TIPPING POINT REVOLUTIONS AND STATE BREAKDOWN REVOLUTIONS: WHY REVOLUTIONS SUCCEED OR FAIL

 

In the last few years, many people have come to believe they have a formula for overthrowing authoritarian governments and putting democracy in their place. The method is mass peaceful demonstrations, persisting until they draw huge support, both internally and internationally, intensifying as government atrocities while putting them down are publicized by the media. This was the model for the “color revolutions” (orange, pink, velvet, etc.) in the ex-Soviet bloc; for the Arab Spring of 2011 and its imitators; further back it has roots in the US civil rights movement. 

Such revolutions succeed or fail in varying degrees, as has been obvious in the aftermath of the different Arab Spring revolts. Why this is the case requires a more complicated analysis. The type of revolution consisting in the righteous mobilization of the people until the authoritarians crack and take flight may be called a tipping point revolution.  It contrasts with the state breakdown theory of revolution, formulated by historical sociologists Theda Skocpol, Jack Goldstone, Charles Tilly and others, to show the long-term roots of major revolutions such as the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russia Revolution of 1917, and that I used to predict the 1989-91 anti-Soviet revolution. Major revolutions are those that bring about big structural changes (the rise or fall of communism, the end of feudalism, etc.). I will argue that tipping point revolutions, without long-term basis in the structural factors that bring state breakdown, are only moderately successful at best; and they often fall short even of modest changes, devolving into destructive civil wars, or outright failure to change the regime at all.

Tipping Point Revolutions with Easy Success

Tipping points revolutions are not new. Some of the early ones were quick and virtually bloodless. For instance the February 1848 revolution in France: There had been agitation for six months to widen the very restrictive franchise for the token legislature. The government finally cracked down on the main form of mobilization-- a banqueting campaign in which prominent gentlemen met in dining rooms to proclaim speeches and drink toasts to revolutionary slogans. The ban provided a rallying point. The day of the banquet, a crowd gathered, despite 30,000 troops called out to enforce the ban. There were minor scuffles, but most soldiers stood around uneasily, unsure what to do, many of them sympathetic to the crowd. Next morning rumours swept through Paris that revolution was coming. Shops did not open, workers stayed home, servants became surly with their masters and mistresses. In the eerie atmosphere of near-deserted streets, trees were chopped down and cobble-stones dug up to make barricades.  Liberal members of the national legislature visited the king, demanding that the prime minister be replaced.  This modest step was easy; he was dismissed; but who would take his place? No one wanted to be prime minister; a succession of candidates wavered and declined, no one feeling confident of taking control. 

Mid-afternoon of the second day, just after the prime minister’s resignation was announced, a pumped-up crowd outside a government building was fired upon. The accidental discharge of a gun by a nervous soldier set off a contagious volley, killing 50. This panicky use of force did not deter the crowd, but emboldened it. During the night, the king offered to abdicate. But in favor of whom? Other royal relatives also declined. The king panicked and fled the palace, along with assorted duchesses; crowds were encroaching on the palace grounds, and now they invaded the royal chambers and even sat on the royal throne. In a holiday atmosphere, a Republic was announced, the provisional assembly set plans to reform itself through elections. 

In three days the revolution was accomplished. If we stop the clock here, the revolution was an easy success.  The People collectively had decided the regime must go, and in a matter of hours, it bowed to the pressure of that overwhelming public.  It was one of those moments that exemplify what Durkheim called collective consciousness at its most palpable. 

