Collective violence is the handling of a grievance by group aggression against persons or property. Although states engage in violence in wars, police operations, and the punishment of criminals, most social scientists regard collective violence as aggression by civilians.

The universe of collective violence is large and diverse and includes such major forms as warfare, feuding, rioting, lynching, vigilantism, and terrorism. These phenomena are often loosely defined, but fundamental differences distinguish them from one another. First, violence may occur between groups or between groups and individuals. It may be a unilateral (one-sided) attack by one group against another, as when an ethnic majority attacks an outnumbered and possibly defenseless minority. Examples would include anti-Catholic, anti-black, and anti-Chinese riots in the 19th-century United States, as well as more recent riots aimed at ethnic minorities in places such as South Asia and Africa. Although covert rather than public, terrorist attacks usually are unilateral attacks by one group against another as well.

Reciprocal, tit-for-tat violence also occurs between groups, typically when the parties are largely equal in status, numbers, and other resources. Warfare in simpler, tribal societies is one example of reciprocal group-on-group violence, as is feuding between modern street gangs. All of these forms of violence involve a logic of collective liability by which a group holds everyone in a social category accountable for the conduct of everyone else. Groups subject to violence because of the behavior of one member might include such categories as families, clans, tribes, racial and ethnic groups, nationalities, and political or religious organizations.

Collective violence might also involve the aggression of a group against an individual without implicating or involving other members of his or her social category. The avenging group may be small and covert in its attacks, or large and highly visible. It is possible to distinguish forms of collective violence according to their pattern of liability (whether collective or individual) and their degree of organization (whether high or low).

Rioting involves collective liability and little organization. It is an informally organized unilateral attack on members of a social category in retaliation for the offense of one or more of its members. In cities in the northern United States in the 19th and 20th centuries, for example, alleged misconduct by a single African American resulted, on numerous occasions, in mass violence by whites against entire black neighborhoods. Historically, minorities such as Jews in Europe or Muslims in India likewise faced similar attacks. Each riot typically lasts no more than a day or two, however, and participants disperse immediately afterward.

Lynching also is informally organized group violence, but unlike rioting, only the alleged offender is punished or killed. During the years of the relatively frequent lynching of African Americans by whites in the American South, for instance, white crowds would rarely beat or kill more than a single black offender. Crowd violence seldom, if ever, spreads to the larger black community in the form of rioting.

Vigilantes are formally organized groups that punish a series of offenders. Whether vigilantes operate swiftly and secretly or deliberately and openly, the guilt of each offender is weighed, and each is punished as an individual. In 19th-century American frontier areas, for example, vigilantes tracked down and punished cattle thieves and other deviants beyond the reach of legal officials. In the American South, the Ku Klux Klan once operated as a vigilante organization as well.

Terrorists also have formal organization, but their adversaries are usually large and powerful groups with superior resources. Moreover, unlike vigilantes, terrorists employ a logic of collective liability: They launch covert attacks on civilian populations, such as bombings of restaurants or airplanes and indiscriminate shooting in public places. Guerilla warfare also involves organized civilians who may operate covertly, but guerillas typically limit their attacks to governmental targets, such as the military and police.

Some social scientists trace collective violence to social tensions such as those resulting from competition for scarce resources, poverty, or real or threatened domination by one group over another. Others focus instead on the social characteristics of the parties involved in a specific incident of conflict, such as the amount of closeness between those in conflict, the number of cultural differences between them, the extent of status differences between them, or the degree to which they depend on one another economically or otherwise. Regardless of historical period or particular setting, more collective violence can be expected when those in a particular conflict are strangers, culturally different, and highly unequal in status. The ultimate goal of collective violence theory is to predict and explain when a conflict will result in group violence, in what form, and with what level of severity.

References:

1) Barkan, Steven E. and Lynne L. Snowden. 2000. Collective Violence. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

2) Black, Donald. 2004. "The Geometry of Terrorism." Sociological Theory 22:14-25.

3) Rule, James B. 1992. Theories of Civil Violence. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

4) Senechal de la Roche, Roberta. 1996. "Collective Violence as Social Control." Sociological Forum 11:97-128.

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