Sociology of Violence and Crime

Qualitative research provides opportunities to study bullying and peer harassment as social processes, interactions and meaning-making in the everyday context of particular settings. It offers the possibility of developing a deep understanding of the culture and group processes of bullying and the participants’ perspectives on peer harassment as well. It gives participants opportunities to discuss their own understanding and experiences of bullying in their own words. This article reviews qualitative studies on bullying or peer harassment in school (including some studies in which qualitative and quantitative methods — so-called mixed methods — have been used).

There has been a continuous attack on education, particularly alternative, progressive, democratic and liberatory forms of education that seek social justice and an equality of opportunity for all to develop.  In the UK this has led to an attack on educators as 'the enemies of promise' by the Secretary of State for Education.  However, what is being proposed by policy makers are the old 'know your station in life' strategies of managing inequality.  These have always resulted in a violation of the intelligence of people.

Violence has in recent years been framed as a public health problem. The medicalization of violence has involved various public health initiatives, with the USA based violence prevention initiative Cure Violence (CV), being one of the most prominent. CV, which operates in 23 US cities and multiple countries abroad, was launched in 2000 by former WHO epidemiologist Gary Slutkin with the aim to reduce violence. Its public health approach maintains that violence is an actual disease, which can be controlled and contained via epidemiological methods and strategies applied in disease control. This study used discourse analysis to explore how CV’s medicalization of violence is tied to a neoliberal rationality of governing that disentangles violence from structural factors and explains violence solely by reference to individual pathology. In doing so, CV produces new identities based on assumptions concerning biological infection or immunity resistance, which, as its visual language shows, are grounded in race. Through a politics of exclusion, CV turns these ‘at risk’ identities into appropriate targets for health intervention, with the aim of encouraging these to act upon themselves to improve or restore their productive capacities in order to achieve the idealized form of healthy citizenship that CV propagates.

الثأر نمط من أنماط ممارسة العنف الأولى الذى يحدث بين البشر من منطلق الحفاظ على توازن المكانة والقوة بين البشر والذى يظل مرهونا بتحقيق السلام والعدل الاجتماعى بين جماعات البشر. انه الشكل الأولى للعنف الذى يستوجب الرد ويعيد الأمور الى نصابها . وهو العنف الذى يقترن بالحياة القبلية بأعرافها السابقة على فكرة  وجود الدولة وفقا لنظرية العقد الإجتماعى. هذه الظاهرة مرتبطة بمفهوم الشرف فى مجتمعات البادية بالمنطقة العربية . ويحاول هذا المقال أن يحلل طبيعة الثأر فى المجتمعات العربية  والأسباب الاجتماعية والاقتصادية والسياسية لاستمرار ممارسات الثأر وإعادة انتاجه فى عالمنا المعاصر، وأسباب فشل الدولة الحديثة التى تأسست فى العالم العربى باعلائها لسيادة القانون فى أن تقضى على حوادث الثأر. والمقال يستند الى قراءة نقدية لدراسة أحمد أبوزيد عن الثأر.

Homophobic violence can be considered as an expressive act. Violent behavior can be considered as anti-homosexual when victims are chosen because they are considered or perceived as homosexual.
Following this reasoning, hate crimes as homophobic crimes have a communicative value, since they represent a range of “masculinization” practices within the processes of gender socialization, both
in conventional and illegitimate social worlds. Every homophobic act aims to intimidate not just the victim, but the whole group associated with the, whether concretely or merely in the perception of the perpetrator. This chapter will take into account the main research on victimization from an international perspective; it will highlight how both the gender of the perpetrator and the cultural constructions of
masculinity(ies), in a heterosexist and hegemonic system, seem to play a fundamental role in producing homophobic and anti-homosexual behaviour

in A. Balloni - R. Sette (Eds), Handbook of Research on Trends and Issues in Crime Prevention, Rehabilitation, and Victim Support

This paper focuses on the urban graffiti painted with a political message by different
movements of the Italian political radicalism in the cities of Rome, Florence, Massa,
Carrara, Verona and Udine. For the purpose of this article, during the period from June
2011 to June 2012, a total of 165 graffiti have been photographed, of which 83 painted by
neo-fascist groups, 72 by extreme left groups and 10 by anarchist groups. These three
macro communities, made of different subgroups, emerged as the most active in expressing
their antagonism towards the parliamentary parties with their graffiti that combine semantic
(words) and semiotic (images) elements. An analysis of the collected graffiti’s language
form, meaning and context allows for the identification of the variety of styles of
communication adopted by the different political antagonisms and the different contents of
their communication through graffiti as well as the key elements of their political identities.
Key words: political radicalism, graffiti, linguistics

