Abstract
Cross-national inquiry can make several distinctive contributions to the understanding of criminal violence. One, it permits an assessment of variability in levels and patterns of violent crime. In his classic discussion of the “normality of crime”, Durkheim (1964:66) argues that crime is “closely connected with the conditions of all social life”, leading him to conclude that a society without crime is inconceivable. The same may very well hold true for violent crime in contemporary nations. Coercive action has intrinsic utility for obtaining compliance from others (see Tedeschi & Felson, 1994), and thus a certain degree of violence may be an inevitably feature of complex forms of social organization. Nevertheless, cross-national research elucidates the range of possibilities for minimizing levels of criminal violence.
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Messner, S. (2003). Understanding Cross-National Variation in Criminal Violence. In: Heitmeyer, W., Hagan, J. (eds) International Handbook of Violence Research. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-306-48039-3_34
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