What enables (political)
violence?
CDSN4002 POLITICAL VIOLENCE
MIRIAM MATEJOVA, PHD
MARCH 4, 2024
Agenda
 Why do people engage in
(political) violence?
 What enables or constraints
people from being violent?
Human nature
 To what extent is violence a
biological necessity or a human
invention, a learned behaviour that
could be unlearned?
Human nature in political thought
 Thomas Hobbes: “a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual
and restless desire for power after power that ceaseth only in
death”
 Experience of the English Civil War (1642-1649)
 Humans as inherently violent (in line with a Christian tradition – i.e.,
sin)
 → we can have little confidence in ethics, law or human rationality
to save us from violence
Aggression, drives, and instincts
 Aggression and violence as human instincts?
 Violence and war traced to our biological heritage –
genetic, hormonal, neurobiological, and/or evolutionary
mechanisms
 Often compared to animal behaviour
The Lorenzian Approach
 Instinctive behaviour: animal
behaviour is genetically fixed
and unvarying form one
individual to other
 Purpose of aggression for some
species:
 Providing an opportunity for
competition within species
 Achieving spacing and population
control,
 Establishing a means whereby the
pair bond can be strengthened
Criticism of human nature theories
 Justifies violence and war by diminishing human responsibility
 An excuse for maintenance of large military forces; leads to
distrust of others
 Because animals behave in certain ways doesn’t mean humans
do so
 War, as an expression of violent nature, is not a universal trait.
Certain cultures like the South African Bushmen or the Inuit
apparently never engaged in war (but interpersonal violence is
common)
Sociobiology
 Ecological competition (for food, etc.), male-male competition
(for dominance), the role of kinship patterns in directing
aggressive behaviour in particular ways
 Men tend to be more aggressive and more involved in violence
than women
 Individuals who share genes are likely to behave benevolently
toward each other
 Behaviour results from the interaction of genetic potential with
experience
Social learning theories
 Frustration-aggression (scapegoats)
 Violence arises in response to experiences: observing others’ behaviour,
attitudes, and outcomes of those behaviours
 Individuals are likely to be violent if they have been violent in the past
and it brought them some success
 Instrumental aggression (oriented towards attaining a goal rather than
causing injury as such)
 Some cultures encourage aggressiveness from early childhood (e.g., the
Fulani people of northern Nigeria)
 Obedience to authority (Milgram’s experiment)
Collective violence
 Charles Tilly
 immediately inflicts physical
damage on persons and/or
objects;
 involves at least two perpetrators
of damage; and
 results at least in part from
coordination among persons who
perform the damaging acts.
Varieties of
(collective)
violence
Mechanisms of collective violence
 Environmental: alter relations between social circumstances and
their external environment,
 Cognitive: operate through alterations of individual and collective
perceptions,
 Relational: change connections among social units