At the core of this seminar course is the question: what work does violent protest perform in social movements? The first part of the course will work to outline the conceptual boundaries of violent protest, considering how involved actors struggle over the classification of actions as violent. The second part of the course will consider the multi-layered purposes of violence from the perspective of the activists who use it. This section will demonstrate how strategic considerations interact with emotional and cognitive factors in violent collective action. We will also discuss how groups negotiate the limits, purposes, and meanings of violence. The final section will examine how the contexts and contents of violent protest events— actor composition, temporal and spatial arrangement, inciting events — shape the field of action. Through engaging with core literature in social movement and contentious politics studies, the course will provide students with a theoretical foundation for considering the multi-layered and interactive forms and functions of violent protest. In addition, the course will be built around recurring engagement with a small number of contemporary cases in liberal democracies around the world. This will allow students to re-engage with and compare familiar cases with new tools throughout the semester.