Observers of human violence divide into three camps: idea people, behavior people, and relation people. Members of the three camps differ in their understanding of fundamental causes in human affairs. Idea people stress consciousness as the basis of human action. They generally claim that humans acquire beliefs, concepts, rules, goals, and values from their environments, reshape their own (and each other’s) impulses in conformity with such ideas, and act out their socially acquired ideas. Idea people divide over the significance of the distinction between individual and collective violence, with some arguing that individual and collective ideas inhabit partly separate domains, while others argue seamless continuity between individual and society. In either view, ideas concerning the worth of others and the desirability of aggressive actions significantly affect the propensity of a person or a people to join in collective violence. To stem violence, goes the reasoning, we must suppress or eliminate destructive ideas.

Behavior people stress the autonomy of motives, impulses, and opportunities. Many point to human evolution as the origin of aggressive action, individual or collective. They argue, for example, that among primates both natural and sexual selection gave advantages to individuals and populations employing aggressive means of acquiring mates, shelter, food, and protection against attack. Hence, runs the argument, propensities to adopt those aggressive means entered the human genetic heritage. Others avoid evolutionary explanations, but still speak of extremely general needs and incentives for domination, exploitation, respect, deference, protection, or security that underlie collective violence. Behavior people often take a reductionist position, saying that ultimately all collective phenomena sum up nothing but individual behaviors or even the impacts of particular genes. In such a perspective, since motives and impulses change at a glacial pace, violence rises or falls mainly in response to changes in two factors: socially imposed control over motives and socially created opportunities to express those motives.

Relation people make transactions among persons and groups far more central than do idea and behavior people. They argue that humans develop their personalities and practices through interchanges with other humans, and that the interchanges themselves always involve a degree of negotiation and creativity. Ideas thus become means, media, and products of social interchange, while motives, impulses, and opportunities only operate within continuously negotiated social interaction. For relation people, interpersonal violence therefore amounts to a kind of conversation, however brutal or one-sided that conversation may be. Relation people often make concessions to the influence of individual propensities, but generally insist that collective processes have irreducibly distinct properties. In this view, restraining violence depends less on destroying bad ideas, eliminating opportunities, or suppressing impulses than on transforming relations among persons and groups.

Of course, some analysts of violence offer combinations or compromises among ideas, behavior, and relations. Classic Marxists, for example, derived shared interests especially from relations of production, then saw interests as determining both prevailing ideas and interest-oriented behavior. Violence, in that view, generally resulted from and promoted class interests. Classic liberals replied that properly instilled ideas (sometimes, to be sure, reducing to simple calculations of gain and loss) generated appropriate behaviors and social relations. Despite many such attempts to combine perspectives, in the analysis of violence observers have divided sharply over the relative priorities and connections among ideas, behavior, and social relations. Strongly competing explanations for violence have therefore emerged.

For this special issue on violence, Social Research has recruited authors from all three camps, and some who straddle the boundaries of camps. David Slocum provides the purest example of an Idea analysis. His knowledgeable tracking of violence in mass-production American films from the 1890s to the recent past treats cinema as a site, transmitter, and sometime instrument of struggles over prevailing social values. It complicates that already complex conception by arguing that in representing violence filmmakers were also negotiating the place of cinema in American life as a whole. Film censorship, for Slocum, therefore becomes a privileged locus; although it bears only an indirect relation to changing popular tastes, censorship shows us producers, critics, regulators, and public authorities battling over what the film-consuming public will actually see. Nevertheless, consumer demand made a difference over the longer run. Slocum reports a general increase in popular demand for graphic depictions of violence, as well as increasing readiness of film producers to meet that demand. Meanwhile, critics including Slocum struggle to reconcile three contradictory views of American cinema: as a recorder of the current national moral climate; as a cohesion-promoting instrument of social control; and as a challenge to complacent mainstream culture.

In the Behavior camp, Caroline Blanchard and Robert Blanchard provide a striking statement of a very different view. Speaking from behavioral biology, they challenge semi-official denials that human warfare has a biological basis. Step by step, they attack claims for war as a uniquely human activity, for violent attacks by other animals as always unilateral (instead of the bilateral combat that defines human warfare), and for intentionally designed weapons as a defining element of warfare. They argue that students of non-human animal behavior have ignored important evidence of warlike encounters within such species as hyenas, lions, and even chimpanzees. The Blanchards’ revised picture of the evolutionary background to human warfare features two observations about non-human parallels: first, among non-humans fear generally propels flight rather than counter-attack when the attacking group has a discernible force advantage; second, where the groups are relatively equal, something like warfare does sometimes occur. Blanchard and Blanchard therefore recast the problem. How, they ask, do humans that encounter each other in hostile groups reduce their fear, increase their motivation to attack, and increase penalties for failing to attack? While allowing that historically developed cultural practices figure in all three regards, even here they stress the shared neurobiological heritage of human and non-human primates: similar genes, similar biological processes, similar emotions, similar behaviors.

For a strongly Relational account we can turn to Vadim Volkov. Stepping back from his own remarkable studies of Russia’s private wielders of substantial force – from petty thugs and gangs to well capitalized security organizations – Volkov places these “violent entrepreneurs” in deep historical perspective. Illustrating his arguments with Ekaterinburg sporting groups that evolved into an industrial and political powerhouse between the 1980s and the 1990s, he introduces a distinction between two different uses of force: its direct deployment in damage of persons and objects (violence) and threats or promises to use it in enforcement of rules, agreements, or claims (coercion). People conducting risky, long-term enterprises, Volkov points out, often gain from skillful use of coercion by their own agents or on their behalf. Thus merchants become willing to buy protection and governments organize security forces to protect the enterprises of their major supporters. In some sense, indeed, Ekaterinburg’s former sporting clubs are becoming part of their region’s government. Volkov clarifies the eternal dialectic between governmental and non-governmental use of violent means.

Other papers in our symposium range within the space marked out by Slocum, the Blanchards, and Volkov. No one else gives quite the prominence to ideas and their transmission that distinguishes Slocum’s analysis of American film. Within the Behavior camp, James Gilligan’s consideration of punishment and violence relies on psychology rather than evolutionary biology, arguing that the deliberate infliction of pain on a person for the sake of attaining revenge teaches entirely the wrong lesson: not that if you do wrong you will suffer pain but that the way to get revenge is by inflicting pain. Among our specialists in Interaction, Cathy Schneider offers an illuminating comparison of Chile, Argentina, and Colombia, reversing Volkov’s field by asking how in the face of force-wielding authorities and violent entrepreneurs non-violent citizens nevertheless found spaces in which they could make effective claims. Meredeth Turshen’s equally relational but much more somber account of violence against women in Uganda raises the surprising possibility that rape and assault gain assent from authorities and their enemies not as mere concessions to the lusts of soldiers but as systematic devaluation of their enemies’ property.

Our remaining contributors cross the boundaries of ideal, behavioral, and relational approaches to violence. Martin van Creveld argues essentially – I use that loaded term advisedly! – that genetically determined sexual dimorphism implies a gender division of labor with respect to violence: So long as humans create armies and other organizations specialized in dispensing violence men will generally predominate within those organizations; thus Creveld combines behavioral and relational elements. Without the least drawing on evolutionary biology or depth psychology, Robert Jackall moves from behavioral to relational ground as he reports how criminal investigators, steeped in their professions, gather information about violent crimes. Finally, Sudhir Kakar combines ideal, behavioral, and relational elements in his analysis of the bases of inter-religious violence in India. Like all other authors in this issue, Kakar denies that violence constitutes a world apart from routine social life; one, alas, implies the other.