What is violence and how can we understand it sociologically? And is society becoming increasingly inured to acts of violent behaviour? Pushing beyond widely accepted sociological theories of the complexity of violence, Violence and Society: Toward a New Sociology gathers leading national and international experts to set a new agenda for our understanding of interpersonal and state violence in contemporary society. Through an in–depth analysis of issues that include the nature of contemporary war; gender–based violence and street fights; and of the role of biography, the body, culture, emotion, and time in the exercise and experience of violence, chapters reveal how modern sociological thinking is at odds with a proper understanding of the nature and root causes of violence. Timely and important, Violence and Society: Toward a New Sociology sheds important new light on our understanding of the world we live in.
Table of Contents
Series editor s acknowledgements viIntroduction 1
Jane Kilby and Larry Ray
The socioeconomic function of evil 13
Steve Hall
Trauma, guilt and the unconscious: some theoretical notes on violent subjectivity 32
Simon Winlow
The sociological analysis of violence: new perspectives 50
Michel Wieviorka
Is war becoming obsolete? A sociological analysis 65
Sini a Male evic
Family honour and social time 87
Mark Cooney
Towards an embodied sociology of war 107
Kevin McSorley
On violent democracy 129
Karl von Holdt
Violence before identity: an analysis of identity politics 152
Glenn Bowman
Competitive violence and the micro–politics of the fight label 166
Curtis Jackson–Jacobs
Mainstreaming domestic and gender–based violence into sociology and the criminology of violence 187
Sylvia Walby, Jude Towers and Brian Francis
Notes on contributors 215
Index 220
Authors
Jane Kilby is Senior Lecturer in English and Cultural Studies in the School of Arts and Media at the University of Salford. She is the author of Violence and the Cultural Politics of Trauma (2007).Larry Ray is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent. He has researched and published on topics in sociological theory, globalization, post–communism, social memory, collective and interpersonal violence; and is the author of Violence and Society (2011).
