The Idea of Violence

What constitutes violence? Such a deceptively simple question belies a much longer and contested history over the idea, meaning, and actualization of violence. Our initial supposition is that violence is an abstraction, a constantly changing 'idea' that impacts the ways in which it manifests itself and how people and societies relate to it. Violence thus becomes an intrinsic factor--negative, positive, ritual, institutional, revolutionary--of sociological processes and as such its practices and interpretations affect and are affected by culture. The contributions in this volume address directly the philosophic foundations of violence within different historical and geographical contexts. Individually and collectively, contributors investigate how varied contexts generate specific concepts of violence and, concurrently, how different philosophies and ideologies shape the expression, perception, and representation of violence.