Terrorism as Performance: The Assassinations of Walther Rathenau and Hanns-Martin Schleyer
According to Martin Juergensmeyer, terrorist acts are always defined by their performative character. This chapter connects this “performance violence” with the question of control. It is assumed that the language of violence speaks with its own attraction irrespective of the political field into which it is inserted. To test this assumption, the author asks how the reading of terrorist acts can be compared over time and across political divides, finding surprising family resemblances between the narratives of the Freikorps killers in the Weimar Republic and those of the street guerrillas of the Red Army Faction, although they seem to be worlds apart in politics and ideology. Ulrike Meinhof herself has rejected any idea of such a genealogy, but it can be shown that in categories of symbolic performance the voluntarism of violence appears to provide some common ground for the escalation or the control of these violent acts.
The Art of Hunger
By the tenth and final collective hunger strike in 1989, the West German public had grown tired, and the Red Army Faction (RAF) prisoners, for their part, had grown both sick and tired.2 The hunger strike declaration from February 1989 combined familiar demands with a new tone of desperation and a recognition of the physical toll the campaign of selfstarvation had taken: “We have embarked on nine hunger strikes, two prisoners have died as a result, the health of many of us has suffered. Now this eighteen-year-long torture must end.” 3 Exhaustion had dulled it, and historic circumstances had marched by the RAF strategy of political self-starvation, but for a decade and a half the collective hunger strike shaped West German terrorism and counterterrorism. The carefully choreographed spectacle of hunger dragged the organization up from its knees after the arrest of its leaders, it helped underpin a RAF prison identity, and it allowed the group to confront what it saw as a mainstream medicalization of terror. The performative strength of the hunger campaigns rested on Meinhof’s ability to tailor the RAF struggle to the prison environment by encoding the starving prisoner with the group’s established rhetoric and victimhood during the three major strikes of the first generation.4
Achievements and contradictions of the Peruvian agrarian reform
Different paths of transition to capitalist agriculture, as well as different types of agrarian reform, can be distinguished. The Peruvian agrarian reform is analysed within this context and evaluated in terms of its contribution to rural development. The Peruvian case underlines the importance of understanding the rationality of the pre‐existent agrarian system for a successful restructuring of the agrarian economy and society. The contradictions which arose between the State's model and the peasants’ model of agrarian reform, as well as those between different types of peasants, are discussed. Peru's experience is also a reminder that a land reform is not a sufficient condition for rural development unless accompanied by proper price, marketing, credit and investment policies.