This moment of near-unanimity did not last. In the first weeks of enthusiasm, even the rich and the nobility-- who had just lost their monopoly of power-- made subscriptions for the poor and wounded; the conservative provinces rejoiced in the deeds of Paris. The honeymoon began to dissipate within three weeks. Conservative and radical factions struggled among the volunteer national guard, and began to lay up their own supplies of arms. Conservatives in the countryside and financiers in the city mobilized against the welfare-state policies of Paris.  Elections to a constitutional assembly, two months in, returned an array of conservatives and moderates; the socialists and liberals who led the revolution were reduced to a small minority, upheld only by radical crowds who invaded the assembly hall and shouted down opponents. In May, the national guard dispersed the mob and arrested radical leaders. By June there was a second revolt, this time confined to the working-class part of the city. The Assembly was united against the revolution; in fact they had provoked it by abolishing the public workshops set up for unemployed workers. This time the army kept its discipline. The emotional mood had switched directions. The provinces of France now had their own collective consciousness, an outpouring of volunteers rushing to Paris by train to battle the revolutionaries. Within five days, the June revolution was over; this time with bloody fighting, ten thousand killed and wounded, and more executed afterwards or sent to prison colonies.

The tipping point mechanism did not tip this time; instead of everyone going over to the victorious side (thereby ensuring its victory),  the conflict fractured into two opposing camps. Instead of one revolutionary collective consciousness sweeping up everyone, it split into rival identities, each with its own solidarity, its own emotional energy and moral righteousness. Since the opposing forces, both strongly mobilized, were unevenly matched, the result was a bloody struggle, and then destruction of the weaker side. In the following months, the mood flowed increasingly conservative. Elections in December brought in a huge majority for a President-- Napoleon’s nephew, symbol of a idealized authoritarian regime of the past-- who eventually overturned the democratic reforms and made himself emperor. The revolutionary surge had lasted just four months.

Tipping Point Revolutions that Fail

The sequence of revolts in 1848 France shows both the tipping point mechanism at its strongest, and the failure not so far downstream to bring about structural change. Modern history is full of failed revolutions, and continues to be right up through the latest news. I will cite one example of a tipping point revolution that failed entirely, not even taking power briefly. The democracy movement in China centered on protestors occupying Tiananmen Square in Beijing, lasting seven weeks from mid-April to early June 1989. Until the last two weeks, the authorities did not crack down; local police acted unsure, just like French troops in February 1848; some even displayed sympathy with the demonstrators. 

The numbers of protestors surged and declined several times. Initially, students from the prestigious Beijing universities (where the Red Guards movement had been launched 20 years earlier) set up a vigil in Tiananmen Square to mourn the death of a reform-oriented Communist leader. This was China’s center of public attention, in front of the old Imperial Palace, the place for official rituals, and thus a target for impromptu counter-rituals.   Beginning with a few thousand students on April 17, the crowd fell to a few hundred by the fourth day, but revived after a skirmish with police as militants took their protest to the gate of the nearby government compound where the political elite lived. Injuries were slight and no arrests were made, but indignation over police brutality renewed the movement, which grew to 100,000-200,000 for the state funeral on day 5. Militants hijacked the ritual by kneeling on the steps of the ceremonial hall flanking Tiananmen Square, in the style of traditional supplicants to the emperor. The same day rioting broke out in other cities around China, including arson attacks, with casualties on both sides. Four days later (day 10) the government newspaper officially condemned the movement-- the first time it had been portrayed negatively; next day 50-100,000 Beijing students responded, breaking through police lines to reoccupy the Square. So far counter-escalation favored the protestors.

The government now switched to a policy of conciliation and negotiation. This brought a 2-weeks lull; by May 4 (day 18) most students had returned to class.  On May 13 (day 28), the remaining militants launched a new tactic: a hunger strike, initially recruiting 300; over the next 2 days it recaptured public attention, and grew to 3000 hunger strikers. Big crowds, growing to 300,000, now flocked to the Square to view and support them. The militants had another ritual weapon: the arrival on May 15 of Soviet leader Gorbachev for a state visit, then at the height of his fame as a Communist reformer. The official welcome had to be moved to the airport, but the state meeting in the ceremonial hall flanking Tiananmen was marred by the noisy demonstration outside. On May 17, as Gorbachev left, over one million Beijing residents from all social classes marched to support the hunger strikers. The militants had captured the attention center of the ceremonial gathering; the bandwagon was building to a peak. Visitors to Tiananmen were generally organized by work units, who provided transportation and sometimes even paid the marchers. A logistics structure was created to fund the food and shelter for those who occupied the Square. The organizational base of the Communist regime, at least in the capital, was tipping towards revolution. Around the country, too, there were supporting demonstrations in 400 cities. Local governments were indecisive; some Communist Party committees openly endorsed the movement; some authorities provided free transportation by train for hundred of thousands of students to travel to Beijing to join in.

