Perpetrating violence viewed from the perspective of the social sciences: Debates and perspectives

Abstract

What drives some people to “perpetrate violence”? Why do others, by contrast, not perpetrate violence, even under the same conditions? Do all violent acts involve a radicalization or a dehumanization and degradation of civil relations between subjects, sometimes even between neighbors or even within the same family or community, be it ethnic or national? This special theme gathers contributions from many different geographical areas (mainly Morocco, Syria, Germany, and Rwanda) and from several disciplines (literature, political science, sociology, history) in order to offer keys to understanding the factors that trigger or accelerate the perpetration of violence, but also those that curb or limit it. The reader will also find exhaustive states of the art and case studies on different types of violence (riot, political, paramilitary, genocidal), leading to transversal theorizations that go well beyond dichotomies and old debates. For example, the authors discuss the “old” opposition between a situational and a procedural approach, embodied—not without artifice—by Browning and Goldhagen, or the necessary dehumanization of the enemy generally associated with the study of genocides. Another methodological choice with a strong epistemological implication consisted in not contrasting the recent theories on radicalization with those on extreme violence, and rejecting any obvious determinism between both moments, in order to avoid explaining the perpetration of violence in too facile a way.