Repression and Repressive Violence

These papers are the proceedings of the 3rd international working conference on violence and non-violent action in industrialized societies held in Brussels on November 3rd-5th 1976. Political violence is generally understood to be violence used by people who seek to change the existing power structure through rebellion revolution coup d’état etc. It is much less studied from its opposite angle as violence used by people who seek to consolidate their powerful positions. Such violence from above’ however was the subject of an international conference on Repression and Repressive Violence’ which was organized by the Polemological Centre of the Free University of Brussels (v u b ). The conference provided a unique opportunity for bringing together a number of scholars who had been working on the subject of repressive violence separately each within his/her scientific discipline