Violence should permanently alter theory about and policy-making on the subject. Collins argues that violence is not frequent, contagious, chaotic, or enduring. Nor are its perpetrators especially brave, able, or willing. The cowboy cops, war lovers, hit-men, sadists, and the like who populate modern romance are largely media fabrications that make the job of understanding violence only that much more difficult. Equally deficient in this regard are the libraries of social science that locate the causes of violence either inside the perpetrators’ heads (e.g., in their frustrations, their lack of education, their “short fuses,” their rational calculations, machismo, or prejudices); that, or in structural conditions lying outside them (their alleged “culture of death,” their poverty, powerlessness, anomie, or alienation). Such accounts are what Collins calls “folk cognitions,” tales devised by expert myth-makers after battles to bring them to meaningfully satisfying conclusions. Thus, they are “part of the process itself” (discussed below). The actual drivers of violence, according to Collins, are to be found in the micro-dynamics of communicative interaction. That is to say, there are “no violent individuals, but [only] violent situations” (p. 70).

To unravel exactly what these dynamics are, Collins consults video documents, still camera shots, ethnographies, ancient histories, and audio-recordings of a variety of encounters, from military combat missions, gang fights, and police beatings, to massacres, domestic abuse, and bullying. He comments on hazing, rape, hold-ups, duels, jousts, old time gun fights, and Greek battle tactics (surprisingly omitting, however, the rich resources of the Pentateuch). He moves from road rage incidents, to Japanese dojos and Sicilian mafia killings; and from these to American teen-age mosh pits, British soccer hooliganism, and down-home bar-room brawls. It’s easy to lose oneself in the sheer mass of material. Yet out of it, Collins is able to derive several principles. The first and most important is that “violence is hard,” and relative to all the opportunities for it, it is (and always has been) rare. This is because when human beings face hostilities, whether in war, at home or the office, on the dance-floor or in the school hallway, they undergo “confrontational tension and fear”; not the terror of getting injured oneself, as such, but of hurting others. In bringing harm to others, says Collins, we risk violating our innate “feelings of inter-subjectivity and moral solidarity” (p. 79). And this simply “goes against one’s physiological hard-wiring” (p. 80). Ideological dehumanization, the use of blind-folds during executions, assassinations to the back of the head, and even the fact that bayonets are almost never deployed in battle, are all explicable by a reluctance to despoil and ravage our fellows.

The upshot of this is that instead of ranks of competent heroes who eagerly engage enemies, in reality we observe bungling, reluctant troops losing control of their sphincters, vomiting, and burying themselves in the earth in anticipation of the fight; and afterwards, suffering (sometimes permanent) post-battle psychosomatic illness. When broken-down to essentials, family spats, riots, muggings, and fist-fights invariably “abort” into cursing-swaps, stare-downs, muscle-bulging displays, bluffing contests, and swaggering; and eventually into mutual boredom. This is followed by the construction of hyperbolized encounter-narratives that exaggerate the courage and skills of the participants, while “forgetting” that most of those present (especially the narrators themselves), held the combatants’ coats and watched the fleeting affair from a safe distance. Says Collins: “A little violence goes a long way” in producing the “buzz” of solidarity (p. 324).

To say it again, “violence is difficult, not easy” (449). But if this is true, then how is it possible in the first place? The short answer is that there must be situational “pathways” or social organizational pre-conditions that overcome the natural human inclination not to fight. These are, in brief: (1) Availability of a weak, despairing victim, out-numbered, off-balanced, or socially isolated. Once such prey is found, the aggressor’s earlier fear/tension typically can reach a climax and “boil over” into “forward panic” (as opposed to retreat): an orgy of destruction, coupled with ecstasy, ending in self-disgust and disbelief. This can be witnessed during ghetto uprisings (say, Detroit, 1968), police beatings (e.g., Rodney King, 1991), military massacres of defenseless civilians (My Lai, Vietnam, 1968), and in ethnic incursions into enemy turf (Rwanda, 1994). In forward panics, a “moral holiday” is tacitly declared, permitting an “antinomian carnival” of looting, rape, arson, and murder. While to outsiders the events appear chaotic, closer view shows them to follow predictable, sequential patterns. Moral holidays are not utilitarian exercises, but ad hoc sacramentals that produce zones of “collective effervescence” among the executioners. (2) Audience encouragement. Collins cites the well-confirmed proposition that teams are more violent than individuals, and that antagonists lacking spectators will slink back into the shadows after a peremptory exchange of epithets and threats. Third-party encouragement can take the form of coercion (think: battle-field policing), of drilled-in pre-battle discipline (wherein obedience to orders becomes habitual), and/or when aggregates of combatants join in phalanxes, and each warrior’s safety depends on the others. (3) The combat is “clean,” because it is rule-governed. When they are well-developed conflict regulations will prescribe permissible weaponry, permissible moves, and legitimate targets. They will designate special arenas and times for fighting, establish scoring protocols, impose penalties for unfairness, and stipulate pre-battle gifting and post-battle prizes. Above all, they will impose on combatants costume requirements, most notably, heavy padding and helmets. When these conditions are met, the frequency of fighting will go up, but its carnage will decline: the first, because combat etiquette itself becomes the focus of attention, allowing opponents a pathway around fear/tension; the second, because the rules limit the harm they can do, once engaged.

After over 450 dense pages devoted to the preconditions of violence, it seems ironic that Collins leaves only four to discuss remedies. But there is a very good reason for this, namely, that the thought of “eradicating violence entirely is unrealistic” (p. 466). Indeed, far from putting an end to violence, modern civilization has only “increased” its likelihood (p. 29). This is because modern surveillance technologies are able to isolate enemies with more facility than ever before (condition 1, above); electronic social networking encourages bullying and piling-on (condition 2); and the electronic battlefield has generated new, more lethal ways to attack (condition 3) (p. 334). As a result, no number of “zero tolerance” policies or “just say no” and “hugs not drugs” campaigns “can… come close to dealing with the issues of violence” in our age (p. 466).

While his accounts of conflict scenarios are riveting and occasionally funny, Collins can be verbose. Without much loss in analytic rigor, the page count of Violence could probably be halved. Nevertheless, this is a compelling corrective to pop social sciences of violence, and there really is nothing comparable to it on the market. I enthusiastically recommend Violence for all public and academic libraries and for all scientists and humanists concerned with dealing with this always fascinating subject in an intellectually honest, morally challenging way.