The aim of this study was to investigate how individuals;who had been victims of school bullying;perceived their bullying experiences and how these had affected them;and to generate a grounded theory of being a victim of bullying at school. Twenty-one individuals;who all had prior experiences of being bullied in school for more than one year;were interviewed. Qualitative analysis of data was performed by methods from grounded theory. The research identified a basic process of victimising in school bullying;which consisted of four phases: (a) initial attacks;(b) double victimising;(c) bullying exit and (d) after-effects of bullying. Double victimising refers to a process in which there was an interplay between external victimising and internal victimising. Acts of harassment were repeatedly directed at the victims from their social environment at school – a social process that constructed and repeatedly confirmed their victim role in the class or the group. This external victimising affected the victims and initiated an internal victimising;which meant that they internalised the socially constructed victim-image and acted upon this image;which in turn often supported the bullies’ agenda and confirmed the socially constructed victim-image. The findings also indicate the possible positive effect of changing the social environment.

Apresentação do número 84 da Revista de Informação Bibliográfica em Ciências Sociais. Discute-se, neste paper de apresentação deste numero especial, as diferentes revisões realizadas sobre o campo de pesquisa em questão desde 1993, buscando identificar os pontos de convergência e de divergência teóricos e metodológicos no debate sobre crime , violência polícia, sistema de justiça e punição nos últimos 40 anos no Brasil.

Imprisonment is a widespread punishment all over the world, but prison is for most of us an unknown experience and anything we know is mostly through media and cinema representations. Therefore, it is very likely these representations play an important role in formation of our social representation for this matter. Additionally, the audience captivated for issues which are unknown and unreachable and that relate to the criminal behavior and action of institutions of social control of crime, but also to life in prison. In this article we will refer, first to the way of representation of prison in fictional films and television series, secondly the research which have been developed about the relationship between the fictional representation of the prison and the audience’s reception and finally we see what impact have all these to criminal justice community, since research saw that “skilled public” in criminological knowledge share the same perceptions for prison with others.
Key words: prison, fictional representations, reception of audience, social construction, criminological knowledge

The international human rights movement of the last sixty five years now includes the rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons and other sexual minorities.  Although cultural historians and other have documented evidence of the existence of same-sex sexual relations in nearly every early society and civilization, across history it has been the case, and it is the case today, that “[s]exual minorities are the target of libel, slander, hate-speech; of laws criminalizing homosexual conduct; of threats and mob violence; and of state-sponsored outrages upon human dignity, including inhuman treatment, physical assault, torture, and murder.”  In fact, sexual orientation discrimination is implicated in a number of areas of international human rights concern.
Although Jamaica “holds the crown for being the worst place in the Americas to be gay,”  homophobia is prevalent throughout the Commonwealth Caribbean, in part a response to the entrenchment of “buggery laws” by Great Britain throughout the British Empire, laws which remain in force in many of the former colonies, taking a variety of forms.  In England, to which many gay Jamaicans and presumably other Caribbean nationals have fled, the House of Lords debated the treatment of sexual minorities during fall 2012.  Lord Lexden of the Conservative Party admitted that the British Empire is responsible for leaving behind a legacy of intolerance for homosexuality: “Today, 42 of the 54 nations of the Commonwealth criminalise same-sex relations.”  The laws vary widely.  For example, Trinidad & Tobago, Barbados, Antigua and St. Lucia prohibit all acts of homosexuality; the Bahamas criminalizes public but not private same-sex acts; and the Jamaican, Guyanese and Grenadian laws do not mention lesbianism.  Meanwhile, British Overseas Territories Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat, and the Turks & Caicos islands repealed their anti-sodomy laws in 2000, to comply with a British mandate issued in response to its obligations as a Council of Europe member.  This essay surveys the modern history and current state of lesbian and gay human rights, considering the Caribbean and particularly Jamaica as a case study.
This essay proceeds as follows: in Part I, I discuss the background context of sexual orientation and gender identity in human rights law.  At long last, LGBT issues – from anti-discrimination, to decriminalizing homosexual acts, to immigration, to public health, to marriage – have been incorporated into the human rights agenda.  I will highlight the landmark jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights and the Human Rights Committee, and the movement for the full inclusion of lesbian and gay rights into the global human rights agenda, highlighting the Yogyakarta Principles, the French-Dutch Statement on Human Rights, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, and Resolution 17/19 of the Human Rights Council and the reports issued by the High Commissioner for Human Rights. 
In Part II, against the background of the legacy of British colonial law which entrenched “buggery” or anti-sodomy provisions in the criminal codes of dozens of Commonwealth nations, I discuss the particularly virulent strain of homophobia present in many Caribbean states, which is at once a consequence and a cause of male hyper-sexuality, hyper-religiosity, the continued presence of buggery laws, poverty, reggae dancehall music as a forum for social commentary, and police misconduct.  I discuss the Jamaican case in depth, including homophobic/transphobic violence, the Offenses Against Persons Act, and the impact of these forces on HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment.  I briefly discuss the impending ratification of the Caribbean Court of Justice as the final court of appeals for its potential to benefit sexual minorities and allies agitating for human rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, intersex, and queer/questioning persons.

