Abstract

Fear of violence seems to become a prevailing political driving force. There is a lot of talk nowadays about the transformations that hallmark the practices of violence, with regard to the “new wars” and especially to urban violence. But at the same time, we can see that these changes in violence take place in a world that claims to be more and more peaceful and pacifying, in a world where security tends to become the supreme societal value, the dominant public good of all communities. A strange cohabitation is settling in: on one hand, a self-regenerated frenzy of violence feeds and perpetuates fear as a factor of destabilization; on the other hand, the obsession with security leads to types of politics intended only to fight against the fear of violence