Warriors and Peacemakers
eBook - ePub

Warriors and Peacemakers

How Third Parties Shape Violence

Mark Cooney

Share book
  1. 222 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Warriors and Peacemakers

How Third Parties Shape Violence

Mark Cooney

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

Why do some conflicts escalate into violence while others dissipate harmlessly? Under what circumstances will people kill, and why?

While homicide has been viewed largely in the pathological terms of "crime" and "deviance," violence, Mark Cooney contends, is a naturally-occurring form of conflict found throughout history and across cultures under certain social conditions. Cooney has analyzed the social control of homicide within and across over 30 societies and interviewed several dozens of prisoners incarcerated for murder or manslaughter, as well as members of their families. Violence such as homicide can only be understood, he argues, by transcending the traditional focus on the social characteristics of the killer and victims, and by looking at the role played by family members, friends, neighbors, onlookers, police officers, and judges. These third parties can be a source of peace or violence, depending on how they are configured in particular cases. Violence flourishes, Cooney demonstrates, when authority is either very strong or very weak and when third-party ties are strong and boundaries between groups sharply defined.

Drawing on recent theory in the lively new sociological speciality of conflict management, Mark Cooney has culled a vast array of evidence from modern and preindustrial societies to provide us with the first general sociological analysis of human violence.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Warriors and Peacemakers an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Warriors and Peacemakers by Mark Cooney in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Política y relaciones internacionales & Paz y desarrollo global. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

1
Introduction

It was a Saturday in September. They were having a function in a local park. Me and another guy, George, went along on bicycles. It didn’t make sense to try and drive—there were too many cars. The bike George was on was stolen. As we were riding through the park, a guy came up to George and said that he was on his bike which had been stolen. George said it might look like his bike but it wasn’t. The guy left.
We were in the park about an hour. When we were leaving, the guy who had come up to George before came up to him again. This time he had about five or six other guys with him. We didn’t know them. The guy said that the bike was his. George said it wasn’t. He said it was again and he then grabbed the bike by the handlebars. George told him to take his hands away. He said “I ain’t taking my hands away, I’m taking the bike away.” We started to argue.
The guy then told one of his friends to get a wrench out of the trunk of the car they was in. George asked him what that was for and then punched him in the face. A fight broke out. There were too many of them. One of them took the bike and put it in the trunk. The rest of them jumped in the car and left.
We went back to where we lived and suited up. We took a couple of sawed-off shotguns and some nine millimeter pistols. Then we went looking for them.
We saw them in the park leaning on the car eating spiced shrimp. Now there were just three of them. We drove by and parked our car in a back street. We got out and walked back towards them. When we got around, the guy who argued with George was the first one to stand up. I go over to him, and he says, “What’s up.” I say, “You know what time it is.”
Then he swung at me. We scuffled. Another guy joined in.
The third guy reached into the car. George shot the guy he
had argued with earlier. The other guy who was fighting ran.
The third guy brought out a .45 pistol and was putting the
clip in. He never got to shoot it because George shot at him
but missed and he ran.
The guy who got shot, Billy, died two days later.
These events occurred in a city in Virginia in the late 1980s. They were related to me by a young man, Tom,1 who was serving time in prison for his involvement in the killing. Cases like this are quite common in America, where about seventy people are killed every day (MacKellar and Yanagishita, 1995: 1). But, then, few societies or large groups are free of lethal conflict. Violence, including lethal violence or homicide, is a fact of human existence.
Nevertheless, the incidence of violence per head of population (its rate) can vary sharply from one place to another. Take homicide, the form of violence we know most about. The United States has an annual homicide rate approaching 10 per 100,000 people (it fluctuates slightly from year to year)—about ten times higher than that of western European countries, such as England, Spain, France, Germany, and Ireland (MacKellar and Yanagishita, 1995: 3). In all modern societies for which we have information, the poor have more homicide than the rich, the unemployed more than the employed, men more than women, young people in their late teens and early twenties more than the elderly, and cultural minorities more than cultural majorities (see, e.g., Wolfgang, 1958; Strang, 1993; Silverman and Kennedy, 1993). The differences can be striking. In America, a twenty-year-old nonwhite male was, from 1970–1990, between thirty and eighty times more likely to be a victim of homicide than a sixty-five-year-old white woman (calculated from MacKellar and Yanagishita, 1995:17–18). Among members of street gangs, homicide looms even larger, with mortality sometimes running at more than two hundred times the national average (Decker and Van Winkle, 1996).
Rates of homicide fluctuate even more widely across the structurally simple societies studied by anthropologists. The Mbuti Pygmies of Zaire, for example, have virtually no homicide at all. They lead a peaceful, cooperative existence hunting and gathering in the Ituri forest with little violent conflict of any type (Turnbull, 1965). Among the Gebusi of New Guinea, on the other hand, two out of every three men over the age of thirty-five have killed somebody (Knauft, 1985: 132).
Homicide rates may also differ dramatically in the same society over time. Medieval Iceland, for instance, was rife with feuds between rival families (Miller, 1990). Although its homicide rate is not known, it must surely have been high to generate that impressive but bloodthirsty body of literature known as the sagas. Modern Iceland, by contrast, is extremely peaceful, annually recording one of the lowest rates of homicide in the world (see, e.g., United Nations, 1996: 500).
What explains this variation? Why are some human settings remarkably peaceful and others strikingly violent? Why in one society are people virtually free from the risk of violence and in another exposed to it every day of their lives? The answer to these questions begins with a paradox: Violence is a type of morality.

