The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics Series)
Charles Tilly, Douglas McAdam (Editor), Sidney FarrowBooks.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
Are there any commonalities between such phenomena as soccer hooliganism, sabotage by peasants of landlords' property, incidents of road rage, and even the recent events of September 11? With striking historical scope and command of the literature of many disciplines, this book seeks the common cause 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.Synopsis
This book attempts to explain collective violence and to identify the best ways to mitigate it.
Foreign Affairs
Why do people who have lived together peacefully for years suddenly start killing each other? Tilly, a leading historical sociologist, thinks there are patterns to collective violence that run through its various forms — barroom brawls, peasant rebellions, labor strikes, ethnic struggles, civil wars, and even interstate wars. Although Tilly relies on jargon and abstractions in his quest for a unifying framework to make sense of these diverse types of violence, a dedicated reader will pick up some interesting insights. Tilly argues that the activation of latent political identities that separate people into "us" and "them" often triggers violence. But the violence emerges less from preexisting hatred than from sudden uncertainties and shifting social conditions, particularly the declining capacity of authorities to enforce agreements or police existing boundaries. Tilly supports this claim with the useful finding that the character and intensity of collective violence depend mightily on the type of government and its capacities. Democratic regimes tend to experience less group violence than authoritarian ones because of broader participation and a more extensive array of rights and institutions, and thus, he concludes, they are the best cure for collective violence.
Editorials
From the Publisher
"The Politics of Collective Violence offers an arsenal of testable hypotheses that have the capacity to render intelligible the actions of statesmen, terrorists, and road-ragers who turn to violence as a means of staking claims, asserting identity, or exacting retribution...Tilly has drawn the subject of violence into the same rational-strategic frame that defines political process theory." American Journal of Sociology"....interesting insights...useful..." Foreign Affairs