From Warre to Tyranny: Lethal Conflict and the State

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Sociological Review.Following Hobbes, many social theorists have claimed that the state reduces the amount of violence in human societies. Are they right? I review the crosscultural 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 (Black 1993), I argue 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. theoristss have long argued that the state JLreduces violence among those subject to its jurisdiction. Hobbes ([1651] 1909) provided an early and eloquent statement of this idea, contending that in the absence of a strong central authority, violence pervades social life. Weber's ([1922] 1968:54) influential definition of the state emphasizes its ability to successfully monopolize the legitimate use of violence, a capacity that would seem to depend partly on the state's ability to restrict violent behavior. Elias ([1939] 1982) nominates the state as a primary source of the long-term civilizing process that decreases violence in everyday life. And Koch's (1974) experience as an ethnographer in New Guinea leads him to stress the importance of thirdparty modes of conflict management, like those provided by state legal systems, as violence-controlling mechanisms in human societies.But are these authors correct? Does the state diminish violence in human affairs? If the state did not exist, would life be more violent? Neither the literature on the state nor that on violence contains a sustained empirical analysis of these issues, even though the "many-sided problem of order" remains a prominent topic of theoretical discussion (Wrong 1994). In this paper, I seek to fill the void, reviewing the available information in light of ideas developed in the sociology of conflict management, a broad field dedicated to describing and explaining the handling of human conflict (Black 1976(Black , 1984(Black , 1993; also see Horwitz 1990).The argument I advance is that the Hobbesian thesis is only partially correct. Anthropological evidence suggests that the state tends to reduce the amount of violent conflict in human societies. But pol...

Good Policy Can Lower Violent Crime: Evidence from a Cross-National Panel of Homicide Rates, 1980–97

“…• Interpol: Bahrain, 1989;China, 1980 and1981;Honduras, all years;Iraq, 1987;Lesotho, 1981 and1997;Malaysia, 1993;Morocco, all years;Rwanda, all years;Sri Lanka, all years;Sudan, 1995;Suriname, 1996Suriname, -1997Syria, 1980 and1983;Turkey, 1980;Zimbabwe, 1994.…”

Representing Mass Violence: Conflicting Responses to Human Rights Violations in Darfur

“…And such responses affect chances of breaking those "cycles of violence" (Minow 1998) that have tortured humanity throughout its history, with Darfur being one of the recent chapters of such suffering (Hagan and Rymond-Richmond 2008). Nation building succeeded in dramatically reducing civil violence within modernizing societies (Elias 1978;Johnson and Monkkonen 1996;Cooney 1997;Eisner 2001). Will the building of global institutions, especially in the justice field, lead to a similar degree of pacification worldwide?…”

The Long Twentieth Century in American Sociology: A Semiautobiographical Survey

“…Third, lethal violence has a curvilinear relationship to the extent and kind of state centralization and intrusive societal control. Stateless societies and those with very weak states have high rates of deadly violence, but societies governed by highly centralized autocratic or totalitarian states have the very highest rates, whereas intermediate levels of state control are associated with low rates of lethal violence (Cooney 1997).…”