Pure Sociology
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Occurring in a broad range of non-western and western countries, violence committed against women in the name of family honor has been viewed in several ways, including as a crime, as gendered violence, or as a violation of human rights.... more
Genocide is defined here as organized and unilateral mass killing on the basis of ethnicity. While some have focused on genocide as a type of deviance, most genocide is also social control-a response to behavior itself defined as deviant.... more
Purpose À In this chapter, I apply theories of conflict and social control derived from the work of Donald Black to explain when suicide attacks will occur and who will carry them out.
Donald Black defines social control as any way of defining and responding to deviance, including various means of expressing grievances or otherwise handling moral conflict. Thus defined, social control is highly variable, and occurs in... more
This article focuses on intimate partner killings to address the question of why some killers subsequently commit suicide whereas others do not. Utilizing Blackian theories of conflict management and Manning's theory of suicide, it... more
This article employs Max Weber's ideal-type method to classify genocides based on their degree of mass killing, unilateralism, and ethnic liability. The identification of the elements of genocide draws from a general theory of genocide... more
Sociology began as a scientific discipline in large part by defining itself by what it was NOT, namely, psychology. This means that within sociology there has always been an uncertainty over whether subjective phenomena, including selves,... more
Violence is a dynamic event, not a static state. The cause of violence, therefore, cannot lie in static variables such as individual propensities (eg self-control) or aggregate properties (eg inequality). But what changes cause violence?... more
The pure sociology perspective invented by Donald Black, a general theoretical framework for the prediction and explanation of social reality, has considerable potential for the scientific understanding of criminal behavior. Several... more
Despite growing awareness of the limitations of group-level analyses in ethnic studies, research on ethnic conflict has paid virtually no systematic attention to variation at the individual or micro level. Addressing that gap, the present... more
In all large-scale genocides, rescuing occurs alongside killing. Some members of the aggressors' ethnic group even risk their own lives to save members of the targeted group. Killing and rescuing occur closely together, and even the same... more
Academics have conflicts over ideas with some regularity, yet they contest only some of them. When will they do so? We draw on a theory of conflict management developed by Donald Black and others to explain the response to intellectual... more
This paper is a study of the topos of the king burning captives in the Assyrian royal inscriptions. This punishment is notable for both its rarity and its cruelty, being the only time that the royal inscriptions describe violence towards... more
Foreign fieldwork often comes with vast cultural differences between the researcher and participants. Such differences have implications for the success and findings of research. In this paper, we draw on our experiences doing fieldwork... more