Graduating to Violence: The Escalation of Student Strife at Karachi University, 1979–1989

Social sciences and political science in particular have generally been moreconcerned with the “root causes” or “raw conditions” ofpolitical violence than with the way it unfolds. Dominant approaches havehitherto focused on why men rebel, kill, and get killed, rather than how. Butthis search for “background explanations”, based on thestudy of motivations and opportunities, exposes itself to severalpitfalls. The first consists in assigning motivations to these actors—and particularlythose involved in acts of self-sacrificial violence—without even bothering to consider what they have to say about their own actions, resulting in “fictions that justify our responses but that we cannotverify”. And when social scientists do bother to talk to theseactors, it is generally to record narratives of past engagement and violence,which often leads to conflating their justifications with their motivations,while—wrongly—assuming that “violence is easy once the motivationexists..