Progressive Geographies  provides a link to a new site exploring the Histories of Violence, a project which goes live next week on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. On a related theme, Erica Chenoweth’s blog Rational Insurgent  provides a detailed resource for thinking about nonviolent politics (a detailed overview of the practice of nonviolent politics and civil resistance is provided by the edited volume Civil Resistance and Power Politics). Chenoweth has an interesting piece in Foreign Policy examining the relevance of this strand of thought and action in the context of the Arab Spring. I suspect her argument would not convince Zizek, who used the riots in the UK last month to reiterate the broad argument about political violence he has been making for some time now.  Zizek’s piece, with its impatience towards deliberating, self-organising protesters and its longing for “a strong body able to reach quick decisions and to implement them with all necessary harshness”, reiterates the themes raised by the ‘debate‘ between Zizek and Simon Critchley a couple of years ago about how to think about the relationship between violence and non-violence in ethics and politics (most of the discussion was from Critchley, certainly all of the interesting thinking). Hamid Dabashi provides a smart and succinct riposte to Zizek’s most recent anaysis.