This book, an outcome of an international conference entitled "State Organized Terror: The Case of Violent Internal Repression", addresses the antecedent structural factors conducive to state organized terror and provides insights into the political and social psychology of state terror.

Introduction -- State Organized Terror: Tragedy of the Modern State -- Repression, State Terrorism, and Genocide: Conceptual Clarifications -- The Structural Sources of State Organized Terror -- Domination, State Power, and Political Repression -- Sources of State Terrorism in Rural Central America -- Repression and State Terror in Kenya: 1982–1988 -- The Development of the Secret Police in Communist States -- Social Dynamics and the Disutility of Terror: Afghanistan, 1978–1989 -- Terror as an Instrument of State Policy -- The Ideological Governance of Perception in the Use of State Terror in Latin America: The Case of Argentina -- Violent Repression in the Third Reich: Did It Stabilize Hitler's Rule? -- The Refractory Aspect of Terror in Movement-Regimes -- Genocidal Targeting: Two Groups of Victims in Pol Pot's Cambodia -- Genocide of a Religious Group: Pol Pot and Cambodia's Buddhist Monks -- The Social and Political Psychology of State Terror -- The Rajk Trial and the Captive Mind in Hungary, 1949 -- Popular Support for the Soviet Political Trials of the Late 1920s and the Origins of the Great Purges -- The Politics of Paranoia: Jonestown and Twentieth Century Totalitarianism -- Suicides and Suicide Survivors of the Cultural Revolution -- Coda: Enter the Demon