How Can We Conceptualise Paramilitary Violence in 1940s’ Europe?

There is no coherent explanatory framework for the study of the multiple and diverse instances of paramilitarism that occurred across Europe in the 1940s. Because of this, it is not possible to understand fully the emergence and nature of paramilitary movements or paramilitarised societies, let alone the connections between them. We address the problem of incoherence and fragmentation in the scholarship by proposing an alternative method for the analysis and comparison of paramilitary violence in Europe in the tumultuous decade of the 1940s.