Today, even after the slaughter of two world wars, the genocide of European Jewry and the creation of the United Nations, the world has often seemed no less violent than before. The contemporary forms of violence are so varied and complex, occurring at such different levels and in such widely different contexts, that their specific links tp capitalism and imperialism need a fresh understanding. This volume paints on a broader canvass, with most of the essays analyzing the nature and roots of paradigmatic cases and types of violence today around the world.

- Reflections of violence today
- The defence of humanity requires the radicalization of popular struggles
- American militarism and the US political establishment: the real lessons of the invasion of Iraq
- On-screen barbarism: violence in US visual culture
- Race, prisons and war: scenes from the history of US violence
- State talk, state silence: work and 'violence' in UK
- Violence's victims: the gender landscape
- Girls as disposable commodities in India
- India's paradigmatic communal violence
- Reflections on Indonesian violence: two tales and three silences
- Colombia: old and new patterns of violence
- The commodification of violence in the Niger Delta
- Revolutionaries, barbarians or war machines? Gangs in Nicaragua and South Africa
- Emancipation and the left: the issue of violence
- Human shield.