The Rise of Organised Brutality: A Historical Sociology of Violence

Siniša Malešević

Apr 2017 · Cambridge University Press

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Challenging the prevailing belief that organised violence is experiencing historically continuous decline, this book provides an in-depth sociological analysis that shows organised violence is, in fact, on the rise. Malešević demonstrates that violence is determined by organisational capacity, ideological penetration and micro-solidarity, rather than biological tendencies, meaning that despite pre-modern societies being exposed to spectacles of cruelty and torture, such societies had no organisational means to systematically slaughter millions of individuals. Malešević suggests that violence should not be analysed as just an event or process, but also via changing perceptions of those events and processes, and by linking this to broader social transformations on the inter-polity and inter-group levels he makes his key argument that organised violence has proliferated. Focusing on wars, revolutions, genocides and terrorism, this book shows how modern social organisations utilise ideology and micro-solidarity to mobilise public support for mass scale violence.

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Siniša Malešević is a Professor of Sociology at University College Dublin. His books include Nation-States and Nationalisms: Organisation, Ideology and Solidarity (2013), The Sociology of War and Violence (Cambridge, 2006), Identity as Ideology (2006), The Sociology of Ethnicity (2004) and the edited volumes Ernest Gellner and Historical Sociology (2015), Nationalism and War (Cambridge, 2013) and Ernest Gellner and Contemporary Social Thought (Cambridge, 2007). His work has been translated into Croatian, Persian, Turkish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian and Spanish.