Public understanding of what constitutes interpersonal violence has been the topic of much conceptual debate. In this study, we aim to contribute to this literature by generating empirical insight. We recruit a quota representative sample of the Dutch population ( N = 724) and expose participants to vignettes describing interpersonal conflict. We use a conjoint design to manipulate six features of the vignettes and examine how these impact participants’ willingness to label the incident as violent. Results showed that – in line with ideal victim effects – events involving more vulnerable victims and more blameworthy perpetrators are more likely to be labelled as violence. Further, ‘traditional’ representations of interpersonal violence as events that produce physical injury to the victim, generated high violence ratings. Still, public understanding of interpersonal violence was relatively inclusive – various non-physical confrontations were also considered to be violent.
The PARTES project examines rising violence against places of worship in Europe, driven by terrorism, hate crimes, vandalism, and cyber-attacks. Between 2013 and 2023, these incidents grew in diversity and scope, involving both right-wing and jihadist groups. The current study highlights how radicalization and hate speech intensify inter-religious tensions and violence. Despite protective measures by European states, such as surveillance, these strategies remain insufficient, calling for more inclusive, participatory approaches involving law enforcement and religious communities. The project categorizes different types of attacks and stresses the growing threat of ideological violence, particularly online. It also highlights the need to combat misinformation and regulating hate speech, while promoting inter-community dialogue for peaceful coexistence. The findings advocate for a comprehensive approach that combines security, education, and interfaith collaboration. Future research should focus on digital threats, the effectiveness of protection systems, and the role of inter-religious dialogue in fostering cooperation.
This article explores the symbolic and structural violence embedded in heritage preservation practices, focusing on the case of the Collection Persévérance held by the Historical and Geographical Institute of Alagoas (IHGAL). Through an anthropological lens and field-based research, it interrogates the epistemological, racial, and spiritual silencing imposed on Afro-Brazilian ritual objects when they are removed from their cosmological and liturgical contexts and confined within traditional museum logics. The analysis reveals how these preservation models, often rooted in colonial, elitist, and hygienist frameworks, continue to marginalize Afro-Brazilian religious knowledge and maintain historical hierarchies. The article also highlights the recent recognition of the Perseverance Collection as Brazilian Cultural Heritage by IPHAN, emphasizing the importance of shared management with religious leaders as a step toward decolonizing museological practices. Ultimately, the article questions whether the very act of preservation, when detached from community-led interpretations, can itself become a form of symbolic violence.
This article offers a discursive analysis of two contemporary Islamist 8 texts that frame violence not as a deviation from religious normativity, but as its necessary and even redemptive expression. It examines Daʿwa al-muqāwama al-islāmiyya al-ʿālamiyya ( The Call to Global Islamic Resistance ) by Abū Muṣʿab al-Ṣūrī (2004) and De l’idéologie islamique française by Aïssam Aït-Yahya (2015) , two ideologically distinct yet rhetorically potent works that articulate violence as an existential necessity. Although relatively unknown to the general public, al-Ṣūrī’s manifesto has become a foundational text within ǧihādist circles, serving as a discursive matrix for constructing violence as both theologically sanctioned and strategically necessary. Aït-Yahya’s essay, though more elliptical and less widely disseminated, plays a significant role in shaping ideological polarization within French Muslim contexts. Drawing on critical discourse analysis, the article draws on critical discourse analysis to explore how sacred language, theological references, and affective strategies produce a grammar of legitimacy. From this perspective, radicalization is not approached as a deviant behavior, but as a discursive production—embedded in language, affect, and symbolic economy—that constructs violence as morally compelling and theologically grounded. The article also discusses how discursive structures may create potential openings for disengagement by revealing the interpretive tensions at the heart of radical narratives. It argues that understanding religious violence requires not only sociopolitical analysis but a careful reading of how language constructs normative obligations, moral antagonisms, and sacred temporality.
