A Micro-Sociology of Violence

Deciphering patterns and dynamics of collective violence

Jutta Bakonyi, Berit Bliesemann de Guevara, Jutta Bakonyi, Berit Bliesemann de Guevara

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138798106
• eBook ISBN: 9781317977957
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book aims at a deeper understanding of social processes, dynamics and institutions shaping collective violence. It argues that violence is a social practice that adheres to social logics and, in its collective form, appears as recurrent patterns. In search of characteristics, mechanisms and logics of violence, contributions deliver ethnographic descriptions of different forms of collective violence and contextualize these phenomena within broader spatial and temporal structures. The studies show that collective violence, at least if it is sustained over a certain period of time, aims at organization and therefore develops constitutive and integrative mechanisms. Practices of social mobilization of people and economic resources, their integration in functional structures, and the justification or legitimization of these structures sooner or later lead to the establishment of new forms of (violent) orders, be it at the margins of or beyond the state. Cases discussed include riots in Gujarat, India, mass violence in Somalia, social orders of violence and non-violence in Colombia, humanitarian camps in Uganda, trophy-taking in North America, and violent livestock raiding in Kenya.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Civil Wars.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. The Mosaic of Violence - An Introduction
• 2. Rioting as Maintaining Relations: Hindu-Muslim Violence and Political Mediation in Gujarat, India
• 3. Moral Economies of Mass Violence: Somalia 1988-1991
• 4. Displacing, Returning, and Pilgrimaging: The Construction of Social Orders of Violence and Non-violence in Colombia
• 5. Humanitarianism, Violence, and the Camp in Northern Uganda
• 6. ‘Transgressive Objects’ in America: Mimesis and Violence in the Collection of Trophies during the Nineteenth Century Indian Wars
• 7. Of Rain and Raids: Violent Lifestock Raiding in Northern Kenya
• Index