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Clandestine political violence, by Donatella Della Porta

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DOI: 10.1080/17539153.2014.982929

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 Critical Studies on Terrorism, 2014

BOOK REVIEW

Clandestine political violence, by Donatella Della Porta, Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press, 2013, 326 pp., £21.99 (paperback), ISBN 9780521146166

Since her comparative analysis of the development of German and Italian radical move-
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ments leading to the emergence in the 1960s of armed and clandestine forms of political
contestation (Della Porta 1995), Donatella Della Porta has produced numerous insightful
analyses on German and Italian episodes of contentious politics. Her impressive body of
research, embracing the richness and diversity of the latest social movement theories, is
firmly anchored in one key epistemological principle that could be expressed in a simple
and yet engaging way: because violence is dynamic, relational and multifaceted, it should
be understood and analysed as such. Isolating violence from its social and political
backgrounds, or ignoring the organisational mechanisms at stake within small close-tied
groups, or overlooking personal motives, tends to reduce drastically our ability to under-
stand the genesis and evolution of armed and clandestine forms of political contestation
(Della Porta 2008). The analysis of the sociopolitical sequences of action and contexts and
of interrelationships between social structures, political contexts and biographical expo-
sure in which violence is embedded is key to understanding the processes that lead to
extreme political violence, that is radicalisation (Della Porta and LaFree 2012).
In Clandestine Political Violence, Donatella Della Porta aims to present what should be
a comprehensive relational and dynamic explanatory model of political violence, weaving
together environmental conditions (macro level), group dynamics and organisational beha-
viours (mezzo) with individual impetuses and motives (micro). Della Porta draws upon her
previous research into the 1970s radical left in both Italy and Germany, the radical right in
Italy and her cogent understanding of the complex ethno-nationalist Basque separatist
movement. She also carefully uses a more topical strand of academic literature dedicated
to contemporary religious extremism with a specific emphasis on Al-Qaeda. Della Porta
ushers her reader forthrightly through the mechanisms at stake within the realm of high-risk
and high-cost political activism and its fatal conclusion.
Clandestine Political Violence is divided into three main sections exploring either the
mechanisms of radicalisation (Chapters 2–4) or the logics of persistence of violence
(Chapters 5–8) or the causes of decline of political violence (Chapters 9 and 10). In the
first part, while stating that episodes of political violence tend to emerge within protest
cycles, Della Porta recalls the impact of protest policing on social movements (Chapter 2,
32–69), highlighting how tough repression “increases the perception that there is no other
way out” (68), before suggesting how internal competition within a clandestine organisa-
tion is also an important causal mechanism in radicalisation (Chapter 3, 70–112). In the
chapter dedicated to militant networks (113–145), Della Porta offers her view on how the
context and organisational structure influence the type of individuals who are recruited.
In the second section of Clandestine Political Violence, focusing on the causes of
perseverance of violence, Della Porta starts with the issue of organisational compartmen-
talisation (Chapter 5, 146–173). When groups become more and more isolated and
detached from a larger movement, violence arises more fiercely. Compartmentalisation
 2 Book review

