Violence as an Essentially Contested Concept

Scientific understanding of human violence is one of the most urgent tasks of our time. Given this sense of urgency, it is shocking how little we seem to know about it (Turpin & Kurz, 1997: 1–2). In fact, even among scholars there is not even the beginning of an agreement concerning a definition of what exactly ‘violence’ is (Stanko, 2003: 3). One of the most common ways of defining violence is to only consider forms of criminal violence and to argue that violence is the use of force that has been prohibited by law (Riedel & Welsh, 2002: 3). However, whilst ‘violence’ might conventionally connote physical attack, the notion of physical violence represents a surprisingly broad spectrum of incidents (Waddington, Badger & Bull, 2004: 149). This is obvious, even within the legal point of view which, typically, defines violence rather technically as ‘‘the actual or threatened, knowing or intentional application of statutory impermissible physical force by one person directly against one or more other persons outside the contexts both of formal institutional or organizational structures and of civil or otherwise collective disorders and movements for the purpose of securing some end against the will or without the consent of the other person or persons’’ (Weiner, 1989: 37–38). Thus, it may appear to be self-evident what ‘violence’ is but, in reality, ‘violence’ is ‘‘a slippery term which covers a huge and frequently changing range of heterogeneous physical and emotional behaviors, situations and victim-offender relationships’’ (Levi & Maguire, 2002: 796). Social scientists attempting to come to grips with the phenomenon find the concept of violence ‘‘either under-, or over-defined, or both.’’ (Bauman, 1995: 139) Even though two overarching assumptions seem to be that: 1. violence is typically assumed to be motivated by hostility and the willful intent to cause harm and 2. violence is – legally, socially, or morally – deviant human activity, it