Violence as Morality

Violence, many people believe, is the antithesis of morality, the very embodiment of evil. But, as the sociologist Donald Black (1983) has pointed out, in reality violence is not usually committed for gain, monetary or sexual, or for the pleasure of hurting someone. It occurs, instead, as in Tom’s case, in the course of arguments or altercations, fights or feuds. In the typical act of violence somebody seeks to manage or prosecute a conflict, to right a wrong. The wrong might be an insult, an unpaid debt, an act of sexual infidelity, or a physical assault. Whatever form it takes, it is a violation of standards of acceptable behavior that is punished by the violence (see also Levi, 1980; Felson, 1984; Katz, 1988: chap. 1).
To accept that most violence is an act of morality is not to imply that violence is morally right. Social science, as social science, cannot judge the rights and wrongs of people’s actions. But it can say that, as an empirical matter, acts of violence are typically moralistic acts that originate in disputes over right and wrong.
It is easy to overlook this point. Newspapers, crime novels, films, magazines, and other organs of popular culture tend to concentrate not on cases like Tom’s but on those in which people use violence to enrich or gratify themselves. Examples are homicides committed to facilitate a robbery or rape, and serial killings (see Dietz, 1983). These are not moralistic but predatory acts. The following case, again from Virginia, provides an illustration. The defendant, a twenty-one-year-old white man, describes what happened:
One day four of us were hanging out, looking for something to do. Somebody suggested we rob the convenience store which was only about a five minute walk away. We talked about it and decided to go do it. I knew then I wanted to kill the store keeper but I didn’t tell the others. I took a knife with me, everybody else was unarmed.
When we went in the store keeper was alone, down at the back. Two of us grabbed him and the other two went to the cash register. The other guy with me held the store keeper and I stabbed him, many times. When he fell, we all just ran out.
Why did I do it? I don’t know. Just something to do, I guess. I had shot people before and enjoyed it but hadn’t stabbed nobody. It was fun.
Most homicides are either predatory, like this, or moralistic. A small minority are neither. Infanticide, for instance, is typically a form of after-the-fact birth control committed by young women in desperate circumstances. And some manslaughters are negligent acts for which the killer is held legally responsible (e.g., killings by drunk drivers). But moralistic and predatory homicides are by far the most common types.
They are very different. Predatory violence is a kind of opportunistic behavior, unrelated to any prior conflict between the parties. Predatory violence falls within the same category of behavior as white-collar crime, piracy, and shoplifting; moralistic violence belongs with litigation, punishment, and mediation. Increasingly, scholars recognize that although the word “violence” is commonly used to refer to both types, they are, in fact, so different as to require separate theories (e.g., Block and Christakos, 1995).
We do not yet know how much violence is moralistic and how much predatory, but we do know that the great majority of homicides are moralistic. In the United States the percentage is between 60 and 80. In other modern societies, the percentage may well be even larger. Likewise, most homicides in simpler and earlier societies arose out of conflict, as the anthropological and historical evidence makes clear (see Appendix A). Unless otherwise stated, I therefore use the terms “violence” and “homicide” in the following pages to refer just to moralistic violence and homicide, regardless of the society being discussed.

