Russia’s war against Ukraine has grave consequences in several political categories. These include: a reassessment of the school of ‘political realism’, one of whose proponents claims to have predicted the war. Was the West partly ‘responsible’ for the war? Second, to what extent does the war of aggression, as an undeniable violation of law, damage the status of international law and justice? Third, the war is embedded in political developments that stretch back a century. It is examined in its context (...) within American foreign policy since the Wilsonian peace programme, in relation to the dangerous reluctance of the EU to pursue a decisive geopolitical policy towards Russia, and interpreted in the light of Stalinist echoes within Russian politics. (shrink)

The sociology of violence still struggles with two critical questions: What motivates people to act violently on behalf of groups and how do they come to identify with the groups for which they act? Methodologically the article addresses these puzzling problems in favor of a relational sociology that argues against both micro- and macro-reductionist accounts, while theoretically it proposes a twofold reorientation: first, it makes a plea for the so called cognitive turn in social theory; second, it proposes following praxeological (...) accounts of social action that focus on the dynamic interpenetration of cognition and socio-cultural practices. The argument is that symbolic boundaries constitute the “missing link” that allows for overcoming the micro-macro gap in violence research: Symbolic boundaries can cause people's participation in collective violence by providing the essential relational resources for violent action and by triggering the cognitive/affective mechanisms necessary for social actors to become drawn into mobilization processes that can cause their engaging in coordinated attacks on sites across the boundary. The article offers a new theoretical argument by drawing on knowledge from violence research, social action theory and cognitive science allowing for a non-reductionist theory of action that explains how and why people engage in collective violence. (shrink)

This article aims to develop a social theory of violence that emphasizes the role of the third party as well as the communication between the involved subjects. For this Teresa Koloma Beck’s essay ‘The Eye of the Beholder: Violence as a Social Process’ is taken as a starting point, which adopts a social-constructivist perspective. On the one hand, the basic concepts and the benefits of this approach are presented. On the other hand, social-theoretical problems of this approach are revealed. These (...) deficits are counteracted by expanding Koloma Beck’s approach with a communicative-constructivist framework. Thus, the role of communicative action and the ‘objectification of violence’ is emphasized. These aspects impact the perception, judgement and (de-)legitimation of violence phenomena and the emergence of a ‘knowledge of violence’. Communicative actions and objectifications form a key to understanding violent interactions and the link between the micro and macro levels. Finally, the methodological consequences for the research of violence and Communicative Constructivism are discussed. Furthermore, possible research fields are outlined, which open up by looking at communicative action and the objectifications within the ‘triads of violence’. (shrink)