Mark Cooney

Aiding Peace, Abetting Violence: Third Parties and the Management of Conflict

When and how will third parties intervene in the conflicts of others? When will third parties further violence, and when will they foster peace? These are questions addressed by Blacks theory of the third party. The authors conducted the first systematic test of the theory, drawing on quantitative and qualitative data from in-depth interviews with 100 men imprisoned for assault or homicide. Specifically, they tested Cooneys elaboration of Blacks theory, which argues (1) that the social location of a third party, based on ties to the principals, predicts whether he or she will act as a partisan or settlement agent or remain uninvolved, and (2) that the third-party structure of a conflict, based on the general configuration of all the third parties present, predicts whether the conflict will escalate to violence. The study results confirm most of the theoretical predictions regarding both third-party behavior and violence. The discussion also extends the theoretical model, offering new concepts and suggesting how the theory can be applied to a range of subjects, such as international war and the long-term historical decline of interpersonal violence.

From warre to tyranny : Lethal conflict and the state

Following Hobbes, many social theorists have claimed that the state reduces the amount of violence in human societies. Are they right ? The author reviews the cross-cultural and cross-national evidence on the impact of the state on the most common form of extreme violence-lethal conflict (i.e., war, rebellion, homicide, and execution). Drawing on the sociology of conflict management, he argues that the relationship between the state and lethal conflict is not negative as Hobbesian theory predicts. Rather, it appears to be U-shaped. A combination of materials from anthropology, criminology, and political science suggests that rates of lethal conflict tend to be high when state authority is absent and also when it is extremely strong or centralized. Between these extremes, in less centralized states, lethal conflict typically declines

Death by family: Honor violence as punishment

Occurring in a broad range of non-western and western countries, violence committed against women in the name of family honor has been viewed in several ways, including as a crime, as gendered violence, or as a violation of human rights. But from a purely explanatory point of view, family honor violence is most profitably viewed as a type of social control, specifically penal social control. As punishment, honor violence appears to obey the same principles as other forms of punishment. Drawing on the theoretical strategy of pure sociology, the present article highlights two such principles: punishment increases with the social distance and social inferiority of the offender. These twin principles help to explain a broad range of facts about when and where family honor violence will occur, and how severe – in particular, how lethal – it will be.

Less Crime, More Punishment

Recasting Durkheim’s “community of saints” thesis, the authors argue that the severity of punishment is predicted in part by the prevalence of the deviant behavior of which the deviant stands accused. Although there is some curvilinearity at low levels of prevalence, the relationship is generally negative. Thus, all else equal, where a particular crime is frequent, any punishment applied to it is likely to be mild; conversely, where a crime is infrequent, its punishment ought to be severe. Using hierarchical regression models, the authors support this hypothesis with 1988 homicide conviction and imprisonment decisions in 32 U.S. counties.

The scientific significance of Collins's Violence.

In Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory, one of the world’s greatest sociologists, applies his formidable intellectual powers to the problem of human aggression. But how far does Randall Collins’s big and ambitious book advance the scientific understanding of violent behaviour? Addressing that question, I pinpoint three major strengths and three major weaknesses of Violence before offering, at the end, a summary evaluation.

Ethnic conflict without ethnic groups: a study in pure sociology

Despite growing awareness of the limitations of group-level analyses in ethnic studies, research on ethnic conflict has paid virtually no systematic attention to variation at the individual or micro level. Addressing that gap, the present paper draws upon data from interviews conducted with members of two broadly-defined categories recently arrived in the Republic of Ireland, Muslims and Nigerians. Results indicate that while members of both immigrant categories experience a good deal of ethnic conflict or hostility, such conflict is rarely collective and invariably varies across individuals. The research data are consistent with Donald Blacks theory of moralism. Blacks theory, based on his theoretical system known as pure sociology, predicts that ethnic hostility increases with the social inferiority and cultural distance of the immigrant, and that higher status immigrants are more assertive in responding to hostility, though they experience less of it (the status paradox).

Terrorism as Gravitational Attraction

Originality/value Our theory builds upon network explanations of the transition to terrorism but goes beyond them in three ways: (1) it provides an explanation of the initial drift into terrorist networks; (2) it does not invoke psychology, purposes or other subjective mental states of the actors; and (3) it situates the transition to terrorism within a general theory of conflict.

