Violence is the first means and the last resort to pacify a people, and thus is something we need to continue to consider after the gunfire has ended.

The grand schemes of liberation, however indistinct and amorphous, can quickly be compromised, consumed by petty disputes and local hatreds.

Violence is the first means and the last resort to pacify a people, and thus is something we need to continue to consider after the gunfire has ended.

Violence is used to suppress a people in a most blatantly crude way. We can historicize and contextualize it. We can analyze the Algerian situation, its history and so forth, and question whether that is anything like the situation we face today. But, this is only one way to understand why violence becomes so important.

Political change does not really lead to any fundamental change for most of the people, indeed because politics (even if it calls itself democratic) is elitist and barred to most people, so it is necessary to look to new movements outside of "politics."

Manicheanism is like a vacuum, it is an either or situation that curtails or destroys the development of liberatory thought.

If you look at social movements in Latin America, there are spaces where alternative politics are thought about on the ground, at the grassroots level, but they are always under threat. The problem in North Africa and the Middle East is the politics of oil. It means that the spaces for truly grassroots politics, involving those masses of people excluded from high politics, are very quickly closed down. They are not really allowed any kind of autonomy to develop, and that seems to be the real problem, which gets us back to the neo-colonial relationship.