Why Humans Fight: The Social Dynamics of Close-Range Violence [Paperback]

Maleaevi offers a novel sociological answer to the age-old question: 'Why do humans fight?', by emphasising the centrality of social contexts that make fighting possible.Maleaevi offers a novel sociological answer to the age-old question: 'Why do humans fight?'. Instead of focusing on the motivations of individuals, this book emphasises the centrality of the social contexts that make fighting possible. It will appeal to students and scholars of war, violent crime, and inter-personal violence.Maleaevi offers a novel sociological answer to the age-old question: 'Why do humans fight?'. Instead of focusing on the motivations of individuals, this book emphasises the centrality of the social contexts that make fighting possible. It will appeal to students and scholars of war, violent crime, and inter-personal violence.Maleaevi offers a novel sociological answer to the age-old question: 'Why do humans fight?'. Instead of focusing on the motivations of solitary individuals, he emphasises the centrality of the social and historical contexts that make fighting possible. He argues that fighting is not an individual attribute, but a social phenomenon shaped by one's relationships with other people. Drawing on recent scholarship across a variety of academic disciplines as well as his own interviews with the former combatants, Maleaevi shows that one's willingness to fight is a contextual phenomenon shaped by specific ideological and organisational logic. This book explores the role biology, psychology, economics, ideology, and coercion play in one's experience of fighting, emphasising the cultural and historical variability of combativeness. By drawing from numerous historical and contemporary examples from all over the world, Maleaevi demonstrates how social pugnacity is a relational and contextual phenomenon that possesses autonomous features.Acknowledgements; Introduction: The social anatomy of fighting; 1. The body and the mind: Biology and the close-range violence; 2.lSº