Introduction (Themed section presentation)

Violence has always been one of the underlying characteristics of social life. While appearing in diverse, historically determined forms, it is found in all societies, including global society, in which it is present both in its traditional configurations (connected to frontiers, wars, terrorism, ethnic-religious conflicts and identity) and in global, systemic configurations.

As an analytical category and as a phenomenon linked to deviation, conflict, power and rights, violence has been widely dealt with in social sciences. Its range of relevance, however, has been studied less frequently in relation to the variety of its forms, and its relationship with order and social change.

In this special issue of the International Review of Sociology, it was our intention to collect contributions on different aspects of violence in the globalised world, in an attempt to carry forward thinking on violence and its diverse forms, and in the belief that it is impossible to find adequate corrective measures for the suffering and damage it produces without sufficient elucidation of its recurrent features and its transformations in the globalised world.

The contributions presented here are detailed studies on diverse aspects of violence, including its metamorphoses in the contemporary world. What emerges forcefully from the papers in this issue is a contemporary reality that is anything but peaceful, featuring different forms of violence – socio-political, religious, gender, ethnic, techno-systemic – in which ‘archaic’ elements combine with characteristics belonging to the globalised world.

The collection of essays we present here is a kind of map of the violent phenomena characterizing global society, neither definitive nor exhaustive, but sufficiently wide and detailed to show the combination of ‘old’ forms of violence persisting in contemporary society (violence against women, infidels, etc.) and the new forms that are developing according to large-scale processes of social change.

The contributions have been assembled as stages along an ideal route of reflection that sets out from an investigation of the theoretical foundations of violence in its logical-conceptual structure, passes trough its historical and phenomenological transformations, to finally reach a reflection upon its purpose and the instruments necessary to deal with its consequences.

The opening contribution by Maria Giovanna Musso, entitled ‘Violence and social change. The new routes of sovereignty in the globalised world’, is the first stage of this journey. The initial issue addressed by the author relates to the definitions, critical points and some fallacies produced in thinking about violence. Within a broad theoretical, interdisciplinary framework, the phenomenon of violence is extrapolated and distinguished from the other categories to which it is at times connected and confused: aggressiveness, force, power, etc. In the context of a wide definition of violence outlined in relation to the differing notions that dot the constellation of meaning that revolves around violence (power, potency, dominance, force, sovereignty), its close connection with order and sovereignty emerges together with its new configurations connected to the systemic upheavals of the globalised world. In contemporary society the author sees the double face of violence. This double face resides in the combination of renewed forms of traditional violence and ‘new’ forms of violence that come from the adjustments of processes of social differentiation. According to the author, these new forms of systemic and molecular violence are related to a biotechnological dominance that unfolds a new scenario for the possibility of violation of freedoms and rights in the globalised world.

We then have a contribution by Emanuela Ferreri entitled ‘Violence, identity and culture. Perspectives and topics in the global scenarios’. This is a review article about notable authors, centring on the different definitions of violence found in chosen works and comparing them with each other. The essay outlines two approaches in thinking and investigation. The first focuses on violence between centripetal and centrifugal links, between cultural traditions and multiple modernities. The second concerns cultural anthropology's interpretation of violence: those arguments which, while emphatically underlying the hiatus between traditions and modernity, fail to properly address the matter. Indeed, these theories locate violence through the whole spectrum of the socio-cultural dimension, in the end positioning it in the relationship between actors and their subjectivity.

Religious violence with its transformations in contemporary society is at the centre of the contribution by Jean-Jacques Wunenburger entitled ‘Islamist terrorism. Millennial violence in the global media era’. Islamic radicalism, which for the author is a symptom of a socio-cultural crisis in Muslim countries in the context of globalization processes, reawakens the imaginary of millenarianism underlying monotheist religions. This re-emergence, however, is not a return of the same. Wunenburger focuses on the character of hybridization between archaic and new, between depth and surface, between religion and technology which appears in the forms of violence enacted by Islamic radicalism. As the author points out, in terrorism the millenarian imaginary and the society of the spectacle create a form of violation capable of crossing the emotional, cognitive and symbolical spheres of those who assist, actively or passively, in the physical violation of victims, inscribing the phenomenon within a new sector of totalitarian violence.

