Challenging the prevailing belief that organised violence is experiencing historically continuous decline, this book provides an in-depth sociological analysis that shows organised violence is, in fact, on the rise. Maleevi¿ demonstrates that violence is determined by organisational capacity, ideological penetration and micro-solidarity, rather than biological tendencies, meaning that despite pre-modern societies being exposed to spectacles of cruelty and torture, such societies had no organisational means to systematically slaughter millions of individuals. Maleevi¿ suggests that violence should not be analysed as just an event or process, but also via changing perceptions of those events and processes, and by linking this to broader social transformations on the inter-polity and inter-group levels he makes his key argument that organised violence has proliferated. Focusing on wars, revolutions, genocides and terrorism, this book shows how modern social organisations utilise ideology and micro-solidarity to mobilise public support for mass scale violence.
Challenging the prevailing belief that organised violence is experiencing historically continuous decline, this book provides an in-depth sociological analysis that shows organised violence is, in fact, on the rise. Maleevi¿ demonstrates that violence is determined by organisational capacity, ideological penetration and micro-solidarity, rather than biological tendencies, meaning that despite pre-modern societies being exposed to spectacles of cruelty and torture, such societies had no organisational means to systematically slaughter millions of individuals. Maleevi¿ suggests that violence should not be analysed as just an event or process, but also via changing perceptions of those events and processes, and by linking this to broader social transformations on the inter-polity and inter-group levels he makes his key argument that organised violence has proliferated. Focusing on wars, revolutions, genocides and terrorism, this book shows how modern social organisations utilise ideology and micro-solidarity to mobilise public support for mass scale violence.
Über den Autor
Sinia Maleevi¿ is a Professor of Sociology at University College Dublin. His books include Nation-States and Nationalisms: Organisation, Ideology and Solidarity (2013), The Sociology of War and Violence (Cambridge, 2006), Identity as Ideology (2006), The Sociology of Ethnicity (2004) and the edited volumes Ernest Gellner and Historical Sociology (2015), Nationalism and War (Cambridge, 2013) and Ernest Gellner and Contemporary Social Thought (Cambridge, 2007). His work has been translated into Croatian, Persian, Turkish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian and Spanish.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Acknowledgements; Introduction: the faces of violence; 1. What is organised violence?; 2. Violence in the long run; 3. How old is human brutality?; 4. The rise and rise of organised violence; 5. Warfare; 6. Revolutions; 7. Genocides; 8. Terrorisms; 9. Why humans fight?; Conclusion: the future of organised violence; References; Index.
