Understanding the next act

Abstract The practitioner and analyst of Russian unconventional warfare in 1812, Denis Davydov, distinguished three levels of violence: (big) war, small war, and “burning one or two granaries” (Laqueur 1976, p. 46), for which he had no name and which I shall call small violence, or microviolence; even if passenger terminals of metropolitan airports or 747s were, in the near future, to be substituted for granaries. What differentiates microviolence—a mere quantity— is that with “small war” you may expect to impose substantial attrition on the enemy at least over the long run, and with “microviolence” not even that. The numerous writings concerned with “urban guerrillas” and modern “terrorists” have focused on what they do, and—to some extent—on what makes them do it: which environments and personalities dispose to microviolence. Even the most sophisticated treatments, such as the recent analyses by J. Bowyer Bell and Walter Laqueur, do not systematically consider what they thought they were doing, precisel...