Explosive Conflict: Time-Dynamics of Violence

Abstract

The latest title by Randall Collins—Explosive Conflict: Time-Dynamics of Violence—extends the micro-interactional insights of his previous work to explain the temporal dynamics of violence. The book is made up of chapters dedicated either to stand-alone theoretical contributions or illuminating case studies. Overall, the work is a mixture of the familiar (interaction ritual chains; CT/F) from previous work and the new (case studies of the storming of the U.S. Capitol in January 2021; case files from the Harvey Weinstein trials). So diverse are the contents that it would not be possible to cover the book’s entire range in the space of a short review. Suffice it to say that we cover, in true Collins style, everything from high-tech warfare to territorial warfare, via chapter-length sojourns into sports matches, sexual assault, revolution, and police violence. The logic of this diversity is clear: the emotional processes that Collins has previously identified as central to violence obtain anywhere conflict occurs. However, perhaps curiously for someone who has made their name defining the messiness of violence in parsimonious terms, there is no one conceptual or theoretical lesson here. That doesn’t detract necessarily from what is useful in the book. It does contain some key lessons that will be stimulating—and often provoking—to students of violence. One oddity is that these new insights abut against pragmatic policyoriented solutions: for example, cops wearing heart-rate monitors or strategies for going on the offensive if you fall victim to attempted sexual assault (more on these later). In prior work by Collins (e.g., 2008) such recommendations were confined to an Epilogue section, where they were better placed. Chapter One will be familiar to readers of the American Sociological Association Presidential Address (Collins 2012). This is the closest the book comes to a self-contained theory of time dynamics in violence. But some key elements are conspicuously under-theorized: what does Collins mean by polarization here, for example, and how do the more familiar dynamics of ‘‘emotional processes’’ link to more mundane concerns around resourcing and personnel (p. 22)? This gap between the emotional processes Collins sees as inherent to all violence dynamics and other (rival?) explanations for violence outcomes is the weakest part of the framework and the book overall. This gap is most stark in the chapter on police violence. In Chapter Fifteen, Collins writes compellingly of the perceptual distortion that accompanies adrenaline-filled confrontations between police and members of the public. But we are then given just four short paragraphs (p. 280) on why these situations are less about race and more about situational dynamics. That is, racism can’t explain why cops shoot black people—the answer instead lies more in the particular dynamics of any given conflict situation. This is a provocative argument that deserves more attention. After all, the situational dynamics of a given encounter must matter in some way irrespective of race. It would be surprising if racism determined the outcome of every such encounter. But why can’t both contribute something? And, crucially, how might Collins’s influential micro-sociological framework of violence incorporate race into the situational perceptions that explain violence outcomes? This criticism is one that could be made of social interactionist explanations of violence generally. But the criticism applies more acutely when the object of explanation is outcomes of violence over time. In short, we are left wondering whether ‘‘emotional processes’’ in the way in which Collins defines them are actually doing the doing. Examples of this abound. Chapter Five argues that material interests can’t explain action—they are but post-hoc rationalizations of interaction ritual chains. It is followed by a chapter on ‘‘mood swings’’ in the context of the English Revolution and the assault on the U.S. Capitol in January 2021. Here, Collins is at his most engaging—especially when citing first-hand testimony and inferences 428 Reviews