Violence

Abstract

In the week leading up to drafting this chapter, I was suddenly attentive to the range of violent images I encountered: cage fighting — now gentrified as “mixed martial arts”; grisly crime drama murders; reports of violent criminal acts; civil unrest; terrorism; state violence, and more. Given these very different images, and perhaps very different categories or types of violence, an immediate question is whether there could be any general, unified approach to violence, whether violence has any essence (Schinkel, 2010). Indeed, violence is commonly deemed a “slippery” object (Schinkel, 2010; Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, 2004; Arendt, 1970). Perhaps this slipperiness accounts for the relative underdevelopment of sociological reflection on violence until more recent times, because it wasn’t really until the late ’70s and into the ’80s that war and violence were addressed as distinctive sub-fields of sociological endeavour (Scott, 2001b; Joas, 2003; Mann, 1988).