Resulting from a workshop held last year in Jena, my colleagues Christian Faludi, Marko Kreutzmann and Thomas Kroll have published an edited volume on the tensions between freedom and violence in the European revolutions of 1848/49.
My own contribution to the volume, titled
Ambivalenzen: Neue Perspektiven auf die Geschichte revolutionärer Gewalt 1848/49
[Ambivalences: New Perspectives on the History of Revolutionary Violence 1848/49]
surveys the historical research on the role of violence in the context of the revolutions of 1848/49, identifying three perspectives that have gained new attention in recent years. Besides fruitful new perspectives on the role of structural violence and of the escalatory dynamic of “spaces of violence”, I argue that future research could benefit from a more sustained attention to the role of potential violence. What I call the history of violence “in the subjunctive” traces how contemporaries’ expectations of violence, hopes and fears, influenced how they acted in the revolutionary context.
I thank the editors for their thorough and remarkably fast work in getting this volume together. I’m looking forward to reading the other contributions.
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