David Wästerfors is Professor of Sociology at Lund University, Sweden.

Imagine... 1.Violence as situation 2.Violence as specialty 3.Violence as politics 4.Violence as storytelling 5.Scraps and side-tracks

This book considers how the concept of violence has been interpreted, used, defined, and explored by social researchers and thinkers. It does not provide a final answer to the question of what violence is or how it should be explained (or prevented), and instead offers a variety of useful ways of thinking about and theorising the phenomenon, mainly from a sociological standpoint.
It outlines four ways of understanding violence:
¿ Violence as situation: the tension that exists between category-driven and situational explanations.
¿ Violence as speciality: the study of particularly violent actors, and how they may be understood by reference to childhood histories, technologies, institutions, culture, class, and gender.
¿ Violence as politics: political violence and violent politics.
¿ Violence as storytelling: representations of violence from a narrative perspective.
Concluding with reflections on possible convergences between the four approaches and new directions for research, this book offers a unique and experimental approach to discussing and reconstructing the concept of violence. It is essential reading for criminologists, sociologists, and philosophers alike.