Violence in Peaceful Times: Welfare and Coercion in Europe Since 1945 - Prof. Dr. Pavel Kolář­­

This book project traces the history of state violence in European ‘peaceful times’ from 1945 to the present. It seeks to qualify the established optimistic accounts which see violence progressively disappear during this period. Exploring the question of the meaning of violence in peace, my research is organised around the argument that state violence did not continually decrease, but was instead, within the context of the expanding welfare state, directed at the social margins and gradually removed from the public eye. By rendering state violence ‘scientific’, it allegedly became more ‘civilized’ and thus less visible. I develop a transnational perspective on state violence across the Iron Curtain and the following geopolitical divisions, arguing that the governmentalisation of violence played a growing role in the legitimisation of all political systems. The overarching goal is thus to illuminate the changing relationship between repressive and consensual strategies of domination. Aspects of violence are explored that in most histories of Europe have not been adequately taken into account. These include riot police, surveillance, border regimes, capital punishment, violence in prisons and educational institutions as well as domestic and medical violence. Each thematic field considers the impact of key historical turning points on the use of state violence, e.g. 1956 de-Stalinization, the 1968 revolt, the 1970s terrorism, the fall of communism in 1989, the fight against terrorism since 2001 and the 2015 refugees’ crisis.