The tipping point did not tip. The Communist elite met outside the city in a showdown among themselves. A collective decision was made; a few dissenters, including some army generals, were removed and arrested.  On May 19, martial law was declared. Military forces were called from distant regions, lacking ties to Beijing demonstrators. The next four days were a showdown in the streets; crowds of residents, especially workers, blocked the army convoys; soldiers rode in open trucks, unarmed-- the regime still trying to use as little force as possible, and also distrustful of giving out ammunition-- and often were overwhelmed by residents. Crowds used a mixture of persuasion and food offerings-- army logistics having broken down by the unreliability of passage through the streets-- and sometimes force, stoning and beating isolated soldiers. On May 24, the regime pulled back the troops to bases outside the city. But it did not give up. The most reliable army units were moved to the front, some tasked with watching for defections among less reliable units. In another week strong forces had been assembled in the center of Beijing.

Momentum was swinging back the other way. Student protestors in the Square increasingly divided between moderates and militants; by the time the order to clear the Square was given for June 3, the number occupying was down to 4000. There was one last surge of violence-- not in Tiananmen Square itself, although the name became so famous that most outsiders think there was a massacre there-- but in the streets as residents attempted to block the army's movement once again. Crowds fought with stones and gasoline bombs, burning army vehicles and, by some reports, the soldiers inside. In this emotional atmosphere, as both sides spread stories of the other’s atrocities,   something on the order of 50 soldiers and police were killed, and 400-800 civilians (estimates varying widely). Some soldiers took revenge for prior attacks by firing at fleeing opponents and beating those they caught. In Tiananmen Square, the early morning of June 4, the dwindling militants were allowed to march out through the encircling troops.

             

International protest and domestic horror were to no avail; a sufficiently adamant and organizationally coherent regime easily imposed its superior force. Outside Beijing, protests continued for several days in other cities; hundreds more were killed. Organizational discipline was reestablished by a purge; over the following year, CCP members who had sympathized with the revolt were arrested, jailed, and sent to labor camps. Dissident workers were often executed; students got off easier, as members of the elite. Freedom of the media, which had been loosend during the reform period of 1980s, and briefly flourished during the height of the democracy protests in early May, was now replaced by strict control.  Economic reforms, although briefly questioned in the aftermath of 1989, resumed but political reforms were rescinded.  A failed tipping point revolution not only fails to meet its goals; it reinforces authoritarianism.

If the Chinese government had the power to crack down by sending out its security agents and arresting dissidents all over the country, why didn't they do so earlier, instead of waiting until Tiananmen Square was cleared?  Because this was the center of the tipping-point mechanism. As long as the rebellious assembly went on, tension existed as to which way the regime would go. If it couldn't meet this challenge, the regime would be deserted. This was in question as long as all eyes were on Tiananmen. Once attention was broken up, all those security agents could fan out around the country, picking off suspects one by one, ultimately arresting tens of thousands. That is why centralized and decentralized forms of rebellion are so different: centralized rebellions potentially very short and sudden; decentralized ones long, grinding and much more destructive. 

We like to believe that any government that uses force against its own citizens is so marred by the atrocity that it loses all legitimacy. Yet the 1990s and the early 2000s were a time of increasing Chinese prestige. The market version of communist political control became a great economic success; international economic ties expanded and exacted no penalty for the deaths in June 1989; domestically Chinese poured their energies into economic opportunities. Protest movements revived within a decade, but the regime has been quick to clamp down on them.  Even the new means of mobilization through the internet has proven to be vulnerable to a resolute authoritarian apparatus, which monitors activists to head off any possible Tiananmen-style assemblies before they start.

