These papers are the proceedings of the 3rd international working conference on violence and non-violent action in industrialized societies, held in Brussels, on November 3rd-5th, 1976. Political violence is generally understood to be violence used by people who seek to change the existing power structure through rebellion, revolution, coup d’état, etc. It is much less studied from its opposite angle, as violence used by people who seek to consolidate their powerful positions. Such violence from above’ however, was the subject of an international conference on Repression and Repressive Violence’, which was organized by the Polemological Centre of the Free University of Brussels (v u b ). The conference provided a unique opportunity for bringing together a number of scholars who had been working on the subject of repressive violence separately, each within his/her scientific discipline