The article focuses on the football Ultras and their involvement in the stadium as a social situation and contextual environment from a linguistic point of view. The focus of the article is on the Fiorentina Ultras - Ultras Viola - as it is a very big community of
football followers with a historical role in the Italian Ultras phenomenon. Among the different means of communication adopted by the Ultras Viola, the article focuses on the
analysis of the banners exposed in the stadiums (114 banners exposed by the Fiorentina Ultras from the season 2004/2005 to 2008/2009). The banners are, together with the
choruses, the foremost mean adopted to communicate and they can be seen as a sort of crystallization of the Ultras’ messages. A sociolinguistic, sociosemiotic and sociosemantic
analysis of the banners allows us to identify the styles of communication and the different ways of expression as well as the constitutional dynamics of the Fiorentina Ultras’ identity.
Key words: Football Ultras, Linguistics, Communication

Criminal activities and criminals are defined by the society. Law and especially criminal law is essential to define the society’s cooperative existence and integrity (Einstadter and Henry, 2006). The codification of mandates to regulate the behaviors acceptable within a society is defined as law and this law may hugely differ from one society to another. However, in the present society it is questionable that whose values and standards are reflected by the laws that are enumerated in any society (Einstadter and Henry, 2006).
This paper would deal with the concept of crime and social harm and the difference between how criminologists perceive crime should be defined and how legislators actually define criminal activities according to a given situation. In general, corporate crimes do not result in many sanctions as compared to ordinary crimes such as violence, thefts or burglary. This difference in defining crime in criminal statues is also discussed in this paper.

Predmet rada je biopsihološka pozadina nasilnih krivičnih djela i analiza profila lica ih čine. Autor će kroz rad pružiti uvid u definicije osnovnih predmetnih pojmova, te pružiti izlaganja najdominantnijih biopsiholoških teorija iz oblasti biologije, psihologije i kriminologije s ciljem  interdisciplinarne analize mehanizama koji kod pojedinaca utiču na činjenje djela iz oblasti nasilničkog kriminaliteta, te objašnjavanje bitnih karakteristika njihovih ličnosti i raznih tipologija, kojima se uz primjenu raznih metoda vještačenja može doći do njihovog grupnog razvrstavanja. Osnovna premisa u radu je ukazivanje na sve prisutnije teorije biosociologije, odnosno evolutivne psihologije, koja kroz mehanizme adaptacija objašnjava ljudska ponašanja, uključujući tu i ona devijantna, koja su, u svojoj najtežoj formi i predmet rada.

The present paper focuses on the concepts of urban and linguistic space. It considers the city as a diamesic melting pot. Graffitism is seen as a communication channel that needs to be examined in order to better understand the urban language and its many forms.
Key words: graffiti, linguistics, diamesia

Crime and violence are major themes that have dominated cinema screens around the world since the arrival of film in the late 19th Century, raising concerns about the potentially damaging effects of these images on vulnerable sections of society. In about three thousand studies conducted over the last four decades, researchers have argued that incessant and excessive exposure to on-screen violence often leads to anti-social and aggressive behaviours when complemented with hostile surroundings at home and in the wider society. The present study examines the possible relationship between increasing violence in Pakistani society and its excessive portrayal in popular Indian films, ardently viewed in Pakistan since the 1970s.

