Like State, Like Citizen A Study of the Legitimization of Violence.

摘要

This study compares state violence and citizen violence in several selected countries. Relying on the pure sociology approach of Black (1995) and developing out of Cooney's (1997) theory of lethal conflict and the state, this project involves an analysis of selected nations on the basis of a qualitative comparison of archival data collected from academic and political sources. The analysis focuses on the violent actions of various state governments and on the violent actions of the citizens of those states. The nations were selected to give the most variety in comparisons and were organized based on their official position on capital punishment as presented by Amnesty International. This study follows the method of Fabbro (1978) in his study of peaceful societies, in which a number of questions have been developed in order to demonstrate various aspects of these societies, and, where sources allow, to extract the same type of information for each society. This study serves two purposes. The first purpose is to add to the existing knowledge and literature on the topic of lethal conflict, both at the state and citizen level. The second purpose is to offer feedback towards policy on the basis of the results.