Proposal sans timeline

Institutionalizing Violence

This research will look to understand institutional forms of violence – how they are formed and develop. The first part of the research will be aimed at describing of the basic components of the coherent social context, derived from sociological theory, and how institutions are embedded in these contexts. I will argue that the coherent social context is made up of a social structure or field, agents, discourse, events, and an environment. Institutions are regularly reproduced structural relations, explicit in discourse, which agents understand and are able to perform to the point of taking the situation for granted and expect a certain series or sets of events to occur. The second part will be aimed at creating a uniform definition and typology of violence from the currently disjointed understanding of violence. I will limit violence to physical harm and categorize the types of violence according to the group affiliations and intimacy-level between those involved. The final part will attempt to explain how the types of violence become regularized in the social context institutionally and how these institutions of violence change over time. I will argue that institutionalized violence is an event brought about by escalating tensions between in- and out-group agents which reoccur and become taken-for-granted via the institutionalized structures, discourses, and roles embedded in social structure, individual habitus, and common knowledge. These violent events develop as a number of factors change between violent agents including spatial distance, functional distance, and power inequality.

AREAS OF RESEARCH:

Institutional Theory: Economic institutionalism, historical institutionalism, sociological institutionalism

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Social Context: Functionalist approaches, phenomenology, Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice, Goffman’s Dramaturgy

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Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974.

Luhmann, Niklas. Social Systems. Trans. John Bednarz Jr. with Dirk Baecker. Stanford,

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Categorizations of Violence: Philosophical, sociological, anthropological, political science

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Key Resources for Instances of Violence: Case studies and histories of violence

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Heitmeyer, Wilhelm and John Hagan, editors. International Handbook of Violence

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Institutionalizing Violence Resources: Social psychology, post-structuralism, sociology, political science, peace studies, anthropology.

Brewer, Marilynn B. and Miles Hewstone, editors. Social Cognition. Malden, MA:

Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Brubaker, Rogers and David D. Laitin, “Ethnic and Nationalist Violence” The Annual

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Hinton, Alexander Laban, editor Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide.

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Mann, Michael. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. New York:

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Staub, Ervin “Genocide and Mass Killing: Origins, Prevention, Healing and

Reconciliation” Political Psychology 21 no. 2. (2000): pp. 367-382.