The Return of Political Violence: A Conversation With Robert Pape

If there’s a thread that connects unsettling trends across domestic and international affairs today, it’s the return of forms of violence that we once thought were more or less obsolete. That’s true of the return of political violence in the United States. It’s also true of the ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine.

Robert Pape is a political scientist at the University of Chicago and the founding director of the Chicago Project on Security & Threats. He has made a career of studying these types of violence—whether carried out by American extremists, by suicide bombers, or by Russian or Israeli fighter jets. In a series of pieces in Foreign Affairs, he explains why all of these phenomena are likely to endure—including, in the wake of the U.S. presidential election, with what he calls an era of violent populism here at home.

He spoke with Foreign Affairs editor Dan Kurtz-Phelan on October 30 about the resurgence of these forms of violence—and the consequences for the United States and the world.

You can find transcripts and more episodes of The Foreign Affairs Interview at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/podcasts/foreign-affairs-interview.