Violence is a confounding concept. It frequently defies explanation and lacks an agreed upon definition. Yet geographers are well positioned to bring greater conceptual clarity to violence by thinking through its intersections with space. In setting the tone for this special issue on Violence and Space we highlight some of the key lines of flight that have shaped geographical thinking on violence. While there are a significant number of geographers interested in the question of violence, the field of ‘geographies of violence’ remains an emerging area of research that deserves greater attention and a more rigorous examination. By emphasizing the spatiality of violence, this special issue aims to contribute to a more sustained conversation on the violent geographies that shape our daily lives, our encounters with institutions, and the various structures that configure our social organization. This introduction is but an initial sketch of what we believe needs to be a much larger and unfolding research agenda dedicated to understanding violence from a geographical perspective.

The study focuses on the republican murals painted on the walls of two cities, Belfast and Derry, in May 2009. The idea for the study was born during a trip to Northern Ireland during which I had the opportunity to observe the murals and to talk with some of the authors and with persons who had actually experienced
the events represented in the murals.
The nationalist murals have been studied by the author under different perspectives: language, iconography, political symbolism and social environment. Murals are, for sure, the community’s reaction to the British political and violent domination on Northern Ireland and they become instruments of rebellion representing
a collective request for freedom and independence. But they also represent a more complex phenomenon as they embody values and perspectives of the entire nationalist community in Northern Ireland. The study analyses the murals both as single artworks and as a collective phenomenon.A strong focus is given at all the political and social themes represented in the murals and at the different linguistic and iconographic styles of communication
as well as how different themes and styles combine. The nationalist murals are also examined under an artistic perspective with a special focus on the figure of the “artista armato”, the artist as a warrior that uses art as an instrument for communicating higher, collective (moral, social, religious, political) values. This
perspective brings the author to draw and analyse a parallel between the phenomenon of nationalist murals and Futurist art: a comparison based on the themes represented in the artworks, on the placing of the art pieces and on the social role of the artists.
If words, pictures and colours used in the nationalist murals become, as analysed in the study, the voice of the Catholic community in Northern Ireland, a voice not so often listened in the EU, it becomes crucial to understand what the artists
want to communicate, why and how. This study aims also to open up to a new research perspective based on a multidisciplinary approach through the integrated use of semiotics and semantics in ethnography in order to offer a more complete and holistic interpretation of the phenomenon of the Northern Irish republican
murals.

Les violences armées collectives dont les derniers épisodes remontent à octobre 2015 lorsque des bandes rivales de Bois Neuf et de Projet Drouillard se contre attaquaient sont-elles sur le point de disparaître à Cité Soleil? La cité veut-elle tourner sa page d´histoire marquée par la violence sociale recurrente? Faisant partie d´une enquête sociologique réalisée dans cette commune en 2017, ce travail propose, pour comprendre la sincérité de cette volonté de rupture, de passer en revue quelques éléments tels que origine, sources, nature et géolocalisation de ces violences, de problématiser surtout le processus de la paix de 2016 qui serait à l´origine de leur suspension sans qu´il n´y ait eu de désarmement. Pour y parvenir, interviews, enquêtes de terrain et théorie sur la violence nous serviront de méthode. Nous espérons montrer à travers ce travail que, malgré toute sa bonne volonté, cette paix ambigüe est loin d´être celle dont Cité Soleil a besoin pour sortir réellement des violences collectives. Mots-clés: Cité Soleil. Violence armée. Processus de Paix. Macoutisme. Banditisme. Abstract Collective armed violence, the last episodes of which date back to October 2015 when rival gangs of Bois Neuf and Projet Drouillard were fighting against each other, are they about to disappear in Cité Soleil? Does the city want to turn its page of history marked by recurrent social violence? As part of a sociological survey carried out in this commune in 2017, this work proposes, to understand the sincerity of this desire for rupture, to review some elements such as origin, sources, nature and geolocalisation of these violence, to problematize the 2016 peace process that would have caused their suspension without disarmament. To achieve this, interviews, field surveys and theory on violence will serve as a method. We hope to show through this work that, despite all its goodwill, this ambiguous peace is far from what Cité Soleil needs in order to truly emerge from collective violence.

This article highlights the patriarchal nature of the Indian state and discusses this in relation to the state’s response to several rape and molestation cases. It emphasises a number of responses made by political, community and well-known fundamentalist leaders, which have focussed on controlling women’s sexuality and mobility. Such statements are framed within patriarchal notions of female morality, honour and shame through which mores are created for eve-teasing (sexual harassment). The article also discusses public remarks highlighted within the media in relation to the internationally reported Delhi gang rape case, which focussed on the movements and morality of the victim. I argue that such patriarchal responses support a rape culture in India, which has led to increased violence against women and breaches of Indian women’s human rights.

