Making Better Sense of Violence: Violent Capital

To make a better sense of conflict, we need to continue unpacking what “violence” is. On the one hand, we know plenty about violence: how it feels (to ourselves and others), How it is organized (Collins 2008, Malešević 2022), and its evolution over time (Malešević 2017; Mann 2023). Yet all this useful (if painful) knowledge and analyses are not always clear about how and why violence achieves aims. Threats and real harm can subjugate targets and bystanders, but we should start clarifying how this happens. If goals of violence are (usually) clear, mechanisms of effectiveness that translate violence into gain are less so. Fear, harm, and pain (threatened or carried out) are real, but we know more is at work. We obey the police because their guns, uniforms, posture, and stature are imposing in reality and via our interpretations—but the police trade those things and symbols for different things, from civil peace in some cases to obedience (social capital) and rent (sometimes called “corruption”) in others. Scholars have documented empirically how gang leaders and mafia dons, monarchs and dictators, toxically masculine husbands and CEOs, and others use violence to defend or expand gains. But if we think sociologically, we should ask what makes violence matter, as more than a response to harm.

         I suggest we begin by thinking of violence as 1) a potential resource or asset, 2) that can be exchanged for something else of value. In other words, we should start thinking of some violence as violent capital. In fact, violence as capital has been staring us in the face. We have explored capital related to two of Max Weber’s three dimensions of stratification (Weber 1946: 180-195): class and economic capital, and status and cultural capital. We still have “party,” the state and organizations that hover around it, and the state’s main resource is violence. Why not take a deeper dive into this dimension, as we have done for economic and cultural capital (and other forms of capital)? We can take inspiration from Pierre Bourdieu’s work on cultural capital. Not all culture is cultural capital, but sometimes it is, and “cultural capital” has been a useful analytic tool for making better sense of the generation and regeneration of inequality, for example in schools and where meritocracy is a supposed goal in modern societies.

         My new project dives into how violence operates as more than wanton harm (Hass 2024). There is usually a rhyme and reason to how violence is employed, even if things do not always go according to plan (as in botched crimes and military accidents such as friendly fire). Gambetta (2009) suggested that criminals exchange signals of capacity for violent acts—what he called “violence capital,” as a way to negotiate status positions. (Gambetta’s concept remains narrow, and he did not develop the concept further, from what I can tell at the moment.) Violence becomes violent capital when there are collective norms and rules that govern what violence can be used, by whom, in what way, and towards what ends. That is, we should think of the use of violence as being shaped by fields (formal or informal). Sometimes these rules are challenged or broken (accidentally or on purpose) for strategic advantage. Responses to such transgressions—from punishment (as in the case of Abu Ghraib), refinement of rules (as in the case of chemical weapons after World War I or massive civilian deaths in World War II), or adjustment (such as total war in the nineteenth century)—suggest the practice of violence is shaped by field expectations that inform what we can gain in the process. A good empirical case of violence as capital is organized crime, where the threat or use of physical harm is exchanged for rent. However, there are rules about how violence can be used, and what can be gained as part of this exchange (Gambetta 1993; see also Volkov 2002 on Russian organized crime). Breaking these rules can invite retribution from other criminal groups, the state, and even average people.

         If this concept has validity and utility—always a big “if” in the early stages of a project—then we could employ it to expand and enrich our understanding of social phenomena. For example, state-building is, in part, the story of pacifying a territory and population, as the state claims a legitimate monopoly on violence, gathers resources for violence, and then uses these to extract resources (e.g. taxes and conscripts). However, we can think of this process as the state claiming the right to set the rules not only for the use of violence generically, but also specifically: what kinds of violence can be used, by whom, and towards what ends (e.g. exchanges). In the contemporary United States, for example, some violence has value (police using force for justice, using force to defend one’s life and property), whereas some do not (police brutality, mugging someone on the street to rob them). And much of the politics of the last twenty years has involved reframing those rules, for example, gun rights and gun control. As another example, the history of war is, in part, a history of geopolitical fields and norms that inform what violence (form, use, aims) has value and legitimacy, and what does not.

         In conclusion, there is much here to explore. Again, validity and utility are still uncertain in these early stages, but my intuition tells me that there is something of analytic value here. We have done the same, fruitfully, for culture and economics. Why not for violence, which—unfortunately—is no less ubiquitous than culture and money?