Mathias Thaler is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Edinburgh. His main research interest is in contemporary political theory. He is currently working on a project analysing the utopian dimensions in current debates around climate change.

Mihaela Mihai is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests cut across political and social theory, history and aesthetics. More precisely, she has written on political emotions, political judgment, the politics of memory, art and politics.

Political violence and the imagination: an introduction
1. Understanding complicity: memory, hope and the imagination
2. The arts of refusal: tragic unreconciliation, pariah humour, and haunting laughter
3. How America disguises its violence: colonialism, mass incarceration, and the need for resistant imagination
4. The subversive potential of Leo Tolstoy's 'defamiliarisation': a case study in drawing on the imagination to denounce violence
5. Our wildest imagination: violence, narrative, and sympathetic identification
6. On representation(s): art, violence and the political imaginary of South Africa
7. The art and politics of imagination: remembering mass violence against women

Using a variety of theoretical reflections and empirically grounded case studies, this book examines how certain kinds of imagination - political, artistic, historical, philosophical - help us tackle the challenge of comprehending and responding to various forms of political violence.