Amok: Framing Discourses on Political Violence by Means of Symbolic Logic

Abstract

After the then 32-year-old Anders Behring Breivik placed a car bomb outside the office of Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, he proceeded to the nearby island of Utya armed with a hunting rifle and a pistol. There, over the course of an hour in the early evening of 22 July 2011, he shot at the mainly young participants at a summer camp of the ruling Labour Party. Shortly beforehand, he had sent an English-language manifesto with the title “2083: A European Declaration of Independence” to roughly a thousand email addresses. In the 1,500-page screed, which Breivik had patched together from various ideologies and in parts simply copied from the internet, he sets out the abstruse motives for his attack and disseminates a world-view that is every bit as self-contradictory as it is radical.¹