Third Parties

Violence is only one way people handle conflict. When does it occur? When will people like George and Billy resort to it rather than talking out their differences, ignoring their adversaries, bringing them to court, or dealing with the problem in some other peaceful way?
One possible answer lies in the nature of the conflict. People are likely to use violence when the stakes get higher, when the underlying issues are more serious. In fact, one of the odd features of violence is that it is not necessarily triggered by conflicts that other people would regard as especially serious. Even for a young man with little money, a stolen bicycle is hardly worth dying for. In that respect Tom’s case is quite typical. Underlying many acts of violence are what to outsiders appear to be relatively trivial disagreements and insults (a point discussed at length in chapter 5).
Scholars therefore look to other places for answers to their questions about violence. One is the characteristics of the principal parties to conflict—the age, sex, race, educational level, employment status, and so forth of people like George and Billy. A second is the characteristics of the environment in which George and Billy find themselves. Criminologists have found, for example, that the percentage of one-parent families or the percentage of divorced males are good predictors of rates of homicide (see, e.g., Land, McCall, and Cohen, 1990).
Important as these foci are, there is another set of influences at work in many cases of violence that have received much less attention: other people who know or might know of the conflict. In Tom’s case these people include not just Tom himself and the young men on the other side but the bystanders and even the police, whom nobody summoned. Had any of these groups acted differently, events could well have taken another course. By their actions and inactions alike these people shaped what happened that Saturday afternoon. Their technical name is “third parties” and this book is about the role they play in violence.

Varieties of Third Parties

Third parties are all those who have knowledge of a conflict, actual or potential (see Black, 1993b: 126). People have potential knowledge when, although they do not know about this particular conflict, they often learn, by virtue of their status or position, of similar conflicts. Legal officials are the primary example. Third parties, therefore, can include family members, friends, neighbors, coworkers, bystanders, police officers, and judges.
Third parties shape conflict in different ways. Sometimes, they promote the use of violence by urging the parties to fight (perhaps calling them cowards if they do not), or by providing moral support or weaponry, or even by joining the fray themselves (see, e.g., Hepburn, 1973; Luckenbill, 1977; Felson and Steadman, 1983; Felson et al., 1984). In Tom’s case, for instance, the groups of friends on both sides backed each other up, thereby enlarging the conflict. That very fact can increase violence. If it happens often enough, it can elevate the homicide rate significantly. Consider an example from Israel. In the 1950s and early 1960s, rates of homicide among Arabs were more than six times higher than those among Jews (Landau and Drapkin, 1968: 90). One reason is that Arabs, unlike Jews, were organized into large family units known in Arabic as “hamulas,” the members of which have a duty to provide partisan support to one another in conflicts with other clans. Because of this, “a trivial altercation between two members of different Hamulas may develop into a prolonged and bitter conflict between the respective Hamulas leading to a vicious cycle of homicides and blood feuds” (Landau and Drapkin, 1968: 55). The same point could be made about urban gangs in the United States: by their willingness to lend mutual support, gang members escalate conflict, distribute violence more widely, and drive up the rate of homicide.
But third parties sometimes act as peacemakers instead of warriors. Indeed, the very same people who intensify conflict in one case can dampen it in another. Third-party peacemaking takes many forms, including encouraging the principals to run away, to talk instead of fight, to go to the police or some other group for help; championing a peaceful resolution of the conflict; distracting the parties from their grievances; or intervening to mediate or arbitrate the conflict. Informal peacemaking of this type is found in virtually every human group and is one of the principal mechanisms by which violence is curtailed or prevented.
Formal peacemaking is also important. Legal officials are the primary example in modern society of people charged with the duty of settling conflicts nonviolently. But the effect of legal officials on violence is not as straightforward as it might initially appear. Law undoubtedly provides a peaceful outlet for the passions aroused by certain disputes. But disputants sometimes reject the authority of the law and its officials and in the process develop a culture of defiance that creates more violence than there might otherwise be. Law and violence relate in complex ways.
Third parties, in short, can act as warriors, peacemakers, or something in between. The difficult part is to specify when they will be one rather than the other. Fortunately, there exists a body of theory that addresses that issue, allowing us to predict the behavior and effects of third parties.

