Political violent activism in times of social turmoil: the life stories of former clandestine militants in Portugal

In the middle and late 20th century, six political violent organisations emerged in Portugal during the pre- and post-1974 revolutionary eras. These organisations were composed by individuals who aimed to achieve socio-political transformation in different contexts (dictatorial – 1962-1974 – and democratic – 1975-1987) and from different ideological positions (four organisations holding leftist ideals and two from an extreme right tradition). This paper focus on the interplay between the micro experiences of the actors of violence and the macro socio-political conditions of their time, answering the call for more in-depth studies on those carrying out acts of violence and for temporality in the study of political violence. Hence, this paper results from the conviction that in order to understand politically motivated violence and its actors, it is better to talk with them rather than about them. Its starting point is the belief that the life stories of former political violent activists can shed light on their decision-making processes which led them to engage with a political violent organisation, to remain a political violent militant for a certain period of time, and to finally disengage from the organisation and from violent struggle in general. This approach allowed the in-depth collection of life stories that compose a very thick description of the experiences of twenty-eight social actors, who at a certain point in time took the leap into political violence, but who are much more than former political violent activists. In this sense, this research attempts to represent both the violent and non-violent facets of these actors’ lives, the before and the after of political violent activism, in order to strengthen the argument that nobody is simply a political violent militant, but a social actor who contains various overlapping identities and acts according to his/her contextual circumstances (see Toros and Gunning, 2009; Toros, 2012). Furthermore, I consider that individual factors do not act in isolation and argue that times of social turmoil (the final turbulent years of a dictatorial regime, the euphoria of the Revolution and the tense beginning of the democratic process) help the conversion of intergenerational and contextual stimulus into personal agency for social and political change. Such an argument was first put forward by Molly Andrews (1991, 2007) in her research on political lives and commitment, and extended in this paper to the experiences of former political violent activists. Therefore, the theorisation of the life stories of former political violent activists is a new and desired development in the political violence literature (see Horgan, 2009b; Jackson, et al., 2014), which in this paper is framed by both narrative and critical theory, adding descriptive depth and conceptual sophistication to existent understandings of the subject. This approach differs from the traditional models on the topic led by mainstream terrorism studies’ scholars, who tend to rely on secondary data sources, producing and reproducing flat descriptions and explanations of the phenomenon, ignoring the voices and experiences of the actors of violence.