Title: The Challenges of Understanding Violence in Contemporary Society: A Sociological Approach
Abstract: This paper analyses partiality in defining and understanding violence and specific social causes of both violence and the bias in dealing with it. The objective is to develop two ideal types of societies regarding their tolerance of violence and repressiveness (not) appearing in them – as a method of analysing current drawbacks in the approaches to violence predominantly based on legal and/or criminological approaches and to offer a possible new sociologically-founded definition of violence. The methods applied to understand latent/invisible yet structuring forces behind violence are ideal types and ex post facto data on social repressiveness (human rights, press freedom index etc.). The meaningfulness of measures is analysed by using a comparative framework. Findings suggest regular (possibly systematic) oversights in understanding and defining violence, and specifically social conditionality of violence and segmentation between different approaches to violence, which is an issue for both research on violence and social policy. Original are: the focus on the sociological definition of violence conceptualized in broad terms, the aspect of social values and the role of social power regarding interconnectedness of different forms of violence. The paper aims to be a contribution to sociological theory and several ‘special’ sociological disciplines, like sociology of violence, sociology of crime and deviance, and sociology of power.
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot