Anatomy of the Red Brigades

An award-winning attempt to understand the logic of revolutionary terrorism.

Alessandro Orsini is professor of political sociology in the Faculty of Political Science, LUISS University of Rome "Guido Carli." He also teaches at the University of Rome "Tor Vergata" and is the author of several books in Italian.

This is a compelling and accessible book that would benefit both scholars and practitioners in the field of terrorism and political violence. The Red Brigades were one of the most important terrorist groups in modern history. Alessandro Orsini has made an enormous scholarly contribution that explains why. In this way, Orsini's study is not only an explication of the Red Brigades, their background and modus operandi, but is also an examination into the timeless nature of terrorism itself.

The book will be relevant to scholars not just interested in collective violence, but scholars who are interested in the dogmatization process of terrorists groups, of political ideology, and support for dictators in the contemporary world. This is a uniquely organized book, and it is my assessment that scholars in the future will be comparing it with Christopher Browning's monograph on Nazi holocaust, Ordinary Men.

Lawrence D. Freedman:

Are terrorists mad, bad, or a combination of the two? It takes a special sort of mind to prepare to kill large numbers of people on the basis of highly speculative political analysis. Orsini's remarkable book gets as close to any to understanding this sort of thinking.

Alessandro Orsini has presented us with a book of high scholarly distinction. Anatomy of the Red Brigades is a tour de force of intellectual history and a major attempt to explain both the Italian experience with terrorism and terrorism in general.

Ryan Shaffer:

Anatomy of the Red Brigades successfully fills a gap in the scholarship by looking at a religious mindset when examining a form of terrorism that is not intrinsically connected to religion.

Spencer DiScala, University of Massachusetts Boston:

What if the terrorism that shook the Western world from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s were unconnected to the economic, political, and social conditions? It is this possibility that Alessandro Orsini examines in this extraordinarily well-researched and well-documented book. Orsini has discovered that the terrorist mind-set always exists just below the surface, is difficult to cope with, is difficult to change, is irrational, and is likely to resurface at any time under conditions we cannot predict.

Dante Notaristefano, President of the Italian Association of Victims of Terrorism:

Alessandro Orsini dissects and analyses the roots of the political ideology of the Red Brigades. Even in a context of academic study, his talent is that of describing everything with great clarity, producing an analysis executed in a plain language which avoids any erudite intellectualism.... The book has at least two further merits. The first is that of showing the killing power of Red Brigade ideology based on the dehumanization of the Red Brigades' political enemies, a process which occurs within a psychological power, an emotional force field, called 'the revolutionary sect.’ The second is its timeliness. The book closes with a chapter devoted to the right-wing Black Brigades of the Seventies, but we are sure it can facilitate the understanding of terrorism as a cultural phenomenon even in its new modern forms, namely those that stretch their tragic and criminal reach into our daily lives.