Abstract
Drawing on Norbert Elias’ concept of “figuration,” this article argues against treating armed groups as static, autonomous units (reification) and instead advocates for analyzing forms of political violence as shifting socio-spatial configurations. By analyzing political violence as a dynamic web of interdependencies between actors and their environments, this perspective offers three key advantages: it establishes a morphology based on recurring relational patterns, captures the fluid, processual nature of political violence, and bridges separate research fields. Two empirical episodes are used to illustrate how socio-spatial relations shift and evolve–and contribute to the transformation of the configuration of political violence over time and across space: the Provisional IRA (Irish Republican Army) in Northern Ireland, between 1969 and 1977, and al-Jamaa al-Islamiyya in Egypt, between 1980 and 1998.
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