1st Edition
A Micro-Sociology of Violence Deciphering patterns and dynamics of collective violence
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.
1. Deciphering the Mosaic’s Tesserae: A Micro-Sociology of Violence
Jutta Bakonyi, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, Civil Peace Service Kenya
Berit Bliesemann de Guevara, Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg
2. Rioting as Maintaining Relations: Hindu-Muslim Violence and Political Mediation in Gujarat, India
Ward Berenschot, Leiden University
3. Moral Economies of Mass Violence: Somalia 1988-1991
Jutta Bakonyi, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, Civil Peace Service Kenya
4. Displacing, Returning, and Pilgrimaging: The Construction of Social Orders of Violence and Non-violence in Colombia
Nora-Christine Braun, Free University Berlin
5. Humanitarianism, Violence, and the Camp in Northern Uganda
Adam Branch, San Diego State University
6. ‘Transgressive Objects’ in America: Mimesis and Violence in the Collection of Trophies during the Nineteenth Century Indian Wars
Cora Bender, Bremen University
7. Of Rains and Raids: Violent Lifestock Raiding in Northern Kenya
Karen M. Witsenburg, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Halle/Saale
Wario R. Adano, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Halle/Saale
Biography
Jutta Bakonyi, PhD, worked at universities of Hamburg and Magdeburg and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), Germany. Currently she is with the Civil Peace Service in Kenya. Fields of research: political sociology of world society and the state, causes and dynamics of violence and wars, conflict management, urbanisation.
Berit Bliesemann de Guevara, PhD, is senior researcher and lecturer at the Institute for International Relations, Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg, Germany. Fields of research include: the international politics of statebuilding, orders of violence, knowledge production in international conflict management, and charisma in politics.
