Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: integrating the study of order, conflict, and violence
- Part 1 Creating, maintaining, and restoring order
- 2 Probing the sources of political order
- 3 Attaining social order in Iraq
- 4 Factors impeding the effectiveness of partition in South Asia and the Palestine Mandate
- 5 The social order of violence in Chicago and Stockholm neighborhoods: a comparative inquiry
- 6 Traditions of justice in war: the modern debate in historical perspective
- 7 Problems and prospects for democratic settlements: South Africa as a model for the Middle East and Northern Ireland?
- Part 2 Challenging, transforming, and destroying order
- Index
- References
5 - The social order of violence in Chicago and Stockholm neighborhoods: a comparative inquiry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: integrating the study of order, conflict, and violence
- Part 1 Creating, maintaining, and restoring order
- 2 Probing the sources of political order
- 3 Attaining social order in Iraq
- 4 Factors impeding the effectiveness of partition in South Asia and the Palestine Mandate
- 5 The social order of violence in Chicago and Stockholm neighborhoods: a comparative inquiry
- 6 Traditions of justice in war: the modern debate in historical perspective
- 7 Problems and prospects for democratic settlements: South Africa as a model for the Middle East and Northern Ireland?
- Part 2 Challenging, transforming, and destroying order
- Index
- References
Summary
We know surprisingly little about interpersonal violence in cross-national, comparative context. Owing partly to the difficulties in collecting data that can reasonably be compared, research has tended to focus on stylized facts generated in separate fashion. For example, we know that violence is ecologically concentrated based on numerous, separate studies of American and European cities. But we do not know why. We also know that violence tends to correlate with structural factors such as neighborhood poverty, again in many different cities. Yet we do not know whether concentrated poverty, defined similarly, can explain cross-national differences in violence, nor even how the distributions of inequality directly compare at the neighborhood level. Perhaps more important, when it comes to the social mechanisms that generate or inhibit violence, the limits of our knowledge become apparent. By focusing primarily on correlates of violence at the level of social composition (namely poverty), prior research has tended toward a risk factor rather than an explanatory approach that posits social mechanisms.
Our goal for this essay is to move beyond the dominance of exclusively American studies of interpersonal violence and the canonical correlate of poverty. We do so by addressing the neighborhood social order of interpersonal violence in the contemporary urban settings of Chicago and Stockholm. The move we make is to link comparative measures of structural inequality with community-level mechanisms that are hypothesized to predict violence in similar ways despite vastly different national contexts.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Order, Conflict, and Violence , pp. 97 - 119Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008
References
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