How can disruption and violence condition protest success, and how can they be legitimized? Where does civil disobedience end and radical protest begin? Potential answers to these controversial questions, as well as attempts at defining the concept of violence, are tied to ontological, normative, and epistemological presuppositions that shape the positionality of those providing those answers. This introduction takes stock of recent empirical and theoretical debates on the (non)violence-resistance-nexus to argue that attempts at objectively determining essentially political concepts are futile if they remain decoupled from the empirical and normative contexts that produce them. Consequently, we highlight several ways how scholars investigating violent phenomena and their social, temporal, relational, and discursive embedding may position themselves vis-à-vis their object of study, in an attempt to move the fragmented debate on (non)violence in the context of social mobilization towards a more situated and differentiated discussion.