Violence : a micro-sociological theory

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1. The micro-sociology of violent confrontations

Violent situations

Micro-evidence : situational recordings, reconstructions, and observations

Comparing situations across types of violence

Fight myths

Violent situations are shaped by an emotional field of tension and fear

Alternative theoretical approaches

Historical evolution of social techniques for controlling confrontational tension

Sources

Preview

The complementarity of micro and macro theories. pt. 1. The dirty secrets of violence

2. Confrontational tension and incompetent violence

Brave, competent and evenly matched?

The central reality : confrontational tension

Tension/fear and non-performance in military combat

Low fighting competence

Friendly fire and bystander hits

Joy of combat : under what conditions?

The continuum of tension/fear and combat performance

Confrontational tension in policing and non-military fighting

Fear of what?

3. Forward panic

Confrontational tension and release : hot rush, piling on, overkill

Atrocities of war

Caveat : the multiple causation of atrocities

Asymmetrical entrainment of forward panic and paralyzed victims

Forward panics and one-sided casualties in decisive battles

Atrocities of peace

Crowd violence

Demonstrators and crowd-control forces

The crowd multiplier

Alternatives to forward panic

4. Attacking the weak : I. Domestic abuse

The emotional definition of the situation

Background and foreground explanations

Abusing the exceptionally weak : time-patterns from normalcy to atrocity

Three pathways : normal limited conflict, severe forward panic, and terroristic torture regime

Negotiating interactional techniques of violence and victimhood

5. Attacking the weak : II. Bullying, mugging, and holdups

The continuum of total institutions

Mugging and holdups

Battening on interactional weakness. pt. 2. Cleaned-up and staged violence

6. Staging fair fights

Hero versus hero

Audience supports and limits on violence

Fighting schools and fighting manners

Displaying risk and manipulating danger in sword and pistol duels

The decline of elite dueling and its replacement by the gunfight

Honor without fairness : vendettas as chains of unbalanced fights

Ephemeral situational honor and leap-frog escalation into one-gun fights

Behind the facade of honor and disrespect

The cultural prestige of fair and unfair fights

7. Violence as fun and entertainment

Moral holidays

Looting and destruction as participation sustainers

The wild party as elite potlatch

Carousing zones and boundary exclusion violence

End-resisting violence

Frustrated carousing and stirring up effervescence

Paradox : why does most intoxication not lead to violence?

The one-fight-per-venue limitation

Fighting as action and fun

Mock fights and mosh pits

8. Sports violence

Sports as dramatically contrived conflicts

Game dynamics and player violence

Winning by practical skills for producing emotional energy dominance

The timing of player violence : loser-frustration fights and turning-point fights

Spectators' game-dependent violence

Offsite fans' violence : celebration and defeat riots

Offsite violence as sophisticated technique : soccer hooligans

The dramatic local construction of antagonistic identities

Revolt of the audience in the era of entertainers' domination. pt. 3. Dynamics and structure of violent situations

9. How fights start, or not

Normal limited acrimony : griping, whining, arguing, quarreling

Boasting and blustering

The code of the street : institutionalized bluster and threat

Pathways into the tunnel of violence

10. The violent few

Small numbers of the actively and competently violent

Confrontation leaders and action-seekers : police

Who wins?

Military snipers : concealed and absorbed in technique

Fighter pilot aces : aggressively imposing momentum

In the zone versus the glaze of combat : micro-situational techniques of interactional dominance

The 9/11 cockpit fight

11. Violence as dominance in emotional attention space

What does the rest of the crowd do?

Violence without audiences : professional killers and clandestine violence

Confrontation-minimizing terrorist tactics

Violent niches in confrontational attention space

Epilogue : practical conclusions