The failure of the Chinese democracy movement, both in 1989 and since, tells another sociological lesson. An authoritarian regime that is aware of the tipping point mechanism need not give in to it; it can keep momentum on its own side by making sure no bandwagon gets going among the opposition. Such a regime can be accused of moral violations and even atrocities, but moral condemnation without a successful mobilization is ineffective. It is when one’s movement is growing, seemingly expanding its collective consciousness to include virtually everyone and emotionally overwhelm their opponents, that righteous horror over atrocities is so arousing. Without this, protests remain sporadic, localized and ephemeral at best. The modest emotional energy of the protest movement is no rushing tide; and as this goes on for years, the emotional mood surrounding such a regime remains stable-- the most important quality of “legitimacy”. 

A Contested Tipping Point: The Egyptian Revolution

Egypt in January-February 2011, the most famous of the Arab Spring revolutions, fits most closely to the model of 1848 France. Egypt took longer to build up to the tipping point-- 18 days instead of 3; and there were more casualties in the initial phase---  400 killed and 6000 wounded (compared to 50 killed in February 1848) because there was more struggle before the tipping point was reached.  Already from day 7, troops sent to guard Tahrir Square in Cairo declared themselves neutral, and most of the protestors’ causalities came from attacks by unofficial government militias or thugs. By day 16, police who killed demonstrators were arrested, and the dictator Mubarak offered concessions, which were rejected as unacceptable. On the last day of the 18-day revolution, everyone had deserted  Mubarak and swung over to the bandwagon, including his own former base of support, the military. This continuity is one reason why the aftermath did not prove so revolutionary.

Again, honeymoon did not last long.  By day 43, women who assembled in Tahrir Square were heckled and threatened, and Muslim/Christian violence broke out in Cairo. Tahrir Square continued to be used as a symbolic rallying point, but largely as a scene of clashes between opposing camps. Structural reforms have not gone very deep. The Islamist movement elected in the popular vote relegated to a minority the secularists and liberals who had been most active in the revolution. President Morsi bears some resemblance to Louis Bonaparte, who rose to power on the reputation of an ancestral movement-- both had a record of opposition to the regime, but were ambiguous about their own democratic credentials. The analogy portends a reactionary outcome to a liberating revolution. 

Bottom line: tipping point revolutions are too superficial to make deep structural changes.  What does?

 

State Breakdown Revolutions

Three ingredients must come together to produce a state-breakdown revolution.

(1)  Fiscal crisis/ paralysis of state organization. The state runs out of money, is crushed by debts, or otherwise is so burdened that it cannot pay its own officials. This often happens through the expense of past wars or huge costs of current war, especially if one is losing. The crisis is deep and structural because it cannot be evaded; it is not a matter of ideology, and whoever takes over responsibility for running the government faces the same problem. When the crisis grows serious, the army, police and officials no longer can enforce order because they themselves are disaffected.

This was the route to the 1789 French Revolution; the 1640 English Revolution; the 1917 Russian Revolution; and the 1853-68 Japanese revolution (which goes under the name of the Meiji Restoration). The 1989-91 anti-Soviet revolution similarly began with struggles to reform the Soviet budget, overburdened by military costs of the Cold War arms race. 

(2) Elite deadlock between state faction and economic privilege faction. The fiscal crisis cannot be resolved because the most powerful and privileged groups are split. Those who benefit economically from the regime resist paying for it (whether these are landowners, financiers, or even a socialist military-industrial complex); reformers are those who are directly responsible for keeping the state running. The split is deep and structural, since it does not depend on ideological preferences; whoever takes command, whatever their ideas, must deal with the reality of organizational paralysis. We are not dealing here with conflict between parties in the public sphere or the legislature; such partisan squabbling is common, and it may also exist at the same time as a state crisis. Deadlock between the top elites is far more serious, because it stymies the two most powerful forces, the economic elite and the ruling officials.

