The Sociology of War and Violence

by Siniša Malešević

• ISBN13: 9780521731690
• ISBN10: 0521731690
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-07-12
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

War is a highly complex and dynamic form of social conflict. This new textbook 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 contemporary 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.

Author Biography

Sinia Maleevic is Senior Lecturer in the School of Political Science and Sociology at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. x
Introduction: war, violence and the social	p. 1
The cumulative bureaucratisation of coercion	p. 5
Centrifugal idcologisation	p. 8
The plan of the book	p. 11
Collective violence and sociological theory
War and violence in classical social thought	p. 17
Introduction	p. 17
The 'holy trinity' and organised violence	p. 18
The bellicose tradition in classical social thought	p. 28
The contemporary relevance of bellicose thought	p. 45
The contemporary sociology of organised violence	p. 50
Introduction	p. 50
The sources of violence and warfare: biology, reason or culture?	p. 51
Organisational materialism: war, violence and the state	p. 70
From coercion to ideology	p. 79
Conclusion	p. 84
War in time and space
War and violence before modernity	p. 89
Introduction	p. 89
Collective violence before warfare	p. 90
War and violence in antiquity	p. 92
War and violence in the medieval era	p. 102
The institutional seeds of early modernity: war, violence and the birth of discipline	p. 109
Conclusion	p. 116
Organised violence and modernity	p. 118
Introduction	p. 118
Modernity and violence: an ontological dissonance?	p. 119
The cumulative bureaucratisation of coercion	p. 120
The centrifugal ideologisation of coercion	p. 130
War and violence between ideology and social organisation	p. 141
Conclusion	p. 145
The social geographies of warfare	p. 146
Introduction	p. 146
The old world	p. 147
The new world	p. 165
Conclusion	p. 174
Warfare: ideas and practices
Nationalism and war	p. 179
Introduction	p. 179
Warfare and group homogeneity	p. 180
The structural origins of national 'solidarity'	p. 191
Conclusion	p. 200
War propaganda and solidarity	p. 202
Introduction	p. 202
War propaganda	p. 203
Killing, dying and micro-level solidarity	p. 219
Conclusion	p. 232
War, violence and social divisions
Social stratification, warfare and violence	p. 237
Introduction	p. 237
Stratification without collective violence?	p. 238
Stratification through war and violence	p. 242
Warfare and the origins of social stratification	p. 252
Justifying social hierarchies	p. 264
Conclusion	p. 273
Gendering of war	p. 275
Introduction	p. 275
The innate masculinity of combat?	p. 276
Cultural givens?	p. 284
The patriarchal legacy?	p. 288
Gender, social organisation and ideology	p. 295
Conclusion	p. 307
Organised violence in the twenty-first century
New wars?	p. 311
Introduction	p. 311
The new-wars paradigm	p. 312
The sociology of new warfare	p. 315
Warfare between the nation-state and globalisation	p. 319
The objectives of contemporary wars	p. 324
What is old and what is new?	p. 329
Conclusion	p. 332
References	p. 336
Index	p. 359
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