Vigilantism: An Analysis of Establishment Violence

TLDR

Abstract

During the past decade a significant number of scholars have investigated the nature, causes, and prevention of social and political violence.1 Their primary interest, motivated perhaps by observations of revolutionary war in Asia and social turmoil in the United States, has been the study of violence aimed at changing the established order. Some of these scholars have developed sophisticated causal models in an attempt to identify the conditions which lead people to turn to violence as a means of transforming political systems.2 Although the prevailing concern with revolution is understandable, it obscures a second form of violence-that designed to maintain the established sociopolitical order. The identification of this type of violence is related to the distinction commonly made between the coercion exercised by the regime and the illegitimate coercion engaged in by private individuals. The latter private coercion exceeds the boundaries set by the political system; an example may be seen in the difference between legitimate parental discipline and child brutality. Illegitimate coercion directed by private persons against one another or against the regime may be defined as violence.3 The exercise of coercion by the regime is also generally viewed as regulated by these formal boundaries. The boundaries are, of course, flexible; and at times of severe social disruption, such as internal war, they may be