“Political violence is experiencing a significant increase with a doubling of attacks over the past ten years” | EUROtoday

Isabelle Sommier, specialist in social actions and political violence, is professor of political sociology on the University of Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne and researcher on the European Center for Sociology and Political Science (CNRS, Paris-I, EHESS).

She co-edited the work Political violence in France. From 1986 to the current (Sciences Po Les Presses, 2021), which collected and analyzed 6,000 incidents of political violence in opposition to property or folks (vandalism, assaults, clashes, assassinations, and so on.) between 1986 and 2017. Today it gives us with the outcomes of a brand new research protecting the next interval, from 2017 to immediately.

How has political violence developed during the last ten years?

In the brand new database that we created through the interval 2017-2026, we observe an general improve within the variety of political violence, particularly for the reason that 2022 presidential marketing campaign. There have already been 2,300 incidents of violence in lower than ten years, in comparison with 5,500 through the first interval of our work which lined the earlier thirty years, from 1986 to 2017.

During this primary interval, violence between political teams was common, however the majority had been clashes between the extremes. The figures we see immediately are out of all proportion to this era. Over the previous ten years, political violence has seen a big improve with a doubling of assaults and a five-fold improve within the variety of clashes. Furthermore, the assaults are extra extreme, and 6 deaths have already been recorded since 2022, all as a consequence of radical proper activists. For comparability, there have been 57 deaths linked to violence between political teams from 1986 to 2017 – 52 from the unconventional proper and 5 from the unconventional left.

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