The violence of the globalised world reaches us also on the long waves of history and, in particular, the history issuing from colonialism, as shown by Sanjukta Das Gupta in the essay ‘Indigeneity and Violence: the Adivasi experience in Eastern India’. Taking her starting point in a post-colonial outlook, the author focuses on the Adivasi community, an identity case as complex as it is exemplary in the system of intersectional oppression existing in India. In this socio-political context that the most violent logic – discriminatory by race, ethnic group, language, territorial belonging, economic status, caste and gender – does not act independently but combines and overlaps, disrupting historical-cultural identities. The essay follows the powerful interconnection between historically diverse phenomena, between multiple institutionalizations and cultural interpretations of violence against the Other. It mainly highlights the leitmotiv of epistemic violence.

The essay ‘Violence against women between globality and persistence’ by Maria Giovanna Musso, Rachel Reynolds and Michele Proietti deals with the topic of violence against women in a cross-national, transdisciplinary perspective. Through the investigation of a vast empirical and theoretical literature and critical thinking on the directions taken by research, the distinctive features and the complexity of violence against women are pointed out. Variable in terms of impact and form, violence against women is not only present in widely differing geo-cultural situations but possesses a persistence and a polymorphic, multi-dimensional character related to male dominance, which has enabled it (until now) to survive many social and legislative changes. As well as identifying the particular features and changing forms of this type of violence, quite unlike any other, the essay stresses the adaptive, endemic and persistent character of this phenomenon and highlights above all its intimate and political matrix.

Pier Luca Marzo in his essay ‘The neutral metamorphoses of technical violence’ analyses the violence inherent in the logic of the functioning of apparatus that permeates the globalised world. This is a kind of violence that is difficult to grasp as long as you stick to an instrumental vision of technology. Beyond that view, the author analyses technologies as parts of a ‘technical mono(a)theism’ that is capable of exercising the binding function typical of the religious phenomenon. It is within this belief system without content that a neutral violence is generated: a process of conversion of individual and social qualities into a quantitative setting governed by precision, utility and efficiency. A neutralizing conversion that leads technical mono(a)theism to become an automated world state that, beyond its historical-social specificities, structures its art of government through discipline and bio-politics. These are the two mechanisms that lead neutral violence to violate the sphere of human life, both individual and social, dominating it in terms of zootechnics.

Lastly, Michel Wieviorka’s essay ‘The Impossible Reverse. Asymmetries and Temporality’ focuses on the ways out of social and political violence, yet without naively falling for the belief that there can be an end to violence, given the irreversible processes it activates. The ways out of violence are always to be tracked in relation to the specificity of its expressions and to radical change in contexts and memories. Keeping in mind this interweaving, the author elaborates a multidimensional analysis of the phenomenon of violence, considering: the individual, the group, the community, the society, the nation and the state. Only by keeping an eye on the different levels of this stratification is it possible to glimpse a possible way out of the violent phenomena created in the interweaving between deviation and social order. Wieviorka also demonstrates how violence is a challenge for sociological knowledge, both on the theoretical and methodological side. Finally, it should undergo an intellectual and historical reconfiguration, given the contemporary metamorphoses of violence in globalised world.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Maria Giovanna Musso is and associate professor at the University of Rome La Sapienza, Department of Social and Economic Sciences, where she teaches sociology of change, creativity and art, and sociological theories. She has conducted studies on complex systems, art and science, development and globalization. Her research includes the relationship between violence against women, identity, the social imaginary and the social bond, and the relationship between art, science, technology and their impact on social change.

Emanuela Ferreri has been a lecturer at the University of Rome La Sapienza since 2012 and at Unitelma-Sapienza since 2014. She has obtained the National Scientific Qualification in General Sociology. An expert on the sociology and anthropology of international cooperation and development processes, she is member of the Italian Sociological Association (AIS).

Pier Luca Marzo teaches sociology of change and creativity at the Department of Cognitive, Psychological, Pedagogical and Cultural Studies of the University of Messina and is the founder and director of the international journal Im@go: A Journal of the Social Imaginary and a founding member of the Italian Sociological Association’s (AIS) ‘Sociology of Imaginary’ research committee.