The Rise of Organised Brutality

Author: Siniša Malešević
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108155898
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 349

Book Description
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. Malešević 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. Malešević 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.

The Better Angels of Our Nature

Author: Steven Pinker
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 0143122010
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 834

Book Description
Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think this is the most violent age ever seen. Yet as bestselling author Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true.

Violence and Social Orders

Author: Douglass Cecil North
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521761735
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Book Description
This book integrates the problem of violence into a larger framework, showing how economic and political behavior are closely linked.

The Sociology of War and Violence

Author: Siniša Malešević
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521731690
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 374

Book Description
War is a highly complex and dynamic form of social conflict. This new book demonstrates the importance of using sociological tools to understand the changing character of war and organised violence. The author offers an original analysis of the historical and contemporary impact that coercion and warfare have on the transformation of social life, and vice versa. Although war and violence were decisive components in the formation of modernity most analyses tend to shy away from the sociological study of the gory origins of contemporary social life. In contrast, this book brings the study of organised violence to the fore by providing a wide-ranging sociological analysis that links classical and contemporary theories with specific historical and geographical contexts. Topics covered include violence before modernity, warfare in the modern age, nationalism and war, war propaganda, battlefield solidarity, war and social stratification, gender and organised violence, and the new wars debate.

Grounded Nationalisms

Author: Siniša Malešević
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110842516X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Book Description
Malešević shows how the recent escalation of populist nationalism is not an anomaly, but the result of globalisation and nationalism developing together through modern history.

Nationalism and War

Author: John A. Hall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107067871
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 387

Book Description
Has the emergence of nationalism made warfare more brutal? Does strong nationalist identification increase efficiency in fighting? Is nationalism the cause or the consequence of the breakdown of imperialism? What is the role of victories and defeats in the formation of national identities? The relationship between nationalism and warfare is complex, and it changes depending on which historical period and geographical context is in question. In 'Nationalism and War', some of the world's leading social scientists and historians explore the nature of the connection between the two. Through empirical studies from a broad range of countries, they explore the impact that imperial legacies, education, welfare regimes, bureaucracy, revolutions, popular ideologies, geopolitical change, and state breakdowns have had in the transformation of war and nationalism.

War, Women, and Power

Author: Marie E. Berry
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108246893
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Book Description
Rwanda and Bosnia both experienced mass violence in the early 1990s. Less than ten years later, Rwandans surprisingly elected the world's highest level of women to parliament. In Bosnia, women launched thousands of community organizations that became spaces for informal political participation. The political mobilization of women in both countries complicates the popular image of women as merely the victims and spoils of war. Through a close examination of these cases, Marie E. Berry unpacks the puzzling relationship between war and women's political mobilization. Drawing from over 260 interviews with women in both countries, she argues that war can reconfigure gendered power relations by precipitating demographic, economic, and cultural shifts. In the aftermath, however, many of the gains women made were set back. This book offers an entirely new view of women and war and includes concrete suggestions for policy makers, development organizations, and activists supporting women's rights.

Why Humans Fight

Author: Siniša Malešević
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009178636
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 379

Book Description
Malešević offers a novel sociological answer to the age-old question: 'Why do humans fight?'. Instead of focusing on the motivations of solitary individuals, he emphasises the centrality of the social and historical contexts that make fighting possible. He argues that fighting is not an individual attribute, but a social phenomenon shaped by one's relationships with other people. Drawing on recent scholarship across a variety of academic disciplines as well as his own interviews with the former combatants, Malešević shows that one's willingness to fight is a contextual phenomenon shaped by specific ideological and organisational logic. This book explores the role biology, psychology, economics, ideology, and coercion play in one's experience of fighting, emphasising the cultural and historical variability of combativeness. By drawing from numerous historical and contemporary examples from all over the world, Malešević demonstrates how social pugnacity is a relational and contextual phenomenon that possesses autonomous features.

Identity as Ideology

Author: S. Malesevic
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230625649
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Book Description
Despite profound disagreement on whether identities are essential or existential, primordial or constructed, singular or multiple, there is little dispute over whether identities exist or not. In this provocative study, Sinisa Malesevic interrogates the unproblematic use of concepts of identity, and in particular national or ethnic identity.

The Cambridge World History of Violence: Volume 1, The Prehistoric and Ancient Worlds

Author: Garrett G. Fagan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108882900
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
The first in a four-volume set, The Cambridge World History of Violence, Volume 1 provides a comprehensive examination of violence in prehistory and the ancient world. Covering the Palaeolithic through to the end of classical antiquity, the chapters take a global perspective spanning sub-Saharan Africa, the Near East, Europe, India, China, Japan and Central America. Unlike many previous works, this book does not focus only on warfare but examines violence as a broader phenomenon. The historical approach complements, and in some cases critiques, previous research on the anthropology and psychology of violence in the human story. Written by a team of contributors who are experts in each of their respective fields, Volume 1 will be of particular interest to anyone fascinated by archaeology and the ancient world.