Black’s Theoretical Paradigm

Third parties are an essential component in the innovative sociology of Donald Black. Black is probably best known for his theory of law (1976), but in fact he has developed a body of theoretical work that extends beyond law to cover the entire range of ways that people handle their conflicts (1993b). Indeed, Black has created a general theoretical paradigm—known variously as “structuralism,” “behavioral sociology,” or “pure sociology”—that, in principle, can be applied to explain any type of social behavior (see Black, 1995). This book applies Black’s paradigm as well as many of his theoretical ideas on conflict management and third parties to the problem of interpersonal violence, and so it seems useful to describe both in some detail.

Pure Sociology

Perhaps the central concept in Black’s theoretical system or paradigm is the idea of a multidimensional social space. Every actor—person, organization, institution, society, and so on—has a location (or status) in each of five dimensions of social space. A wealthy individual, for example, has an elevated location in vertical space, a prisoner an inferior location in normative space. Every action has, in addition, a direction and a distance. The firing of an employee by a company has a downward direction in organizational space; a conversation between strangers from different countries takes place over considerable distance in horizontal and cultural space.
A key assumption of the paradigm is that social life is orderly. Particular types of behavior are associated with particular locations, directions, and distances, or more concretely, with particular social statuses and ties. The task of the theorist is to isolate the connections between behavior and social space, preferably in the form of testable propositions.
Take law, for example. One of Black’s (1976: 21) propositions states: Downward law is greater than upward law. Among the wide array of facts this proposition predicts is that wealthy people in every society are more likely to take legal action, civil or criminal, and to be more successful in those actions, against poor people than the other way around. The proposition received strong confirmation from research conducted in the 1980s showing that in the United States, blacks (who are generally poorer than whites) accused of killing whites are considerably more likely to be sentenced to death than whites who kill blacks (Baldus et al., 1990).
The key to social behavior, then, lies in the statuses and ties of all the participants in an event—its “social structure.” Whether a grievance will result in a lawsuit or who will win a lawsuit depends, then, on the social structure of the case, on whether the principals (the litigants) and third parties (attorneys, witnesses, judges, and jurors) are rich or poor (vertical dimension), intimates or strangers (horizontal dimension), organizations or individuals (organizational dimension), bohemian or conventional in lifestyle (cultural dimension), have a criminal record or not (normative dimension), and so forth. Together, these and other variables predict, in conjunction with their associated proposition (e.g., downward law is greater than upward law), the probability and outcome of a suit. Thus, some case structures are more likely to result in lawsuits than others. And if one city, state, or country has more litigation than another, it is because it has more conflicts with litigation structures.
There are several unusual features of this paradigm (Black, 1995; see also Horwitz, 1983; Cooney, 1986). First, it is not subjective. All variables are conceptualized at a purely sociological level. None requires the analyst to inquire into the state of someone’s mind. Consequently, the paradigm is easily tested against the facts, a desirable feature in a scientific theory.
Second, the paradigm synthesizes many previous sociological approaches. Each dimension of social space represents a major strand of theory and research within sociology. The vertical dimension, for instance, is the province of Marxian theory as well as empirical investigations of social class, race, and other aspects of stratification. Similarly, the horizontal dimension incorporates much of Durkheim’s work and network theory. Black’s paradigm brings these and other traditions together within a single, powerful explanatory system.
Third, the paradigm is highly general. The propositions apply regardless of space or time, incorporating a large body of cross-cultural and historical materials. At a time when sociologists have largely retreated into the present (Elias, 1987), Black’s paradigm is unusual in allowing, indeed inviting, theorists to develop ideas that apply to the entire range of human societies, to the Stone Age and electronic age alike.

Third Parties and the Management of Conflict

People handle conflict in a myriad of ways. At various times, they fight, talk, run away, seek advice, ignore the problem, shame their adversary, spread gossip, go to a mediator or judge, seize a hostage, or take their own lives. Despite conflict-management behavior’s apparent diversity, Black (1993a) argues that it reduces to five “elementary forms”: (1) self-help (aggression), (2) avoidance (the curtailment or elimination of violence), (3) negotiation (joint decision making), (4) settlement (nonpartisan third-party intervention), and (5) toleration (inaction in circumstances where action is sometimes taken).
This scheme maps the universe of conflict ...

Table of contents