Collective Violence

Are there any commonalities between such phenomena as soccer hooliganism, sabotage by peasants of landlords' property, incidents of road rage, and even the events of September 11? With striking historical scope and command of the literature of many disciplines, this book, first published in 2003, seeks the common causes of these events in collective violence. In collective violence, social interaction immediately inflicts physical damage, involves at least two perpetrators of damage, and results in part from coordination among the persons who perform the damaging acts. Professor Tilly argues that collective violence is complicated, changeable, and unpredictable in some regards, yet that it also results from similar causes variously combined in different times and places. Pinpointing the causes, combinations, and settings helps to explain collective violence and its variations, and also helps to identify the best ways to mitigate violence and create democracies with a minimum of damage to persons and property.

Collective violence has played an important role throughout American history, though we have typically denied it. But it is not enough to repress violence or to suppress our knowledge of it. We must understand the phenomenon, and to do this, we must learn what violent groups are trying to say. Th at some choose violence tells us something about the perpetrators, inevitably, about ourselves and the society we have built. This collection of provocative contributions addresses theory and research on violence as a group phenomenon. The editors were co-directors of research for the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence in the 1960s, and many of the contributors to this volume were involved in that research. Collective Violence distills their findings as well as takes a later, harder look at the forms, sources, and meanings of riots and rebellion. Short and Wolfgang consider the political implications of collective violence, especially as it has appeared in the United States. Th e book includes essays on theory, comparative analyses based on anthropological and historical data, studies of the role of police and other social control agents, and summarizes discussions of U.S. public policy. The contributions range from anthropologists' descriptions of collective violence in primitive societies to general statements about the nature of collective violence. Collective Violence is intended for use in a wide range of courses in sociology, anthropology and political science. In addition its fi ndings will interest anyone wishing insight into the nature of group violence in American society.

Turkey has gone through significant transformations over the last century—from the Ottoman Empire and Young Turk era to the Republic of today—but throughout it has demonstrated troubling continuities in its encouragement and deployment of mass violence. In particular, the construction of a Muslim-Turkish identity has been achieved in part by designating “internal enemies” at whom public hatred can be directed. This volume provides a wide range of case studies and historiographical reflections on the alarming recurrence of such violence in Turkish history, as atrocities against varied ethnic-religious groups from the nineteenth century to today have propelled the nation’s very sense of itself.

The first of its kind, The Handbook of Collective Violence covers a range of contexts in which collective violence occurs, bringing together international perspectives from psychology, criminology and sociology into one complete volume. There have been significant advances made in the last 25 years regarding how collective violence is conceptualised and understood, with a move away from focusing on solely individual forms of violence toward examining and understanding violence that can occur within groups. This handbook presents some of the most interesting topics within the area of collective violence, drawing upon international expertise and including some of the most well-known academics and practitioners of our generation. Structured into four parts: understanding war; terrorism; public order and organized violent crime; and gang and multiple offender groups, this volume provides academics and practitioners with an up-to-date resource that covers core areas of interest and application. Accessibly written, it is ideal for both academics and policymakers alike, capturing developments in the field and offering a deep theoretical insight to enhance our understanding of how such collective violence evolves, alongside practical suggestions for management, prevention and intervention.

A monumental study of collective violence in the premodern world, this book analyzes all instances of rebellion and banditry recorded in 1,097 countries in China during the 277 years of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). The assembled evidence constitutes the largest annual, county-level time-series on collective violence events in any part of the world, and the 630 recorded cases are used to test the major social science theories on the origins of collective violence. Using systematic data collected from local gazetteers on natural calamities, size of harvests, famine relief, physical terrain, local construction, and troop deployment, the author advances and validates a rational-choice argument that violence increased when survival in a subsistence economy became uncertain and the likelihood of punishment was low. Analyzing the administrative effectiveness and coercive capacity of the Ming state, the author also finds evidence to support a complementary structuralist explanation for increased collective violence in times of lax rulers, state insolvency, and inadequate welfare and tax policies. After an introductory chapter, the author explicates the main theoretical and methodological issues of collective violence and sketches the empirical pattern of rebellions and banditry, differentiating them by the level of threat they posed to the regime and by the sociopolitical profile of participating groups. In the next four chapters, he relates the Ming empirical configuration to four theoretical frameworks for collective violence: rational choice,which includes the issue of motive and choice—why people chose to become bandits; opportunity, in which the level of Ming collective violence is treated to variations in a regime's coercive capacity; social change, which is used to shed light on food riots, anti-tax rebellions, and conflict between employers and employees and between natives and outsiders; and class conflict, which prompts the author to assess the Marxist explanation for collective violence by investigating revolts of commoners against imperial clansmen, bondservants against masters, and tenants against landlords. The final chapter presents how the author's conclusions on why and how people became outlaws in the Ming and points the questions for future research.

First published in 2004. Collective Political Violence is a concise, but thorough, interdisciplinary analysis of the many competing concepts, theories, and explanations of political conflict, including revolutions, civil wars, genocide, and terrorism. To further his examination of each type of conflict, Earl Conteh-Morgan presents case studies, from the Rwandan genocide to the civil rights movement in the United States. Along the way, he illuminates new debates concerning terrorism, peacekeeping, and environmental security. Written in a knowledgeable, yet accessible, manner, Collective Political Violence treats the issue of political violence with on impressively wide geographic range, and successfully straddles the ideological divide.

This collection presents a range of theoretical and disciplinary approaches to the subject of collective violence. The distinguished contributors investigate the factors that contribute to the social context of violence, and examine the ways of thinking that allow participation in harmful activities.