Aiding Peace, Abetting Violence: Third Parties and the Management of Conflict

Abstract

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.

The Influence of Event Characteristics and Actors' Behaviour on the Outcome of Violent Events: Comparing Lethal with Non-Lethal Events

“…Collins 2008;Decker 1995;Levine et al 2011;Luckenbill 1977;Phillips and Cooney 2005). Although research has yielded mixed results as to whether mediation affects the severity of events (e.g.…”

“…Although research has yielded mixed results as to whether mediation affects the severity of events (e.g. see Felson and Steadman 1983;Phillips and Cooney 2005), taking sides was found to strongly affect the likelihood that conflicts will turn violent (Phillips and Cooney 2005). For example, Collins (2008) argued that the emotional barrier of fear/tension to hurt someone generally inhibits people to commit violence, providing empirical evidence for the notion that encouragements by third parties is one way to overcome this barrier of fear/tension for violence to occur.…”

“…However, it remains unclear whether the presence of third parties has an escalating or de-escalating effect (e.g. Collins 2008;Decker 1995;Luckenbill 1977;Phillips and Cooney 2005).…”

Criminology as social control: discriminatory research & its role in the reproduction of social inequalities and crime

“…There are at least five kinds of social status and three kinds of social distance [9,40]. The five kinds of social status are vertical status, radial status, corporate status, symbolic status, and normative status.…”

“…The majority of prior work in pure sociology has focused on making sense of forms of social control, such as law [5,7], self-help [6,14,38,40], avoidance [3], therapy [22,46], terrorism [11], and control of research by Institutional Review Boards [32]. In short, pure sociology seeks to determine how the social structure of situations affects the form, style, and quantity of social behavior that emerges from those situations.…”