When and how will third parties intervene in the conflicts of others? When will third parties further violence, and when will they foster peace? These are questions addressed by Black's theory of the third party. The authors conducted the first systematic test of the theory, drawing on quantitative and qualitative data from in-depth interviews with 100 men imprisoned for assault or homicide. Specifically, they tested Cooney's elaboration of Black's theory, which argues (1) that the social location of a third party, based on ties to the principals, predicts whether he or she will act as a partisan or settlement agent or remain uninvolved, and (2) that the third-party structure of a conflict, based on the general configuration of all the third parties present, predicts whether the conflict will escalate to violence. The study results confirm most of the theoretical predictions regarding both third-party behavior and violence. The discussion also extends the theoretical model, offering new concepts and suggesting how the theory can be applied to a range of subjects, such as international war and the long-term historical decline of interpersonal violence.

Occurring in a broad range of non-western and western countries, violence committed against women in the name of family honor has been viewed in several ways, including as a crime, as gendered violence, or as a violation of human rights. But from a purely explanatory point of view, family honor violence is most profitably viewed as a type of social control, specifically penal social control. As punishment, honor violence appears to obey the same principles as other forms of punishment. Drawing on the theoretical strategy of pure sociology, the present article highlights two such principles: punishment increases with the social distance and social inferiority of the offender. These twin principles help to explain a broad range of facts about when and where family honor violence will occur, and how severe -in particular, how lethal -it will be. Keywords family punishment, honor violence, violence against womenPunishment is of two principal types: legal and non-legal. Of the two, legal punishment administered by state officials attracts the lion's share of scholarly and popular attention. Yet informal punishment is surely far more frequent. For every person fined, placed on probation, incarcerated, or executed many more are likely scolded, deprived of goods or services, have their pocket money or pay docked, placed in time out, sent to the Principal's office, demoted, fired, assigned unpleasant tasks, shunned, jeered, expelled, or beaten. The disproportionate emphasis is understandable -legal punishment is more public and better documented. But it is not justifiable: the study of punishment cannot privilege one form over another. The present article seeks to provide some balance by addressing the social conditions underlying an increasingly prominent (though not necessarily increasingly

The pure sociology perspective invented by Donald Black, a general theoretical framework for the prediction and explanation of social reality, has considerable potential for the scientific understanding of criminal behavior. Several scholars have profitably drawn upon Black's proposal that a significant amount of crime is a form of disputing or social control, especially to explain violent conflict. However, pure sociology has not yet been extended and applied to criminal behavior more broadly. A pure sociology of predatory behavior, for instance, would address the location and direction in social space of predators, prey, and third parties. In expanding criminological thought, however, pure sociology also challenges it. Pure sociology explanations are not restricted by time or place, a feature not easily realized with a concept so closely tied to a relatively recent social invention: the state. Additionally, the supra-psychological, -anthropocentric, and -teleological nature of pure sociology generates explanations of behavior that are at odds with many of the assumptions of traditional criminology. Ultimately, then, pure sociology yields a new paradigm for the explanation of behavior the state defines as criminal. Criminology has long been hospitable to a diversity of theoretical perspectives. Phenomenology, rational choice theory, Marxism, evolutionary psychology, and a clutch of social psychological explanations have all contributed to a significant growth in our understanding of criminal behavior. Yet gaps undoubtedly remain. A recent addition with much to offer the field is pure sociology. Pure sociology was invented by Donald Black in The Behavior of Law [8], elaborated by him in subsequent publications, and has been applied to a variety of subjects by scholars such as Baumgartner [3][4][5], Borg [21], Campbell [22], Hoffmann [41], Horwitz [42, 43], Phillips [54] (see also Phillips & Cooney [55]), Michalski [49, 50], Morrill [51], Mullis [52], Senechal de la Roche [58, 59], Tucker [67, 68], and myself [28,31]. Since pure sociology represents a new way of explaining social life its application to criminology is not wholly straightforward. The present analysis is divided into two halves, the first addressing how pure sociology differs from

Criminological research consistently shows that interpersonal homicide is largely confined to low-status people. Yet, anthropological and historical materials reveal that in earlier and simpler societies homicide was found throughout the status hierarchy. Using theory developed by Donald Black, I argue that a critical factor in the decline of lethal conflict among social elites is the increased availability of legal means of handling conflict. An implication is that since a focus on modern societies and their developed legal systems yields a limited and even distorted empirical picture of lethal violence, criminologists should strive to formulate theories that are cross-cultural and historical in scope.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Sociological Review.Following Hobbes, many social theorists have claimed that the state reduces the amount of violence in human societies. Are they right? I review the crosscultural and cross-national evidence on the impact of the state on the most common form of extreme violence-lethal conflict (i.e., war, rebellion, homicide, and execution). Drawing on the sociology of conflict management (Black 1993), I argue that the relationship between the state and lethal conflict is not negative as Hobbesian theory predicts. Rather, it appears to be U-shaped. A combination of materials from anthropology, criminology, and political science suggests that rates of lethal conflict tend to be high when state authority is absent and also when it is extremely strong or centralized. Between these extremes, in less centralized states, lethal conflict typically declines. theoristss have long argued that the state JLreduces violence among those subject to its jurisdiction. Hobbes ([1651] 1909) provided an early and eloquent statement of this idea, contending that in the absence of a strong central authority, violence pervades social life. Weber's ([1922] 1968:54) influential definition of the state emphasizes its ability to successfully monopolize the legitimate use of violence, a capacity that would seem to depend partly on the state's ability to restrict violent behavior. Elias ([1939] 1982) nominates the state as a primary source of the long-term civilizing process that decreases violence in everyday life. And Koch's (1974) experience as an ethnographer in New Guinea leads him to stress the importance of thirdparty modes of conflict management, like those provided by state legal systems, as violence-controlling mechanisms in human societies.But are these authors correct? Does the state diminish violence in human affairs? If the state did not exist, would life be more violent? Neither the literature on the state nor that on violence contains a sustained empirical analysis of these issues, even though the "many-sided problem of order" remains a prominent topic of theoretical discussion (Wrong 1994). In this paper, I seek to fill the void, reviewing the available information in light of ideas developed in the sociology of conflict management, a broad field dedicated to describing and explaining the handling of human conflict (Black 1976(Black , 1984(Black , 1993; also see Horwitz 1990).The argument I advance is that the Hobbesian thesis is only partially correct. Anthropological evidence suggests that the state tends to reduce the amount of violent conflict in human societies. But pol...