The Logic of Violence (2002)

Psychology of Violence, 2011

Violence scholarship has focused primarily on accumulating new empirical findings. Theoretical advances, however, are also essential for synthesizing and organizing empirical knowledge in ways that can advance research, prevention, intervention and policy. The articles in this special issue of Psychology of Violence represent the beginnings of a second wave of violence scholarship. There have been many calls for multi-factorial approaches to understanding violence, but most of these are fairly general injunctions to include individual, family, and social factors, which seldom include specific analyses about how these factors intersect. In contrast, the articles included here present detailed, nuanced analyses of how specific mechanisms interrelate with each other. These mechanisms include neurobiological processes such as arousal, social cognitive processes such as automatic cognitions, relational processes such as attachment, and macrosystem processes that affect entire communities and societies. These analyses have been applied to peer victimization, sexual victimization, criminal offending, intimate partner violence, suicide, global warming, and to the commonalities among all forms of interpersonal violence. One important outcome of these authors' work is new insights for actionable steps to improve prevention, intervention, and policy.

The recent interest in the sociology of violence has arisen at the same time that western societies are being urged to consider the profound social crisis provoked by global financial turmoil. Social changes demand the evolution of sociological practices. The analysis herein proposed, based on the studies of M. Wieviorka, La Violence (2005), and of R. Collins, Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory (2008), concludes that violence is subject to sociological treatments centered on the aggressors, on the struggles for power and on male gender. There is a lack of connection between practical proposals for violence prevention and the sociology of violence. It is accepted that violence as a subject of study has the potential, as well as the theoretical and social centrality, to promote the debate necessary to bring social theory up to date. This process is more likely to occur in periods of social transformation, when sociology is open to considering subjects that are still taboo in its study of violence, such as the female gender and the state. The rise of the sociology of violence confronts us with a dilemma. We can either collaborate with the construction of a sub discipline that reproduces the limitations and taboos of current social theory, or we can use the fact that violence has become a “hot topic” as an opportunity to open sociology to themes that are taboo in social theory (such as the vital and harmonious character of the biological aspects of social mechanisms or the normative aspects of social settings).

In this compelling and timely book, Larry Ray offers a wide-ranging and integrated account of the many manifestations of violence in society. He examines violent behaviour and its meanings in contemporary culture and throughout history. Introducing the major theoretical debates, the book examines different levels of violence - interpersonal, institutional and collective - and different forms of violence - such as racist crime, homophobic crime and genocide. It provides readers with a succinct and comprehensive overview of its nature and effects, and the solutions and conflict resolutions involved in responses to violence. Interdisciplinary in its approach, the text draws on evidence from sociology, criminology, primate studies and archaeology to shed light on arguments about the social construction and innate nature of violence. Engaging, wide-reaching and authorative, this is essential reading for students, academics and researchers in sociology, criminology, social pyschology and cultural studies.

2021

After cited several types of violence in part I, they do not have the same significance, neither the same meaning nor the same geopolitical scale. Maybe, specificity of political violence consists of its occurrence when relations are no longer conceivable or negotiable not even institutionalized or instituted, in other words, when symbolization fails and public spaces where violence could be debated don't exist or are fragmentary or unbalanced.

A general theory of violence may only be possible in the sense of a meta-theoretical framework. As such it should comprise a parsimonious set of general mechanisms that operate across various manifestations of violence. In order to identify such mechanisms, a general theory of violence needs to equally consider all manifestations of violence, in all societies, and at all times. Departing from this assumption this paper argues that three theoretical approaches may be combined in a non-contradictory way to understand violence as goal-directed instrumental behavior: a theory of the judgment and decision-making processes operating in the situations that give rise to violence; a theory of the evolutionary processes that have resulted in universal cognitive and emotional mechanisms associated with violence; and a theory of the way in which social institutions structure violence by selectively enhancing its effectiveness for some purposes (i.e. legitimate use of force) and controlling other types of violence (i.e. crime). To illustrate the potential use of such a perspective the paper then examines some general mechanisms that may explain many different types of violence. In particular, it examines how the mechanisms of moralistic aggression (Trivers) and moral disengagement (Bandura) may account for many different types of violence.

Executive Summary AGCC is an international and interdisciplinary group around Andrés Ginestet, attempting to help reduce violence in the world. Many other groups of most serious peoples-governmental or non-governmental, public and/or private, etc. are active in that field, which, in turn, is being studied inside many connected fields/disciplines in academia. Systematic programmatic recommendations are being analyzed, set up and followed; and the outcomes are being monitored and evaluated. True progress seems to be marginal at ...

Every scholar who intends to study in a coherent and academically acceptable manner a world simultaneously extremely diverse and inter-connected faces a difficult choice. On the one hand, the researcher needs the clarity of the abstract intellectual frameworks in order to conceptualize the reality, and on the other hand to avoid becoming their prisoner, by preserving the empirical accuracy of the concepts and theories involved. The aim of this paper is to discuss some epistemological and methodological aspects of a research still in progress which intends to investigate the social legitimization of the use of violence. The basic assumptions of the research can be summarized as it follows: 1. the members of the epistemic community of the Social Sciences share a universally recognized set of concepts, methods, and principles, but the social phenomena conceptualized by the same terms have various, local explanations and meanings; 2. the dominant perspectives of the Social Sciences tend to simply replicate the Western-based, hegemonic knowledge and convictions and attitudes; 3. any political event, process or phenomenon can be studied only in its own terms; 4. in order to be understood, the social realm should be investigated by researchers who are part of it, members of the very society that is questioned. The research discussed here thus consider, as premises, that a political community is, first of all, a moral community, which can be defined through the socially acceptable attitudes towards violence, as is (or can be) used both inside and outside the group. Researchers who are members of a moral community are regarded as its ‘legitimate interprets’: they are considered to be at once members of the universal epistemic community and of the moral community to which they belong as individuals. The present article tries to discuss the logic and the design of a quantitative research still in progress, to critically assess its epistemological and methodological tenets, but also its risks and failures. By doing this, its authors hope to raise some questions concerning the knowledge of the social realm, how is it achieved, how accurate is it, what does it represent, how relevant, in intellectual and even political terms, is it, and so forth. The authors would highly appreciate the comments and observations, considering them of great value for refining the research. Keywords: community, morality, violence, survey methods.

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2014

This paper describes a class of social acts called "violent acts" and distinguishes them from damaging acts. The former are successfully performed if they are apprehended by the victim, while the latter, being not social, are successful only as long as the intended damage is realized. It is argued that violent acts, if successful, generate a social relation which include the aggressor, the victim and, if the concomitant damaging act is satisfied, the damage itself.