This article puts forward two main arguments. First, it highlights the relation between different phases of neoliberalism in Morocco together with the specific methods and techniques of urban government that were deployed in efforts to govern the slums and their populations. A period of roll back neoliberalism during the 1980s generated reforms that tried to increase government control over the urban territory to compensate for the negative social outcomes of structural adjustment. The subsequent period of roll out neoliberalism coincided with the attempt to manage and regulate the slum population as such, through new modalities of state intervention. Secondly, while evolutions in neoliberal government reflected a gradual process, this transition in Morocco was accelerated by security concerns following two severe moments of urban violence: the 1981 riots and the 2003 suicide bombings in Casablanca. Therefore, Morocco’s recent political transformations cannot be understood in terms provided by the mainstream narrative linking economic liberalization to democratization. Rather, it reflects a profound shift towards intrinsically authoritarian modalities of neoliberal government which are clearly revealed at the urban scale.

This is an abstract of a chapter in a forthcoming volume edited by Profs. Ulrike Freitag and Nelida Fuccaro (to be published 2014).

"In December 1942, unrest broke out in Abadan, arguably Iran’s first modern city and home to the world’s biggest oil refinery. Two scuffles in the bazaar provoked Iranians from the Ahmadabad neighbourhood to attack Indian labourers in the so-called ‘Indian Lines’ of the Bahmashir  neighbourhood. Although not as bloody or widespread as more well-studied occurrences of unrest in Abadan, I will argue that this ‘Bahmashir Incident’ represents an important case with which to understand the interconnectedness of oil, space and violence. As such, this chapter has two aims.

The first is to fill a gap in the existing literature on Abadan and the oil-producing province of Khuzestan in southwest Iran. This literature tends to focus on the struggles of the Iranian labour movement against the Anglo-Persian, later Anglo-Iranian, Oil Company (A.I.O.C., henceforth ‘the Company’), and specifically on the great oil strikes of 1929 and 1946 and the oil nationalisation movement of 1951.  In this literature, a very crucial element is normally either mentioned only in passing or simply neglected: imported Indian labour. Through material from, among other places, the underexplored British Petroleum Company archives, I will investigate the context of the event (the Bahmashir Incident) synchronically, and the history of a particular community (the Indians) diachronically.

Through these investigations, an alternative labour history of Abadan emerges, which, I will argue, can complement and challenge the existing literature.  Key Iranian leftist and nationalist accounts of Abadan’s history tend to cast all violence in the binary terms of a struggle between ‘the oppressor’ and ‘the oppressed’. This chapter will instead propose that since Abadan had multiple subaltern agencies, urban violence operated on several levels. The presence of Indians in Abadan’s labour hierarchy and social fabric challenges the idea of Abadan as a ‘dual city’,  and complicates simplistic interpretations of urban violence.

Secondly, by disentangling the web of interests spun between the Company, the British military and the diplomatic machinery, this chapter will nuance the notion, so often reiterated uncritically in Middle East Studies, of ‘The British’ as one single, cohesive actor. The Company drew on the colonial legacy of British imperialism, was protected by the British army, and was influenced by its major shareholder, the British government; yet, the Company was nonetheless an autonomous entity with a distinct mode of operation. In order to ‘see like an oil company’,  this chapter thus examines how World War II affected the Company in Abadan on the eve of victorious nationalist movements and the dissolution of the British Empire – events that eventually drove companies born in colonial settings into the present globalised world of neo-liberal corporate capitalism."

Introduction
 
The current use of the term adultism was first defined in 1978 by psychologist Jack Flasher (Flasher, 1978).  In was later taken up and established as a meaningful concept by academics, researchers and advocates within the children's right movement and the sociology of childhood.  Critical psychologists, critical developmental psychologists and liberation psychologists working at the interface with childhood studies use this term to describe and explain not only children's disadvantaged position within social life but also their positioning within adult-centric research and paternalistic practice generated by the field of mainstream psychology (Burman, 2008; LeFrançois, 2013; Watts and Flanagan, 2007).  Not a new term, adultism has been taken up most significantly within Northern Europe.
 
Definition
 
Adultism is understood as the oppression experienced by children and young people at the hands of adults and adult-produced/adult-tailored systems.  It relates ...