leads to what she calls a “spiral of encapsulation” that eventually leads to deadly
factionalism. In Chapter 6 (174–203), she comments on the choice of action and the
transformation in the strategy deployed within a clandestine organisation, while in the
following chapter (204–234) she focuses on the ideological production and the evolution
of the narratives used within clandestine organisations and how it affects the militants’
understanding of their realities. In the final chapter dedicated to the understanding of the
persistence of violence, Della Porta comes back to the thorny issue of solidarity within
radical groups (Chapter 8, “Militant enclosure”, 235–262), highlighting how participation
in violent activities creates affective and cognitive resources that link individuals to their
organisations.
The final section of Clandestine Political Violence attempts to reverse the fatalistic
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direction of the previous chapters by showing how the same mechanisms that fuel
violence can also trigger mechanisms of disengagement. The death of a comrade or the
experience of jail can either push someone over the edge or, on the contrary, discourage
someone from taking any further action. It all depends on the larger situation (type of
political regime, level of repression and degree of closure of the political system), the
longevity, the type of support and the internal dynamics of the organisation under
consideration and what is happening at the level of the individual (social background,
degree of participation to the organisation and motives) – where none of these explana-
tions is sufficient in itself nor exclusive to each other. Bursts of extreme violence are a
product of social, institutional and organisational circumstances strangely tangled together
where, for Della Porta, the act of going underground (whether as an organisation and/or as
an individual) is a major causal explanation in the chain of interactions that leads to the
persistence and escalation of ferocious violence.
Della Porta’s invitation to focus on the interrelationships between social and political
contexts and biographical exposure, between organisational structures and individual per-
ceptions, is to be praised as a commendable and sophisticated move towards a more
integrated analysis of how words, acts, spaces, time, actors and logistics of violence
perform, interact, interpret and interrupt at the micro, macro and mezzo levels. Two
interlocking problems mar Clandestine Political Violence, however. The first is found in
the use of conceptual categories. “Terrorism” is certainly an equivocal and controversial
word that carries negative representations and infamous narratives about the disruption of
ordinary politics. Donatella cautiously reminds her reader about the necessity to avoid the
term for these reasons, and suggests why the concept of clandestine political violence
should be favoured instead (6–7). But does it capture a more coherent set of practices and
situations? Clandestine political violence is presented and used all the way through as a
specific form of violence or a particular repertoire of violence (176) used by oppositional
groups (6) or political groups active in the underground (282). The two defining elements –
extreme violence and underground – reciprocally warrant one another in a process of
circular reasoning: clandestine violence is an extreme form of violence perpetrated by
clandestine groups. This functional (and tautological) definition might be merely a logical
consequence of researching violence within the context of contemporary currents of
political radicalisation. If one accepts the view that radicalisation always precedes violence,
it becomes more difficult to describe and interpret violence otherwise (Baker-Beall, Heath-
Kelly, and Jarvis 2014).
The second issue is that the book’s central term underground remains very slippery.
Dissimulation or insulation from ordinary public politics does not necessarily mean
violence, as the Soviet catacomb culture in Moscow or the Prague underground in the
1960s and 1970s suggests. Furthermore, it is not because a group is going off the grid that
 Critical Studies on Terrorism 3

violence emerges automatically and immediately. Forced into exile and to hide in the
Basque mountains after the first arrests in 1961, it took nearly eight years for ETA to
finally embrace armed struggle, and it mainly came from militants who were actually
living in plain sight on the other side of the Spanish border, in France. Finally, going
underground is not always synonymous with isolation. Even if the FLNC in Corsica used
the clichéd image of the scrubland (maquis) in its communication and in its representa-
tions, going off the grid in Corsica meant mostly being protected by the unquestioned rule
of hospitality. There is no doubt that the term underground is a rather elusive topological
notion. It certainly calls for conceptual clarification. Perhaps a first step would be actually
to question rather than to accept the 1960s counterinsurgency view of the underground as
the initial stage of insurgency (Rohde 2013). Della Porta’s use of memoirs and life stories
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to flesh out the experience of going underground is compelling and could provide an
exciting foray into a sociology of the underground. Unfortunately, there is a degree of
unevenness in the evidence provided. Furthermore, these documents are complex materi-
als to be handled with great care. The storytelling abilities of their authors – both in terms
of reliability and literary quality – need to be evaluated, and the conformity one might find
across them is not necessarily hard evidence but more stylistic narrative. Had Donatella
done so, her argument would have been perhaps different but strengthened.
The two interlocking issues – radicalisation as an inescapable framework of analysis
and underground as a distinctive causal mechanism – are linked into a sometimes
misleading and premature closure of the subterranean insistence of time on making,
reconfiguring and breaking habits, views and justification of violence. Put differently, it
is of significance that for example the Baader-Meinhof gang found a few months under-
ground hard to cope with, whereas for the Basque separatists and the IRA years of
subterranean existence came to be the norm. Clandestine Political Violence is certainly
a welcome, ambitious political and sociologically-oriented work, but one that unfortu-
nately does not deliver on all its promises.

References
Baker-Beall, C., C. Heath-Kelly, and L. Jarvis, eds. 2014. Counter-radicalisation: Critical
Perspectives. London: Routledge.
Della Porta, D. 1995. Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State: A Comparative Analysis
of Italy and Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Della Porta, D. 2008. “Research on Social Movements and Political Violence.” Qualitative
Sociology 31 (3): 221–230. doi:10.1007/s11133-008-9109-x.
Della Porta, D., and G. LaFree. 2012. “Processes of Radicalization and De-Radicalization.”
International Journal of Conflict and Violence 6 (1): 4–10.
Rohde, J. 2013. Armed with Expertise. The Militarization of American Social Research during the
Cold War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Emmanuel-Pierre Guittet
School of Social Sciences, Politics, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
Email: Emmanuel-Pierre.Guittet@Manchester.ac.uk
© 2014, Emmanuel-Pierre Guittet
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17539153.2014.982929

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