(3) Mass mobilization of dissidents. This factor is last in causal order; it becomes important after state crisis and elite deadlock weaken the enforcement power of the regime. This power vacuum provides an opportunity for movements of the public to claim a solution. The ideology of the revolutionaries is often misleading; it may have nothing to do with the causes of the fiscal crisis itself (e.g. claiming the issue is one of political reform, democratic representation, or even returning to some earlier religious or traditional image of utopia). The importance of ideology is mostly tactical, as an emotion-focusing device for group action. And in fact, after taking state power, revolutionary movements often take actions  contrary to their ideology (the early Bolshevik policies on land reform, for instance; or the Japanese revolutionary shifts between anti-western antipathy and pro-western imitation). The important thing is that the revolutionary movement is radical enough to attack the fiscal (and typically military) problems, to reorganize resources so that the state itself becomes well-funded. This solves the structural crisis and ends state breakdown, enabling the state to go on with other reforms.  That is why state breakdown revolutions are able to make deep changes in institutions: in short, why they become “historic” revolutions.

 

Reconciling the Two Theories

Tipping point revolutions are far more common than state breakdown revolutions. The two mechanisms sometimes coincide; tipping points may occur in the sequence of a state breakdown, as the third factor, mass mobilization, comes into play. In 1789, once the fiscal crisis and elite deadlock resulted in calling the Estates General, crowd dynamics led to tipping points that are celebrated as the glory days of the French revolution. In 1917 Russia, the initial collapse of the government in February was a crowd-driven tipping point, with a series of abdications reminiscent of France in February 1848; what made this a deep structural revolution was the fiscal crisis of war debts, pressure to continue the war from the Allies who held Russian debt, and eventually a second tipping point in November in favor of the Soviets. But state breakdown revolutions can happen without these kinds of crowd-centered tipping points: the 1640 English Revolution (where fighting went on through 1648); the Chinese revolution stretching from 1911 to 1949; the Japanese revolution of 1853-68.  Conversely, tipping point revolutions often fail in the absence of state fiscal crisis and elite deadlock; an example is the 1905 Russian Revolution, which had months of widespread enthusiasm for reform during the opportunity provided by defeat in the Japanese war, but nevertheless ended with the government forcefully putting down the revolution.

A tipping point mechanism, by itself, is a version of mass mobilization which is the final ingredient of a state paralysis revolution. But mass mobilization also has a larger structural basis: resources such as transportation and communication networks that facilitate organizing social movements-- sometimes in the form of revolutionary armies-- to contend for control of the state. If such mobilization concentrates in a capital city, it may generate a tipping point situation.  But also such mobilization can take place throughout the countryside; in which case the revolution takes more the form of a civil war.

 

Tipping Point Revolutions and Imitative Revolutions

  

At times, waves of revolution spread from one state to another; the success of one igniting enthusiasm for another. It is the mass mobilization of the tipping point, the huge crowds and the widespread feeling of solidarity in the pro-revolutionary majority, that encourages imitations. We can see this because some of the famous ignition-revolutions were not very effective in making changes, but they were still imitated. One such wave was in 1848, spreading from  Switzerland and Sicily to the fragmented states of Italy, and most spectacularly to France. Soon after news propagated of events in Paris, Europe’s most famous city, crowds demanded constitutional reforms in Vienna, Berlin, and most of the German states and in the ethnic regions of the Austrian Empire. Some rulers temporarily fled or made concessions; troops mutinied; parliaments and revolutionary assemblies met. All of these were put down within a year and a half. Some were extirpated by the intervention of outside troops, as conservative rulers supported each other in regaining control. Of these revolutions, hardly any had a permanent effect.

The wave of Arab Spring revolts began with a successful tipping point revolution in Tunisia, imitated with temporary success in Egypt; but failed in Bahrain; had little effect on an ongoing civil war in Yemen; led to a full-scale military conflict in Libya that was won by the rebels only through massive outside military intervention with airpower; in Syria generated a prolonged and extremely destructive civil war sustained by outside military aid to all factions. The lesson is that if tipping point revolutions themselves are not very decisive for structural change, further attempts to imitate tipping points in other countries have even less to go on. Regimes may or may not be removed but the downstream situation does not look very different, although there may be a prolonged period of contention amounting to a failed state.

