This book offers a psychosocial perspective on political violence, employing a strong current of psychoanalytic thinking. In the course of its chapters an international roster of researchers and scholars offers a richly complex and insightful view of diverse forms of political violence and its build-ups. The authors discuss the processes by which the ground for political violence is prepared, and how violent acts are facilitated. They question how social, cultural and political constellations can develop in such a way that, for certain people in this constellation, violence becomes a logical perversely reasonable response. This collection demonstrates what a psychoanalytic perspective can bring to existing approaches to political violence, going beyond the social movement approach by unfolding the inherent ambiguity in accepted concepts within the study of political violence.

Steffen Krüger is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, Norway. He develops critical, psychosocial approaches to media texts and discourses. 

Karl Figlio is in private psychoanalytic practice, and is also Professor Emeritus within the Department for Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, at the University of Essex, UK. His research includes psychoanalytic methodology, fundamentalism, memory and reparation.

Fomenting Political Violence An Introduction; Steffen Krüger with Karl Figlio and Barry Richards.- Chapter 1: 'Fighting for something great ...: Intergenerational constellations and functions of self-culturalisation for adolescents in migrant families; Vera King.- Chapter 2: A most brutal and implacable superego: Understanding the pseudo-political violence of the Islamic State; Barry Richards.- Chapter 3: Pussy Riot, or The return of the repressed in discourse; Maria Brock.- Chapter 4: Violence and the Virtual: Right-wing, anti-asylum Facebook pages and the fomenting of political violence; Steffen Krüger.- Chapter 5: Shaping prejudice? Holocaust remembrance and the narrative of German suffering; Roger Frie.- Chapter 6: The Rhetorical Satisfactions of Hate Speech; James Martin.- Chapter 7: Fundamentalism and the Delusional Creation of an Enemy; Karl Figlio.- Chapter 8: Spatialization and the Fomenting of Political Violence; Deborah Wright.- Chapter 9: Four Monuments and a Funeral Pathological Mourning and Collective Memory in Contemporary Hungary; Jeffrey Murer.-Chapter 10: Darwin, Freud, and Group Conflict; Jim Hopkins.