Sex, Violence, and the Avant-Garde examines the French anarchist movement between the wars from a socio-cultural perspective, considering the relationship between anarchism and the artistic avant-garde and surrealism, political violence and terrorism, sexuality and sexual politics, and gender roles.

This is the first global history of the secret diplomatic and police campaign that was waged against anarchist terrorism from 1878 to the 1920s. Anarchist terrorism was at that time the dominant form of terrorism and for many continued to be synonymous with terrorism as late as the 1930s. Ranging from Europe and the Americas to the Middle East and Asia, Richard Bach Jensen explores how anarchist terrorism emerged as a global phenomenon during the first great era of economic and social globalization at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries and reveals why some nations were so much more successful in combating this new threat than others. He shows how the challenge of dealing with this new form of terrorism led to the fundamental modernization of policing in many countries and also discusses its impact on criminology and international law.

Since the early 2000s, global, underground networks of insurrectionary anarchists have carried out thousands of acts of political violence. This book is an exploration of the ideas, strategies, and history of these political actors that engage in a confrontation with the oppressive powers of the state and capital. This book challenges the reader to consider the historically ignored articulations put forth by those who communicate through sometimes violent political acts-vandalism, sabotage, arson and occasional use of explosives. These small acts of violence are announced and contextualized through written communiqués, which are posted online, translated, and circulated globally. This book offers the first contemporary history of these digitally-mediated networks, and seeks to locate this tendency within anti-state struggles from the past.

Louisa Sarah Bevington (born St John's Hill, Battersea, Surrey, now London Borough of Wandsworth, 14 May 1845; died Lechmere Road, Willesden Green, Middlesex, now London Borough of Brent, 28 November 1895) was an English anarchist, essayist and poet. Among those who attended her funeral was Peter Kropotkin. She began to write poetry at an early age, probably appearing first with two sonnets in the Friends' Quarterly Examiner in October 1871. Bevington's first collection, the 23-page Key Notes, appeared in London in 1876 under the pseudonym Arbor Leigh. A second publication, Key-Notes: 1879, appeared under the name L. S. Bevington and seemed to query some established Christian codes of conduct.