The major exception would appear to be the wave of imitative revolts from 1989-91, as the Soviet bloc fell apart. The states of eastern Europe overthrew their communist regimes one after another; some with relatively easy tipping point revolutions as in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and East Germany, and bloodier battles in Romania and eventually Yugoslavia. A second round of revolts began in 1991 as the USSR disintegrated into its component ethnic states. Here was indeed a structural change, dismantling communist political forms and replacing them with versions of democracy (some continuing control by ex-communist elites), and shifting the property system to capitalism. But this series of revolutions were not mere tipping points alone; they were all effects of a deep structural crisis in the lynch-pin of the system, the Soviet empire, that underwent a state breakdown revolution. Revolts can spread by imitation; but what happens to them depends on what kinds of structural conflicts are beneath the surface.

 

The Continuum of Revolutionary Effects, from Superficial to Deep

If we use the term “revolution” loosely to mean any change in government which is illegal-- outside the procedures provided by the regime itself-- there are many kinds of revolutions. They range from those with no structural effects at all, through those which change the deepest economic, political, and cultural institutions.

Coup d’etat is the most superficial; there is no popular mobilization, only a small group of conspirators inside the circles of power, or in the military, who replace one ruler with another. Often there is not even the pretence of structural change or appeal to the popular will.

Tipping point revolutions are more ambitious; emotional crowds who are at the center of the mechanism for transferring power are enthusiastic for grand if often vague ideological slogans. But such revolts often fail, if the government is not itself paralysed by a structural crisis. When tipping points succeed, the new regime often has only ephemeral support, and may peter out in internal quarrels, civil war, or reactionary restoration.

State breakdown revolutions have a less ephemeral quality. The state cannot come back into equilibrium until its own organizational problem is solved; and since this means its fiscal, military, and administrative basis, reforms must go deep into the main power-holding institutions. Whether or not the same ideological brand of revolutionaries continues in office, these structural changes lay down a new order that tends to persist-- at least until another deep crisis comes along.

 

Today: the Era of Tipping Point Revolutions

After the fall of the Soviet Union and its empire, there have been many repetitions of tipping point revolutions (Ukraine 2004, Georgia 2003, Kyrgyzstan 2005, Serbia 2000) mixed with personal power-grabs that are little more than coups masked as popular revolutions. The Arab Spring revolts have relied heavily on the tipping point mechanism. Where the government has had a strong faction of popular support, tipping point attempts have brought no easy transition; the result has been full-scale civil war (Syria), or defeat of the revolutionary mobilization by a mass counter-mobilization (the Green uprising in Iran 2009). The popularity of tipping-point revolts, as in the anti-Islamist uprisings in Turkey and Egypt, appear to have all the weaknesses of their genre.

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References

Cambridge Modern History, Vols. 4 and 11.  1907-1909.

Collins, Randall. 1999. “Maturation of the State-Centered Theory of Revolution and Ideology;” “The Geopolitical Basis of Revolution: the Prediction of the Soviet Collapse.” chapters 1 and 2 in  Macro-History: Essays in Sociology of the Long Run. Stanford Univ. Press.

Collins, Randall. 2012.  “Time-Bubbles of Nationalism.”  Nations and Nationalism  18: 383-397.

Goldstone, Jack. 1991. Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. Univ. of California Press.

Harris, Kevan. 2012. “The brokered exuberance of the middle class: an ethnographic analysis of Iran’s 2009 Green Movement.” Mobilization 17: 435-455.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1987 [1852]. Recollections of the French Revolution of 1848. Transaction Publishers.

Weyland, Kurt. 2009. “The diffusion of revolution: ‘1848’ in Europe and Latin America.” International Organization 63: 391-423.

Zhao, Dingxin. 2001.  The Power of Tiananmen. University of Chicago Press.

