Explaining resilience to political violence and terrorism

Finland has experienced little political violence in the recent decades. The same ideas and models that have inspired people to violence in other countries have found their admirers in Finland too, but this has only very rarely led to actual violence.

The project project sets to find explanations for the lack of violence in post-war Finland. By doing this, it sets to contribute to the debates within the research on Finnish society, history and politics.

The main goal of the project, however, is to further the theoretical understanding of political violence. Almost all studies on political violence concentrate solely on cases in which there have been significant levels of political violence. This means that we have few studies that would have tested the explanatory power of existing theories by setting them against cases in which no political violence has occurred and explored conditions and dynamics that provide resilience to political violence.

The project is funded by the Emil Aaltonen Foundation.