What the Situation Explains: On Riotous Violence

Abstract

Some two decades ago, a number of German sociologists called for a fundamental reorientation of research into violence, arguing that the failure to make violence as such — in the sense of a situated event, a physical activity — the subject of social-scientific research represented a serious deficit that bordered on the grotesque. Such research, these critics claimed, had been hitherto limited mainly to the socio-structural, cultural-historical and biographically conditioned causes of violence, factors that were remote from the situations in which violence was physically manifested.¹ Mainstream sociology, which is able to identify quantitative distributions and statistical connections — for example, between poverty, disintegrated milieux, ethnicised attitudes and violence — has almost nothing to say about the actual exercise of violence and, in addition, has a tendency to over-predict its occurrence. Such a sociology can perhaps explain rates and probabilities of violence but not a violent act, a violent event. Explaining the latter, as Trutz von Trotha has argued, requires a “genuine sociology of violence”, one that begins with a “thick description” and a “microscopic analysis” of the violent action.²