CLUES TO MASS RAMPAGE KILLERS: DEEP BACKSTAGE, HIDDEN ARSENAL, CLANDESTINE EXCITEMENT

This article can now be found at the following link:

 http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11873-014-0250-2


For a follow-up post, see:   
SANDY HOOK SCHOOL SHOOTINGS: LESSONS FOR GUN-OWNING PARENTS

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DRUG BUSINESS IS NOT THE KEY TO GANGS AND ORGANIZED CRIME: WITH A PROGNOSIS FOR THE MEXICAN CARTEL WARS

It has become conventional to refer to all types of gangs and organized crime as if they were synonymous with the illegal drug business. Popular terms like "drug gangs" and "narco-cartels" obscure a fundamental point: crime organizations are political organizations. They are rivals to the legitimate state, and their fundamental asset is their capacity for wielding violence. Their rise and fall, and the amount and kind of violence they perform is explainable by political sociology.

It is easy to demonstrate that drug business is not central, since most crime organizations historically have had little to do with it.

The Mafia in the U.S., in its most flourishing period between 1930 and 1980, was primarily involved in extortion/protection rackets. It drew most of its income and spent most of its time on rake-offs from illegal gambling, prostitution, loan-sharking, debt-collecting, as well as extortion of legal business such as construction, waste collection, wholesale food markets, restaurants, and corruption of labor unions and local government. One of the five families of the New York Mafia, the Lucchese Family, was a major conduit of heroin smuggling and wholesaling in the 1940s-60s. But this was a small part of the overall operation; the prosperity of the Mafia did not rise or fall with the heroin business, and the occasional power struggles in the five families were not over the drug business. One might argue, analogously, that alcohol prohibition during the 1920s was the stimulus to the formation of the Mafia; but Mafia organization dates from 1931 when Lucky Luciano set up the Commission, and its period of greatest dominance was in the 40 years after the end of Prohibition.

The Mafia families in Sicily, from their reestablishment after the fall of the Fascist regime in World War II through their demise in the 1990s, were involved in what Diego Gambetta [1993] calls the business of protection. In the absence of government regulation and in at atmosphere of pervasive distrust, all economic transactions needed a protector or guarantor, and this was provided by traditional secret societies of "men of honor" who received payoffs in return. The scope of businesses under Mafia protection was even wider than in the U.S., and consisted more of legal activities than illegal ones-- gambling was not prominent in Sicily, though an illegal source of income was smuggling cigarettes to avoid taxation, and turfs for pickpocket gangs were enforced in Palermo. Sicilian Mafia families did become important pipelines for heroin processing and smuggling from the Middle-East across the Atlantic. But this was not the key to the Sicilian Mafias; they existed long before the heroin trade, and their protection business remained centered on the local economy.

The Russian crime organizations of the 1990s arose during the period of privatizing the Soviet economy. Their main focus was selling protection/extortion to licit businesses, ranging from small street market vendors to commercial and industrial companies, and they had a large role in taking over former state enterprises. The biggest criminal protection businesses amalgamated with the crumbling government bureaucracy and became legitimate as the economic "oligarchs". By the early 2000s, Russian crime-orgs had ploughed back so much of their illegal gains into the above-ground economy that they abandoned illegal force and became a major part of normal business. Even during their outlaw period of the mid-1990s-- when they were most violent-- they were relatively little involved in running illicit businesses such as drugs. Why focus on drugs when you can take over oil and gas?

The Japanese Yakuza originated historically in gangs allocating stalls in outdoor markets. During the US occupation after WWII, Yakuza families expanded to provide ordinary consumer goods on a black market-- i.e. making scarce goods available outside of government rationing. Since that time, Yakuza activities have resembled those of the NY Mafia, including strong-arm debt collecting, labor disciplining for manufacturers, and protecting illicit businesses such as strip clubs and prostitution. Drugs were at most a minor part of their activities.

Similarly with smaller crime organizations: historically most gangs concentrated on other activities than drugs; even today, when many street gangs are involved in some aspect of drug distribution, for most gangs it is not their central activity. For instance, some motorcycle gangs (i.e. white gang members) are involved in distributing methamphetamine, but the primary purpose of these gangs is showing off and fighting against rival motorcycle gangs. Local gangs are sociable groups in it for action and fun, but they have a political aspect because they organize violence to back each other up-- and with organized violence, we enter the realm of politics and the state.

