Violence: a micro sociological theory/ Randall Collins.

List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. The Micro-sociology of Violent Confrontations
Violent situations
Micro-evidence: situational recordings, reconstructions, and observations
Comparing situations across types of violence
Fight myths
Violent situations are shaped by an emotional field of tension and fear
Alternative theoretical approaches
Historical evolution of social techniques for controlling confrontational tension
Sources
Preview
The Complementarity of Micro and Macro Theories
Part I: The dirty secrets of violence
Chapter 2. Confrontational Tension and Incompetent Violence
Brave, Competent and Evenly Matched?
The Central Reality: Confrontational Tension
Tension/Fear and Non-performance in Military Combat
Low Fighting Competence
Friendly Fire and Bystander Hits
Joy of Combat: Under What Conditions?
The Continuum of Tension/Fear and Combat Performance
Confrontational Tension in Policing and Non-military Fighting
Fear of What?
Chapter 3. Forward Panic
Confrontational Tension and Release: Hot Rush, Piling On, Overkill
Atrocities of War
Caveat: the Multiple Causation of Atrocities
Asymmetrical Entrainment of Forward Panic and Paralyzed Victims
Forward Panics and One-sided Casualties in Decisive Battles
Atrocities of Peace
Crowd Violence
Demonstrators and Crowd-control Forces
The Crowd Multiplier
Alternatives to Forward Panic
Chapter 4. Attacking the Weak: I. Domestic Abuse
The emotional definition of the situation
Background and foreground explanations
Abusing the exceptionally weak: time-patterns from normalcy to atrocity
Three pathways: Normal limited conflict, severe forward panic, and terroristic torture regime
Negotiating interactional techniques of violence and victimhood
Chapter 5. Attacking the Weak: II. Bullying, Mugging, and Holdups
The continuum of total institutions
Mugging and holdups
Battening on interactional weakness
Part II: Cleaned-up and staged violence
Chapter 6. Staging Fair Fights
Hero versus hero
Audience supports and limits on violence
Fighting schools and fighting manners
Displaying risk and manipulating danger in sword and pistol duels
The decline of elite dueling and its replacement by the gun-fight
Honor without fairness: vendettas as chains of unbalanced fights
Ephemeral situational honor and leap-frog escalation into one-gun fights
Behind the facade of honor and disrespect
The cultural prestige of fair and unfair fights
Chapter 7. Violence as Fun and Entertainment
Moral holidays
Looting and destruction as participation sustainers
The wild party as elite potlatch
Carousing zones and boundary exclusion violence
End-resisting violence
Frustrated carousing and stirring up effervescence
Paradox: Why does most intoxication not lead to violence?
The one-fight-per-venue limitation
Fighting as action and fun
Mock fights and mosh pits
Chapter 8. Sports Violence
Sports as dramatically contrived conflicts
Game dynamics and player violence
Winning by practical skills for producing emotional energy dominance
The timing of player violence: loser-frustration fights and turning-point fights
Spectators' game-dependent violence
Off-site fans' violence: celebration and defeat riots
Off-site violence as sophisticated technique: soccer hooligans
The dramatic local construction of antagonistic identities
Revolt of the audience in the era of entertainers' domination
Part III: Dynamics and structure of violent situations
Chapter 9. How Fights Start, or Not
Normal Limited Acrimony: Griping, Whining, Arguing, Quarreling
Boasting and Blustering
The Code of the Street: Institutionalized Bluster and Threat
Pathways into the Tunnel of Violence
Chapter 10. The Violent Few
Small numbers of the actively and competently violent
Confrontation leaders and action-seekers: police
Who wins?
Military snipers: concealed and absorbed in technique
Fighter pilot aces: aggressively imposing momentum
In the zone versus the glaze of combat: micro-situational techniques of interactional dominance
The 9/11 cockpit fight
Chapter 11. Violence as Dominance in Emotional Attention Space
What does the rest of the crowd do?
Violence without audiences: professional killers and clandestine violence
Confrontation-minimizing terrorist tactics
Violent niches in confrontational attention space
Epilogue: Practical Conclusions
Notes
References
Index