective of state actors. But over the past two centuries, a series of competing frameworks have transformed how scholars approach the subject, each responding to the blind spots of its predecessors. The central tension running through this historiography is whether violence is best understood as a product of elite decisions, structural forces, social conflicts, cultural meanings, or global entanglements. This article traces that evolution, showing how each framework reshaped the questions historians ask about political violence.
The earliest systematic framework for studying political violence was Historicism, which dominated from the early nineteenth century into the mid-twentieth. Historicist historians treated violence as a matter of statecraft and high politics: wars, coups, and revolutions were explained through the intentions of rulers, diplomats, and military leaders. The method was archival and narrative, focused on reconstructing unique events in their particular contexts. For example, a Historicist account of political violence in Weimar Germany would center on the decisions of chancellors, the actions of paramilitary leaders, and the breakdown of parliamentary institutions. This approach produced richly detailed narratives but left little room for broader social or economic forces.
Marxist History emerged around 1900 as a direct challenge to Historicism's state-centric focus. Where Historicism saw individual agency, Marxists saw class struggle. Political violence, in this view, was not a series of discrete events but an expression of deeper contradictions between ruling and exploited classes. The Marxist framework shifted attention from the palace to the factory, from the general's tent to the barricade. It explained the violence of the French Revolution, for instance, as a bourgeois uprising against feudalism, and later revolutions as proletarian responses to capitalism. Marxist historians did not simply add class to the story; they redefined the very object of study, arguing that political violence could only be understood as part of a long-term structural dynamic. This framework coexisted with Historicism for decades, each side accusing the other of reductionism—Historicists of economic determinism, Marxists of ignoring contingency and individual choice.
By the mid-twentieth century, a new set of frameworks began to challenge both Historicism and orthodox Marxism. The Annales School, founded in 1929, rejected the primacy of political events altogether. Annales historians advocated for a longue durée perspective, studying slow-moving structures like climate, demography, and economic cycles. Political violence, from this vantage, was a surface phenomenon—the froth on deep currents. An Annales approach to the violence of the French Revolution would emphasize long-term price fluctuations, population pressure, and the erosion of feudal institutions rather than the speeches of Robespierre. This framework narrowed the role of political agency but broadened the temporal and spatial scale of analysis.
Social History, which rose to prominence in the 1960s, built on Annales' structuralism but added a new focus: the experience of ordinary people. Social historians of political violence examined how peasants, workers, and urban crowds experienced and perpetrated violence. They drew on quantitative methods—analyzing census data, court records, and economic statistics—to map patterns of unrest. Social History absorbed Annales' interest in structures but diverged by insisting that class, gender, and race shaped those structures in uneven ways. For example, a Social History of Palestinian political violence might trace the economic dispossession of peasant communities under Ottoman and British rule, linking land loss to cycles of revolt. This framework coexisted with Marxist History, but where Marxists emphasized class consciousness, Social Historians often stressed material conditions and everyday life.
By the 1970s, a Cultural Turn reshaped the study of political violence. Two closely related frameworks emerged: New Political History and Political Culture. New Political History revived the study of politics but redefined it. Instead of focusing on elites, it examined how ordinary people engaged with political institutions—through elections, petitions, riots, and rituals. Political violence was no longer just a breakdown of order but a form of political communication. The Political Culture framework went further, arguing that violence itself was embedded in systems of meaning. A Political Culture analysis of Weimar Germany's street violence would explore how paramilitary groups like the SA and the Red Front used symbols, uniforms, and public rituals to claim legitimacy and intimidate opponents. These two frameworks overlapped considerably: both rejected the structural determinism of Annales and Social History, insisting that ideas, beliefs, and symbols mattered. But New Political History remained closer to institutional politics, while Political Culture pushed into anthropology and discourse analysis.
Gender History, emerging in the 1970s and still active, exposed a profound blind spot in all earlier frameworks: the assumption that political violence was a male domain. Gender historians showed that violence was deeply gendered—both in its perpetration and its representation. Women were not merely passive victims; they participated in riots, revolutions, and resistance movements, often using gendered strategies (e.g., food riots, sexual violence as a weapon). Moreover, the very categories of 'public' and 'political' were constructed through gendered exclusions. A Gender History of Palestinian political violence, for instance, would examine how the intifada mobilized women in new roles, and how Israeli state violence targeted masculine honor as a form of control. This framework did not replace earlier ones but transformed them: after Gender History, no account of political violence could ignore how gender shaped both the causes and the experience of violence.
Postcolonial History, active from the 1980s, launched an even more fundamental critique. It argued that the entire historiography of political violence was Eurocentric. Historicism, Marxism, Annales, Social History—all had been developed to explain European experiences, and when applied to colonial contexts, they distorted or erased indigenous perspectives. Postcolonial historians insisted that colonial violence was not a deviation from European norms but constitutive of modernity itself. They drew attention to forms of anti-colonial violence that earlier frameworks had dismissed as 'primitive' or 'irrational,' such as the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya or the Haitian Revolution. Postcolonial History also challenged the state-centeredness of earlier frameworks, arguing that the modern state's monopoly on legitimate violence was itself a colonial imposition. This framework coexists with Gender History, and together they have pushed the field toward greater attention to race, empire, and subaltern agency.
Global History, rising in the 1990s and still influential, responded to a different limitation: the nation-state as the default unit of analysis. Even Postcolonial History often focused on individual colonial empires. Global historians argued that political violence must be studied across borders—as part of transnational networks, diasporas, and global flows of ideas and weapons. A Global History of Palestinian political violence would trace how the fedayeen drew on anti-colonial struggles in Algeria and Vietnam, how the Cold War superpowers armed different factions, and how the Palestinian cause became a global symbol. This framework does not replace Postcolonial History but extends it: where Postcolonial historians critique Eurocentrism, Global historians attempt to write histories that are genuinely multi-centered. Global History also revives some of the structural ambitions of Annales and Social History, but on a planetary scale, examining long-distance trade, migration, and environmental change as contexts for violence.
Today, the study of political violence is marked by productive pluralism. The leading frameworks—Gender History, New Political History, Political Culture, Postcolonial History, and Global History—coexist and intersect. They agree on several points: that political violence cannot be reduced to elite decisions or economic structures alone; that meaning, identity, and representation matter; and that the nation-state is not a natural container for analysis. But they also disagree. A key debate concerns the relative weight of structure versus culture: Global History and Social History (still influential in modified form) emphasize material constraints, while Political Culture and Gender History stress symbolic and discursive dimensions. Another debate revolves around scale: Global History advocates for transnational and planetary perspectives, while New Political History and Political Culture often prefer fine-grained local studies. Postcolonial historians caution that Global History can inadvertently reproduce Eurocentric narratives if it does not attend to power asymmetries. Marxist History, though no longer a leading framework, remains a living tradition, especially in analyses of economic inequality and state violence. The field's strength lies in this tension: no single framework claims a monopoly on explanation, and the most compelling work often combines insights from multiple approaches. The history of studying political violence is itself a story of successive challenges, each forcing historians to ask new questions and confront their own assumptions.