Book excerpt: Context is crucial to understanding the causes of political violence. This book examines how time, space and supportive milieux shape its pattern and pace. While much existing work focuses on individual psychology or radical ideology, it looks at how context generates mobilisation and shapes patterns of violence. Cases range from Asia, Africa and Europe to the Americas, and encompass separatist guerrillas, Marxist insurgents, Islamist militants, nationalist insurrectionists and the urban violence that has emerged at the boundary between crime and politics