This paper examines how law institutionalizes and legitimizes violence within the Islamic Republic of Iran, using the country’s Islamic Constitution and legal codes as a case study. Through close analysis of constitutional and statutory provisions, it explores how religiously grounded legal frameworks produce systemic harm against women, children, and religious minorities. Rather than viewing violence as a deviation from legal norms, the paper argues that violence is embedded in the law itself—functioning through mechanisms of exclusion, inequality, and punishment sanctified by religious authority. Drawing on theories of structural and symbolic violence, the paper demonstrates how the law codifies hierarchies of gender, age, and belief. Structural violence operates through discriminatory legal provisions, while symbolic violence is enacted through moralizing narratives that mask domination as divine order. The paper focuses on areas where legal violence is most pronounced: unequal rights in family and criminal law, the diminished legal status of religious minorities, and the state’s use of corporal punishments that blur the line between judicial process and physical harm. By positioning the Islamic Republic as a case study, the paper contributes to wider debates on the intersection of religion, law, and violence. It asks how law—rather than restraining violence—can become its most powerful enabler under the guise of sacred legitimacy.
Reports of the Capitol Hill Riot (CHR) on 6 January 2021 emphasized how far-right activists converged from all over the United States and coalesced in violent public action. And yet, the riot itself was highly contested within online far-right communities, revealing underlying infighting. This paper draws on data from three forums and image boards, 8kun, 4chan, and TheDonald.win, to explore how online users interacted on the current political situation in the run-up to and the aftermath of the CHR. We explain far-right infighting through competing conspiratorial narratives that entail different attributions of who is deemed a traitor to the movement and then result in diverging logics for and legitimacies of political action. Drawing on qualitative content analysis of approximately 3000 posts, we demonstrate how these narratives shape internal conflicts, infighting, and proposed action. One perspective supports the riot as a necessary response to save Donald Trump after an allegedly stolen election, rendering anyone not fully in support of the CHR as hybrid; the second perspective depicts Trump as a traitor and part of more fundamental, systemic problems, therefore advocating for violence that supports a fundamental renewal of society. Our analysis thus traces the roots of political infighting amongst far-right actors to two differing conspiratorial narratives and diverging logics of political action.
Staff at residential youth care institutions often encounter conflictual and sometimes dangerous situations while enforcing rules and providing care for adolescents. Although research has explored staff victimization risk factors in this occupational setting, little attention has been paid to the interaction-level risks that may influence this risk. This paper addresses this gap by examining the face-to-face dynamics of staff-adolescent conflicts. We analyzed 135 incidents, retrospectively reported by 50 employees from seven facilities, ranging from open to secure units. Using a case-crossover study design, we coded staff and adolescent actions in both staff victimization and non-victimization events and assessed how staff conflict management actions correlated with subsequent staff exposure to violence and threats. Contrary to our hypothesis, we found no significant influence of staff actions on their risk of victimization. However, further exploratory analysis indicated that when staff attempt to control an object in the adolescent’s possession this leads to escalation and staff victimization. Our null findings may suggest a need to adjust expectations regarding the effectiveness of conflict management strategies in some contexts, although it is important to note that the current results do not preclude the potential for larger-sampled studies to identify preventive benefits of management actions.
This article examines how violence gains value through communicative action, focusing on the distinction between prizing and appraisal as key processes of valuation. Drawing on John Dewey’s theory of valuation and communicative constructivism, it argues that violence is both a performative assertion of value and a subject of discursive negotiation. Using a case study of a racist attack, the study demonstrates that prizing occurs as an immediate, embodied act in which perpetrators affirm perceived values while simultaneously devaluing their victims. In contrast, appraisal involves the retrospective and discursive evaluation of violence, shaping its legitimacy and social meaning through public debate, legal judgment and media representation. This dual perspective challenges structuralist views that treat values as pre-existing determinants of violence, highlighting instead how violence actively produces and transforms cultural meanings. By analyzing the communicative construction of violence-related valuations, the study contributes to the sociology of violence by offering insights into the dynamic processes through which violence is legitimised, contested and integrated into the social order.
