The Sociology of Violence

Very interesting story in the NYTimes on Donald Black's work on the sociology of violence. Worth exploring more since so much of this rings true to me:

A better way to think about violence, Black argues, is to closely examine the relationships between individuals and groups.

"Most violence is a way that people handle grievances. Violence is a species of social life in the same genus as law."

Black argues that the social distance between individuals predicts how violence enters a conflict. The greater the social distance, the greater the violence.

Another Black theory is that the hierarchical relationships between perpetrators and victims predict how the law gets involved.