What is Violence?

notes

properties of violence

• Humiliation
• Ritual
• Physical and cultural
• Pain
• Security
• Transgression
• Body and its placing in social order

dynamics

• Cultural
• Emotional
• Visceral

who does it?

• Individuals
• States

concepts of violence

• “Performances of power and domination offered up to various audiences as symbolic accomplishments” (7)
• Minimalist
  • Physical force and harm
  • Doesn’t consider
    • Social relationships
    • Psychological harm
    • Unintended outcomes
    • Violent without being violence
    • Voluntary participation and prosecution
• Comprehensive conception
  • Broadened
  • “Anything avoidable that impedes human realization, violates the rights or integrity of the person”
  • Judged by outcomes over intents
    • Structural violence

types of violence

• Instrumental: goal-oriented
• Expressive: intrinsic gratification
  • Domination
  • Cruelty
  • Elements necessary for interpersonal violence
    • Intimacy
    • Breaching boundaries of the self
• Often combined

violence and social theory

• Violence happens when institutions and values break down
• “Panic of sadness”
  • Hostility appeased by suffering
  • Scapegoats
• Core of social bonding
  • National
    • Remembrance
    • Identity
    • Founded through sacrificial death (war)

violence and power

• Domination
• Masculinity and state
• Criminal behavior
  • Anomie (lack of the usual social or ethical standards in an individual or group)
  • Frustration
  • Alienation
• Powerlessness
  • “A blinding rage that speaks through the body and an attempt to achieve justice”
• Language
  • Justify
    • Desensitization
    • Rationalization
  • View of perpetrator as victim
    • Self-affirmation
    • Status
    • Respect

causes

• Differential Association
• Strain and institutional anomie
• Subcultural theories
• Control theories
• Conflict theories
• Interactionist theories
• Critique of causality

violence is socially organized

• Social and cultural relationships
• Levels and types change over time
• Spatially organized
  • Potential dramatized by visible markers

evolutionary context

• Affective
  • Neurological processes
  • People learn to derive gratification from pain
• Genes
  • Male-status seeking
• Subject to cultural variation and political challenge