Donatella della Porta's Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State crosses four important thresholds in the comparative study of political conflict: the violence/social movement threshold, the movement/institutions threshold, the comparative politics/sociology threshold, and the history/social science threshold.

Beginning with the attacks on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, a virtual cottage industry of terrorist studies developed. Rooted in the international system, largely innocent of theoretical apparatus, and often conflating terrorism with other forms of violent conflict, these studies produced much new knowledge, but drew little on the social movement field that was undergoing a renaissance at the same time. The first major virtue of della Porta's book is that she has grounded her analysis of political violence in Italy and Germany in both European and American social movement theory. This allows her to show how the organized violence of the 1970s and 1980s in these two countries related to the social movements that appeared during the previous decade.

Della Porta's second contribution is to root the study of social movements within political institutions. Research on social movements languished in the backwaters of sociology and social psychology until the late 1960s and was largely ignored by political scientists. But the flowering of the civil rights and student movements in the United States and of the “new” social movements of Western Europe in the 1970s led to a resurgence and “normalization” of this field. Della Porta situates her study in this tradition, relating the movements she studies to the political process.