Civil unrest erupted throughout the United States following the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer. While most protests remained peaceful, some turned violent. Using publicly available sources, we assembled a database of the 31 known homicides associated with the protests and riots that occurred in 2020 following the death of George Floyd. Results from our descriptive analyses help shed light on the characteristics of the victims and perpetrators in these cases, as well as the nature of the homicide incidents and the civil unrest events during which they occurred. Although certain politicians and journalists depicted the homicides associated with these protests and riots in monolithic terms, the nature of these incidents varied widely. Therefore, theoretical explanations for these homicides, as well as public policy responses to them, must account for this heterogeneity.
The radical right in late-imperial Russia arose at the beginning of the 20th century as a reaction to social and economic transformation in society. The far-right professed the conservative state ideology “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality”; it was against parliamentarianism, liberalism, and socialism. “Although rooted in conservative thought, the far right was radical in its populism, antisemitism and quest for mass appeal. During the 1905 Revolution, various far-right parties emerged (e.g., the Union of the Russian People). These parties sought to defend the existing order and resorted to violence, which they legitimized as self-defense against revolutionaries. After the revolution of 1917, a significant part of the extreme right went into exile and continued the struggle against the Bolshevik regime. This time, violence was legitimized as righteous revenge against the usurpers of the Russian homeland. In the article, I deal with how the extreme right legitimized political violence. I point to the continuity in the use of violence, which was also related to the continuity of antisemitism. At the same time, however, I draw attention to shifts in the legitimization of violence.
The sociology of emotions is an interesting analytical instrument to retrospectively understand social phenomena and a sociological look at violence always thematized the centrality of emotions. The Nanjing Massacre is one of the largest violence cases in human history. Besides arson, looting and massacre, the sexual violence committed by the Japanese army against innocent women stirred up people’s anger and pain, and formed traumatic memories. This paper attempts to analyze the ways in which documentary materials, fictional works and short videos about the sexual violence during the Nanjing Massacre have participated in the construction of cultural trauma from the perspective of sociology of emotions. In this way, the connections between violence against women and emotions in a historical case of collective violence are analyzed. On one hand, through testimonies and news reports, we find that the victims of sexual violence often refuse to recall their experiences due to traditional views on chastity, and the Chinese people tend to empathize with their shame treating them as hollow symbols of national suffering. On the other hand, through films and short videos, we discover that collective memory as an emotional experience is also restructured and expressed under the influence of capital and globalization.
The 2023 Global Slavery Index estimates that India has the highest number of people living in modern slavery (11 million people) in the world, which equates to a prevalence of eight people in modern slavery for every thousand people. Sex slavery and trafficking have harmful effects on the physical and mental health of victims due to violence, emotional violence, and emotional coercion, including consequences on psychological morbidity. Using the snowball method, 27 rescued trafficking victims were interviewed in the Bargarh district of Odisha, India. Findings of the present study describe that there is a systematic implementation of violence and emotional coercion tactics by the perpetrators to control the victims’ body, emotions, and actions. Although physical and sexual abuses are powerful methods to enslave victims, the emotional coercion method is a strategy used by abusers to exert power to destabilize the victim and weaken them emotionally, to make it easier to control over the body, which leads to an elevated and severe prevalence of depression (93 percent), anxiety (96 percent), and stress (100 percent) among the victims. The study concludes that there is an urgent need of public health and epidemiological studies to better understand human trafficking within a health equity framework to strengthen health care services for victims in India.
Violence is perceived as such an obvious sign of our societies that we rarely really observe the news of violence behind it and with it we reach a state of unnoticed acceptance. Daily life in the 21st century is traversed by different forms of violence: political, religious, gender, and ethnic, just to mention a few of its many manifestations. In the classic social theory, various approaches to the violent features of social practices have been aimed at producing, circulating, and reproducing power. In this context, this article has a double objective: (a) to synthesize some facets considered key to study the connections between violence and emotions today and (b) to present some general guidelines for reading violence and coloniality. To achieve this objective, the following presentation strategy has been developed: (a) in the introduction, a first approximation of the connections between violence and emotions is presented, (b) some lines of study on violence are schematized and three fields of work are synthesized that show the relationship between emotions and violence, and (c) we offer a synthetic approach of violent practices and colonial violence. The article is built around a proposal to understand the various forms of violence as “colonial” and ends by emphasizing the opportunities of appealing to a sociology of hope as a counter light to the current politics of sensibilities anchored in violence.