This dissertation focuses on an applied theatre project, Young Voices that has attempted to develop a method, which inquires how performance forms can facilitate youth inclusion. Issues related to young people have been discussed extensively throughout time and within many disciplines. Stanley Cohen (1972), J.J Arnett (1999), Sharon Nichols and Thomas Good (2004) and Monica Barry (2005), have examined the ‘anxieties’ that are often associated with the perceived image of young people in society and how these may often lead to their social exclusion. This method is to be used by youth workers with their role as ‘intercessors’ between young people and the adults that surround them (i.e. their parents, guardians, teachers); it adopts Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) ethos, uses elements of his Forum Theatre (FT) workshop techniques and the theory/technique of verbatim theatre. The project’s research process is in the form of applied and verbatim theatre workshops; performance presentation and a performance lecture addressed to youth workers. The method looks at increasing and facilitating communication between various isolated adolescent groups through applied theatre using various ‘Boalian’ workshop techniques and FT to identify the participants ‘oppressions’. It intends at facilitating communication through applied theatre and verbatim theatre between youth and youth workers, by capturing the participants ‘oppressions’ and presenting them to an audience of their peers and youth workers. And it aims at facilitating communication through the combination of applied theatre and verbatim theatre with the attempt of beginning to bridge the gap amongst young people and the adults around them, through a recommended step by suggesting the involvement of the participant’s surrounding adults. The Young Voices method has been developed from the collaboration of several youth groups from around Scarborough and its district. The complete process attempts to assist teenagers in discussing their concerns from their own perspectives towards empowering them and raising awareness about how their opinions should be required for matters that concern them.

My contribution to the nuclear debate presents 3 possible concepts for complexity evolution, which make understood that what is at a stake right now is the evolution of complexity. The use of missiles in any war scenario has very little, and if any very bad effects on reality, which I strongly recommend to not to look for.

The official results of the conference were published under the following document, which you can find at the ETH Zürich file archive: https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/154318/MD_Draft%20Report_16102012.pdf

The official report does not resolve the dilemma that was discussed in Brussels. It reveals a one-sided and partial perspective and does not uncover the risks at which Europe was. The debate was stronger than the report tells and the report fails to describe the Russian position adequately as well as the reality of the debate. The US-American assurance, that the missile defense shield set up by NATO is not offensive and does not mean a threat to Russia  is a discussable statement. Quoting Vershbow as main speaker is nice, but the way this report puts facts and presents opinions is debatable.

A report about the real terms of discussion cannot be published.

This thesis explores how a pragmatic theory of violence can be developed within Luc Boltanski’s sociology of regimes of action positioned in the overall framework of French pragmatic sociology. The thesis takes its outset in Boltanski’s approximate outline of a regime of violence presented in Love and Justice as Competences (2012) and points out a number of conceptual ambiguities in Boltanski’s regime of violence. The conceptual ambiguities are then discussed and clarified through an integration of Jan Philip Reemtsma’s phenomenological distinction between locative-, raptive-, and autotelic violence. This distinction denotes violence as a non-consensual, primarily, physical assault on another’s body (2012). Overall, the thesis combines French pragmatic sociology with German sociology of violence in order to emphasize our shared understandings and ways of evaluating forms, things and persons in violence. In this relation, the thesis introduces two basic human competences of violence: ‘the competence of evaluating force potentials’ and ‘the competence of evaluating vulnerability of the body’. Methodologically, the thesis mirrors elements of Boltanski’s methodological strategies used to develop the regime of justice and love in order to formalize the principles that can be said to structure a model of a regime of violence based on the distinction between locative-, raptive-, and autotelic violence. The thesis then centers on the important twilight between violence and justice by emphasizing an understanding of different forms, elements and zones of violence in relation to Boltanski’s theoretical model in On Justification and to the concept of the state monopoly on violence. Finally, the thesis presents four empirical case studies of violence as presented in different records of judgement from recent Danish trials, which are then “confronted” with the (extended) regime of violence, after which the “fitness” of the theory and the ambiguity of some of the concepts are discussed.

Edwin M. Lemert è uno dei maestri della sociologia della devianza, in grado di rivoluzionare il rapporto tra soggetto e società con la sua teoria della reazione sociale e di influenzare la teoria dell'etichettamento. Anche nel nostro paese ha ricevuto un immediato riconoscimento che purtroppo si è scontrato con il limi-tato numero di traduzioni dei suoi scritti. Sociologia del male e altri scritti vuole colmare questa lacuna, presentando per la prima volta ai lettori italiani i percorsi di ricerca battuti da Lemert nella seconda parte della sua carriera e celebrando l'anticonformismo, l'eclettismo e l'innovazione di un autore unico all'interno del panorama sociologico internazionale.