Violence is mapped by damage salience and actor coordination

Evidence

In order to discipline our inquiry into connections of collective violence to regimes and repertoires, we must specify the sort of variation we are trying to explain. To that end, I construct a two-dimensional map of interpersonal violence, including individual attacks of one person on another or on that person’s property. This first dimension concerns the salience of short-run damage. We look at interactions among the parties, asking to what extent infliction and reception of damage dominate those interactions. At the low extreme, damage occurs only intermittently or secondarily in the course of transactions that remain predominantly nonviolent. At the high extreme, almost every transaction inflicts damage, as the infliction and reception of damage dominate the interaction. Routine bureaucratic encounters that occasionally lead to fisticuffs stand toward the low end of the range, attacks by genocidal militias toward the high end. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 724

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the two-dimensional violence typology: damage salience (vertical) and coordination extent (horizontal) — the analytic frame for the whole chapter.
• QUESTION: For the reader’s test of institutional absorption asymmetry: does Tilly’s damage-salience axis actually capture politicization of subordinate vs dominant groups differently, since state violence is far more coordinated?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 724
• XREF: connects to: Destructiveness rises with both damage salience and coordination — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 726; Low-coordination scattered violence can cause more damage than organized violence — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 733; Coordinated violence ranges from improvised to centrally scripted — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 725 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• High-coordination violence kills more per episode, but frequent low-coordination violence cumulates to similar damage #expands (0.90) — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 734
• Low- and high-coordination violence complement each other within sustained campaigns #expands (0.88) — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 826
• Coordinated violence ranges from improvised to centrally scripted #exemplifies (0.85) — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 725
• Low-coordination scattered violence can cause more damage than organized violence #expands (0.82) — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 733