Interpreting Collective Violence: An Argument for the Importance of Social Structure

The collective violence of the last decade has been accompanied by a marked increase in scholarly attention to social violence; a marked decline in a previously dominant a-historicism; an increase in borrowing across disciplines in theoretical interpretations. This paper focuses on two of many available explanatory perspectives: that focusing on the individual and that associated primarily with sociology. Psy choanalysts look for violence-proneness as a characteristic of the individual personality; psychologists attend to the dynam ics of the individual's interaction with his environment; social psychologists search for an explanation of social violence in the acting out of prejudice (as an attitude located in the indi vidual). Sociologists who favor explanations oriented toward groups in the social structure emphasize structural features of society, particularly insofar as that structure is related to the distribution of power and its exercise. Two conclusions emerging from the structural perspectives are reviewed: (1) superordinate/subordinate relationships in which parties are social categories are fundamentally unstable and social violence is likely to occur when such an accommodative struc ture loses its viability; (2) social violence is more likely to occur when there is a belief that control agencies (institutional structures within the society which have a legal monopoly of force) are weak, or partisan, or both.