Anger constitutes an undeniable driving force to comprehend many of the collective actions that have traversed the Argentine reality since the return of democracy. As an expression of a constellation of social emotions that materialize in individuals' experiences, the anger underpinning protests not only questions the disputes over the “correct ways of feeling” in society but also communicates about what it is willing to acknowledge in terms of violence management. Emotion and violence emerge as two privileged lenses to unravel a genealogy of anger that materializes in collective actions. This study aims to approach the aforementioned relationship through a series of concrete postcards of Argentine collective action (since 1983). Without striving for exhaustiveness, a series of postcards are reconstructed from paradigmatic collective actions, enabling the identification of “rhythms” in the connections between anger and violence through the interactions of repertoires and action meanings. The following are analyzed: “escraches” (political actions against individuals accused of crimes against humanity), roadblocks , looting, lynchings and “digital cancellation” actions. Records from virtual ethnographies and in-person interviews engage in dialogue with media records and existing academic literature on the selected paradigmatic cases, all aimed at initially characterizing a genealogy of anger in Argentina.
For some young people, violence is the only means of recognition they have to escape a feeling of emptiness or indifference. Violence is a vertigo that seeks a limit to stop it. The self-destructive aspects highlighted in these behaviors call for a search for identity that involves both the ultimate limit, that is, death (falling to someone stronger than oneself, being shot by the police, etc.), and social limits, that is, confrontation with others and the law, in order to find one’s bearings. Sometimes, the act of violence corresponds to a period of crisis in the young person’s life. By exposing himself to a dangerous or conflictual situation, he tries to regain control of the situation, while paradoxically abandoning himself to it at the risk of being arrested by the police or endangering his own life. The art of delinquency is knowing how far to go too far. Two major forms of violence have emerged in recent decades, first school killings, then jihadism, both of which raise specific questions since they involve the premeditated and deliberate killing of others. Killing is undoubtedly the last prohibition of our ultraliberal societies, the ultimate possibility of a grandiose transgression likely to secure power and inscribe one’s name in the media of celebrity. There’s the pleasure of holding someone else’s life in your hands, an unlimited freedom driven by omnipotence.
This research examines the correlation between violence and emotional expression on X (formerly Twitter) in the Colombian context. The investigation employed a mixed-methods approach and digital ethnographic techniques to analyze tweets and responses from three mainstream media accounts regarding controversial topics: the bullfighting prohibition, the femicide of Stefanny Barranco, and President Petro’s constitutional reform proposals. The findings demonstrate significant emotional polarization, characterized by expressions of frustration, indignation, and pessimism. The analysis indicates that symbolic and verbal violence in political discourse intensifies emotional schisms within an already divided society. The study concludes that mitigating these detrimental social media dynamics necessitates collaborative intervention from multiple societal stakeholders to foster constructive dialogue.
This study explores sexual harassment experienced by women in the public spaces of Kathmandu, Nepal, with a focus on their emotional responses and the mediating resources they employ to cope with such experiences. Theoretically, the study draws on the sensibilities of emotions that result from violence by examining the women’s understanding to perceive, interpret, and respond to emotions in a manner that helps them manage their presence in public spaces. Data were collected from semi-structured individual and group interviews with women who frequently used public spaces. Adopting a constructivist approach, the findings discuss three sub-themes: (1) the emotional impacts of sexual harassment, encompassing a wide range of emotions among respondents; (2) responses to these emotions and incidents through freeze, flight, and fight mechanisms; and (3) the coping strategies and social support mechanisms utilized to deal with the situation. This research significantly contributes to our understanding of the convergence of the sociology of emotions with gender-based violence, with specific attention to sensibilities, in rapidly transforming societies.