When Will Academics Contest Intellectual Conflict

Academics have conflicts over ideas with some regularity, yet they contest only some of them. When will they do so? We draw on a theory of conflict management developed by Donald Black and others to explain the response to intellectual conflict. Drawing on interviews with 70 professors at two universities, we find that the contestation of intellectual conflicts is predicted by their social geometry. Academics are more likely to contest conflicts over the validity, ownership, and production of ideas when the conflict spans greater distances in relational and functional space, originates from a lower elevation in vertical space, and is a larger actual or potential change in vertical space.

Homicide: A Sociological Explanation

America’s high rate of homicide is widely known, but the reasons for it are not well understood. Scholarly analyses have remained curiously compartmentalized. Studies of gun effects have little to say about, for example, inequality effects. Leonard Beeghley seeks to provide the missing synthesis. Drawing together the disparate research literatures, he proposes a single model with five variables: guns, illegal drugs markets, exposure to violence, racial discrimination, and economic inequality. Beeghley distinguishes sharply between a social psychological explanation (why individuals commit homicide) and the kind of structural or sociological explanation he is advancing (why homicide rates vary). The ideal way to construct a structural explanation, Beeghley argues, would be to assemble cross-national data on homicide rates with good measures of the variables that previous research has revealed to be important, and to conduct a rigorous multivariate analysis. However, the data necessary for such an analysis are not available, nor are they likely to be anytime soon. Beeghley therefore proposes to identify the major variables in the research literature and to link them together logically rather than statistically. Before doing so, Beeghley challenges the reigning heavyweight champion of explanations: Messner and Rosenfeld’s, Crime and the American Dream. Beeghley criticizes their theory primarily because it does not include several variables that research shows to be important, such as gun availability and racial inequality. Messner and Rosenfeld’s dismissal of each of these variables on the grounds they cannot wholly explain high American homicide rates, the author argues, ignores the fact that any adequate theory of a complex pattern must be multivariate. Turning to his own model, Beeghley reviews in some detail the research literature that establishes a link between elevated homicide rates and his five variables. Because gun availability is the most exhaustively studied and controversial of his variables, he devotes more attention to it than to the other four. In the final chapter, Beeghley argues that if Americans want a society with lower homicide rates, there are a variety of realistic ways they can achieve it, especially by reducing gun availability (e.g., making guns that can be fired only by authorized users) and shrinking illegal drug markets (e.g., treating rather than punishing drug offenders). Throughout the book, Beeghley provides a highly competent and thorough appraisal of the extensive research literature. He writes well in a simple, clear, jargon-free style, and he peppers his discussion with well-chosen examples from real life cases, the arts (e.g., Romeo and Juliet), and scholarly works (e.g., Lawrence Stone on the English aristocracy). His review of the historical literature, especially the American literature, is excellent. He does a good job describing the costs of homicide, especially its human costs. These features make Homicide a book likely to be popular with students. At the same time, there are weaknesses. Beeghley has a habit of concluding discussions of controversial points with a statement of the position he favors and then adding a sentence or footnote to the effect that “Of course, Professor X disagrees” but without telling us why he disagrees. Scholars skeptical of the guns-homicide rate argument receive this treatment several times. Beeghley also makes much of the distinction between a social psychological and a structural explanation, arguing that the latter is quintessentially sociological because it invokes the social environment rather than individual choice. But the choosing individual remains at the center of his thinking, because he goes on to argue that the importance of the social environment is that it facilitates or restricts the choices people make. Thus, there is nothing especially structural about his explanation. The innovative methodology, a multivariate analysis without the numbers, is a strength for the book, but it is also a limitation. The book suffers from the major weakness of much quantitative multivariate analysis: sacrificing explanatory coherence

Feud and Internal War: Legal Aspects

Law has long been considered the antithesis of feuding and internal warfare. Where law represents order and reason and civilization, feud/internal warfare represents disorder, passion, and tribalism. Dissatisfied with the traditional contrast, some scholars have emphasized continuities instead, arguing that sending and internal warfare are the functional equivalent of law in societies that lack a legal system. More recently, the emergence of a new social scientific field—the sociology of conflict management (Black 1976, 1973)—has yielded a sharper understanding of the similarities and the differences between law and intrasocietal violence. From a conflict management perspective, although the presence of neutral, authoritative third parties, often administering explicit rules, is distinctive to law, both law and feud/internal warfare are confrontational ways of handling conflict in which two sides seek victory rather than compromise and in which third-party supporters commonly play a crucial role. Moreover, law and violence flourish under similar, though not identical, social conditions. Hence, law and feud/internal warfare are best thought of neither as siblings nor as strangers, but as cousins.