Government Violence and Repression: An Agenda for Research

In this book, written by social scientists for social scientists and building on an earlier volume, The State as Terrorist, the authors spend much of their energies in establishing definitions, classifications and theories to fit the multifarious phenomena of "state terrorism." One enlightening chapter shows how "national security ideology" has become the rationale for terror and repression in Latin America. Another and certainly controversial chapter compares the records of the United States and the Soviet Union on various forms of state terrorism-and here one catches the "anti-imperialist" tone of much of the book-to the definite disadvantage of the U.S. There are indeed in this "agenda" many judgments, explicit or tacit, interspersed among the definitions and theories.