Bursts of cooperation triggered by threats in violent and other uncertain situations

During intergroup confrontations, agitating stimuli such as opponents' threats and provocations can trigger collective violence, even without the usual mechanisms of cooperation such as norms with sanctions. We examine video recordings of street fights between groups of young men. Collective violence in these attacks sometimes breaks out in a burst and at other times in a fizzle wherein only few group members participate. An adapted Ising spinglass model demonstrates that these two different outcomes can be predicted by a critical level of defectors, which is strongly supported by our data

Weapons, Body Postures, and the Quest for Dominance in Robberies:A Qualitative Analysis of Video Footage

Objective: A small-scale exploration of the use of video analysis to study robberies. We analyze the use of weapons as part of the body posturing of robbers as they attempt to attain dominance. Methods: Qualitative analyses of video footage of 23 shop robberies. We used Observer XT software (version 12) for fine-grained multimodal coding, capturing diverse bodily behavior by various actors simultaneously. We also constructed story lines to understand the robberies as hermeneutic whole cases. Results: Robbers attain dominance by using weapons that afford aggrandizing posturing and forward movements. Guns rather than knives seemed to fit more easily with such posturing. Also, victims were more likely to show minimizing postures when confronted with guns. Thus, guns, as part of aggrandizing posturing, offer more support to robbers’ claims to dominance in addition to their more lethal power. In the cases where resistance occurred, robbers either expressed insecure body movements or minimizing postures and related weapon usage or they failed to impose a robbery frame as the victims did not seem to comprehend the situation initially. Conclusions: Video analysis opens up a new perspective of how violent crime unfolds as sequences of bodily movements. We provide methodological recommendations and suggest a larger scale comparative project

Delinquent Behavior of Dutch Rural Adolescents

This article compares Dutch rural and non-rural adolescents’ delinquent behavior and examines two social correlates of rural delinquency: communal social control and traditional rural culture. The analyses are based on cross-sectional data, containing 3,797 participants aged 13–18 (48.7% females). The analyses show that rural adolescents are only slightly less likely to engage in delinquent behavior. Furthermore, while rural adolescents are exposed more often to communal social control, this does not substantially reduce the likelihood that they engage in delinquent behavior. Concerning rural culture, marked differences appeared between rural and non-rural adolescents. First, alcohol use and the frequency of visiting pubs were more related to rural adolescents’ engagement in delinquent behavior. Second, the gender gap in delinquency is larger among rural adolescents: whereas rural boys did not differ significantly from non-rural boys, rural girls were significantly less likely to engage in delinquent behavior than non-rural girls. However, the magnitude of the effects of most indicators was rather low. To better account for the variety of rural spaces and cultures, it is recommended that future research into antisocial and criminal behavior of rural adolescents should adopt alternative measurements of rurality, instead of using an indicator of population density only

Feel it Coming: Situational Turning Points in Police-Civilian Encounters

Studies of antagonistic interactions, specifically in policing, frequently view (de)escalation as a linear process without considering how officers perceive and anticipate interactional processes. We argue however that officers perceive tense encounters with civilians as characterized by a back-and-forth going of various trajectories, goals, and directions. Based on our interactionist and ethnomethodological conceptualization of interactional trajectories, we analyse 25 video interviews and 46 elicitation interviews. Our analysis focuses on officers' interpretations of "turning points," e.g., sudden shifts in their own, their colleagues', or civilians’ bodily behaviour that redirect their projected trajectories and which necessitate po- lice action, sometimes violence. This article moves beyond a purely situational understanding of police-civilian encounters by incorporating officers’ accounts of their experiences and bodily actions, as elicited by watching video recordings of police-civilian encounters. We argue that our conceptualization of trajectories and turnings points as well as our video-based interview method shed light on the importance of bodily action police-civilian encounters; maintaining public order is to anticipate and redirect perceived turning points that potentially disturb routinized patterns of bodily actions

Engineering vengeful effervescence.: Lynching rituals and religious–political power in Pakistan.

Based on case studies of seven (attempted) lynchings in Pakistan, we argue that they can be considered lynching rituals, which are instrumental in a context of political strife. ‘Shrpsnd anasr’ (agitators) play an important role as ritual engineers; they assemble crowds by spreading rumours and vocalizing accusations, use rhythmic chanting and slogan repetition to generate a shared vengeful mood and focus the crowd’s attention on the (fabricated) encroachment of a moral imperative (notably blasphemy). We conclude that the vengeful effervescence generated in lynching rituals strengthens the clientelistic interdependency networks of religious–political leaders. The contribution of our study lies in demonstrating the importance of bodily practices in lynching rituals and their instrumental political value for both masses and political leaders

How to start a figth? A qualitative video analysis of the trajectories toward violence

This project studies violent interactions as trajectories, which are communicative processes in which antagonists act upon each others’ bodily and verbal actions to project a direction for the interaction to take, which is then (con)tested in the exchanges that follow. Using ethnomethodological and conversation analytical tools, we detail the trajectories of three violent encounters, captured on phone camera recordings. We cartoonized the video footage to protect the identity of the people captured in the recordings