The Secret Society of Torturers: The Social Shaping of Extremely Violent Behaviour

How do normal people become able to torture others? In order to explain this puzzling social phenomenon, we have to take secrecy – the characteristic trait of modern torture – as the lynchpin of the analysis. Following Georg Simmel’s formal analysis of the “secret society”, the contribution reconstructs structural and cultural aspects of the secret society of torturers that generate social processes that allow its members to behave extremely violently, forcing individuals to turn into torturers. The contribution argues that the form of social behaviour that we call torture is socially shaped. It goes beyond social psychology to develop an explanation from the perspective of relational sociology

Introduction: Fat Agency

The introduction lays the ground for this issue’s critical inquiry into fat and agency. Agency is a crucial yet ambivalent tool for historical, cultural and social analysis. It denotes a combination of self-reliance, self-will and self-respect among historical actors. On the one hand, it is a symbol for the reappropriation of alienated and seemingly overpowering discourses, social relations, and institutions. On the other hand, it often serves as an idealized counterpoint to representations of fat bodies. Therefore, agency is not necessarily and exclusively tied to oppositional acts of resistance or withdrawal, but it is also a premise of the social and political organization of liberal societies: exerting agency performs our compliance with its demands

The Transcription Factor Ultraspiracle Influences Honey Bee Social Behavior and Behavior-Related Gene Expression

Behavior is among the most dynamic animal phenotypes, modulated by a variety of internal and external stimuli. Behavioral differences are associated with large-scale changes in gene expression, but little is known about how these changes are regulated. Here we show how a transcription factor (TF), ultraspiracle (usp; the insect homolog of the Retinoid X Receptor), working in complex transcriptional networks, can regulate behavioral plasticity and associated changes in gene expression. We first show that RNAi knockdown of USP in honey bee abdominal fat bodies delayed the transition from working in the hive (primarily “nursing” brood) to foraging outside. We then demonstrate through transcriptomics experiments that USP induced many maturation-related transcriptional changes in the fat bodies by mediating transcriptional responses to juvenile hormone. These maturation-related transcriptional responses to USP occurred without changes in USP's genomic binding sites, as revealed by ChIP–chip. Instead, behaviorally related gene expression is likely determined by combinatorial interactions between USP and other TFs whose cis-regulatory motifs were enriched at USP's binding sites. Many modules of JH– and maturation-related genes were co-regulated in both the fat body and brain, predicting that usp and cofactors influence shared transcriptional networks in both of these maturation-related tissues. Our findings demonstrate how “single gene effects” on behavioral plasticity can involve complex transcriptional networks, in both brain and peripheral tissues

Social life as collective struggle: closure theory and the problem of solidarity

In recent years, all over the globe we have seen intensifying economic exploitation, political disenfranchisement, social marginalization and cultural repression in all kinds of political regimes, from liberal democratic to authoritarian and dictatorial. Although the strategies vary with regard to regime and context, in all of them we observe that while a growing number of social groups are speaking out and rising against them, a presumably much higher number of groups do not. In this article, I argue that all these processes can be conceived as aspects of ongoing closure struggles in social life. However, in order to understand why some social groups are able to fight against closure strategies while others are not, closure theory in its current state of elaboration is not of any help. While it operates with the term solidarization, it does not offer any explanation of how such acting in solidarity may become possible in closure struggles. The article is a mainly theoretical contribution of how to solve this problem

Towards a sociological explanation of violence in conflicts of social orders

The article argues that the uprisings during the Arab Spring as well as the riots in either the banlieues of French cities or in London have to be considered as violent conflicts that pose a serious threat to the social orders in which they emerge. These different kinds of social resistance have in common that they communicate more or less developed alternative conceptions of social orders that challenge what has been considered legitimate so far. Until now, sociology has neither successfully explained such kinds of conflicts nor the way they are triggered. Therefore, the article discusses crucial problems of a sociology of violence, i.e. violence as term and concept, theoretical and methodological deficits and, finally, assumptions about the role of violence in conflict-ridden processes of modernization and civilization in general. The article argues that a sociology of violence should concentrate on the nexus of social order and violence in order to explain how and why violent conflicts emerge in specific social contexts. Thus, a sociology of violence should take an effort to reconstruct the crucial social mechanisms that underlie the dynamics of emerging violence in processes of production and reproduction of social order

Introduction : A political economy of citizenship

In the course of the last four decades, neo-liberalism has established itself as the dominant form of governing both national societies and global affairs. On the foundation of both Keynesian economic policies and the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates among currencies, the world economy recovered. The classical sociological meaning and concept of citizenship as defined by T. H. Marshall and others after World War II rests on an analysis of the relationship between the capitalist economy and political democracy against the background of 'embedded liberalism'. Today, however, the enforcement of neo-liberal principles in order to turn modern democracies into 'market societies' impinges heavily on our idea of citizenship. The critical aspects of a flawed citizenship go directly to the heart of the idea of citizenship itself, as both democratic and social participation and a substantial conception of individual liberty all seem to be under attack from the global politico-economic regime

Introduction : Citizenship and political struggle

The history of citizenship is one of social struggle against pre-modern authorities, nobles and aristocracies, of class struggles and the demands of social movements, and no less of cultural, ethnic, indigenous protests against the long history of colonialism. Paths to citizenship in Europe have taken very different directions, as Charles Tilly has shown with regard to England, the Netherlands, Russia or Prussia. Max Weber's dictum of defining the state by the accomplishment of the monopolisation of the legitimate means of violence is of utmost significance for the history of citizenship. There can be no doubt that the experience of World War II prepared the ground for the twentieth-century idea of citizenship. Consequently the Western concept of citizenship has been promoted as a role model in the march towards modernity as peaceful, democratic and universalistic. Finally, this chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book

Introduction : Citizenship and its boundaries

This introduction presents an overview of the concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the role of Frontex in the European Union as an agency to protect its external borders in the Mediterranean from irregular or 'illegal' migration. It discusses that Europe is an arrangement for European citizens only – and for some privileged non-citizens as in the Swiss case. The book explains the points to the possibility of a transnational membership regime that, however, bears certain antinomies that also point to unresolved problems. It offers an interesting view on the symbolic boundary between the citizen and the consumer, discussing this nexus from the perspective of citizenship studies, consumer culture and surveillance studies. Among the many far-reaching transformations that both societies and citizens have faced in recent years, the European migration crisis has most urgently brought to mind the fact that modern citizenship has always been about boundaries and about processes of inclusion and exclusion

Die transnationale soziale Frage: Soziale Rechte und Bürgerschaften im globalen Kontext

Faist T. Die transnationale soziale Frage: Soziale Rechte und Bürgerschaften im globalen Kontext. In: Mackert J, Müller H-P, eds. Moderne (Staats)Bürgerschaft: Nationale Staatsbürgerschaft und die Debatten der Citizenship Studies. Wiesbaden: VS; 2007: 285-307