There are several kinds of crime organizations, and their differences are explainable by their politics. This means their internal politics-- how they control violence inside their own ranks-- and their external geopolitics-- how they deal with rival organizations. Drug business affects the structure and violence of crime-orgs only as it feeds into their politics.

What makes some gangs small, while others grow into large but loose alliances, and a few become underground governments? What makes some crime-orgs centralized and hierarchic, while others are localized and egalitarian? Why do some engage in lengthy wars of expansion and extermination, while others confine themselves to local crime and skirmishing at the borders of their turf, and still others-- the most successful ones-- make their violence terrifying but limited and stealthy? Let us compare.


Types of Crime Organizations:

Mafia-style syndicates -- protection/extortion, govt. corruption;
underground govt.
New York, Sicily, Russia, other ex-Soviet republics, Japanese Yakuza,
Chinese Triads
Local neighborhood turf gangs (10-20-50-100 members)

Symbol-based alliances
Crips (30,000) , Bloods (15,000),
Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13 & other factions: 50,000 in US )
Multi-gang alliances with political / religious ideologies
People Nation (comprised of Blackstones, Vice Lords, Latin Kings, Bloods)
Folk Nation (comprised of Gangster Disciples, Dieciocho, Hoover Crips)

Large Corporate Gangs ( Chicago) – hierarchic, mainly drug business
Blackstones / Black P. Stone Nation (60,000), Vice Lords (60,000)
Latin Kings (30-45,000)


Mafia-style syndicates

After a crime war among rival Italian, Irish, and Jewish gangs in the New York area, the victorious alliance in 1931 set up a Commission consisting of the heads of five Mafia families, with all other crime families around the USA under the jurisdiction of the one of the New York families. It was called the Peace Commission because its aim was to prevent civil wars. It kept a low profile. All killings inside the Mafia had to be authorized by the Commission; if not, the perpetrator himself would be killed. Killing policemen and government officials was strictly prohibited, and anyone found out plotting such a killing was reported to the Commission and executed. The policy of the Commission was to corrupt local government by reaching accommodation, not to fight with it and draw down the force of the Federal government. Executions were ordered as a matter of organizational discipline, targeting specific individuals as a warning to the rest to stay in line. This was strictly Mafia business; women and personal relatives of those punished were to be left alone and even supported after their man was dead. The aim was to cut off chains of revenge killings by imposing a political solution. And it was all done through layers of secrecy: the technique of murder was not a risky gunfight but a stealthy shot at point-blank range or a bomb under foot, usually set up by betrayal of one's closest friends.

The system worked but not perfectly. Occasionally aging Mafia chiefs were killed or forced out by the younger generation, and some families had brief civil wars. The Commission usually legitimated the outcomes of these wars and carried on. It was able to rule with a high degree of secrecy for 30 years, with near immunity from the corrupt New York government. Publicity began to expose the Mafia in the 1960s, and in the 1980s and 90s Federal prosecutors using RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization) law reduced the Mafia to a trivial presence in a few American cities.

The Yakuza also operated more with a show of toughness than widespread use of violence. There were some periods of war between rival organizations, but for the most part the Yakuza stabilized in separate territories. They achieved a modus vivendi with Japanese government officials, and even operated openly out of offices with their names on it. Unlike the US, where Federal law enforcement was a counterpoise to corrupt state government, the Japanese national government monopolized police functions and rarely made much effort to eliminate organized crime, probably because of its long-standing alliance with the ruling party against leftist labor organizations.

Russian crime orgs in the 1990s began with a large number of small gangs, with shoot-outs peaking during 1993-95. They never achieved a centralized governing body like the New York Mafia. But they evolved a relatively peaceful (if threatening) technique of negotiating rival claims over who was protecting which business; as the gangs winnowed down to an oligopoly, their above-ground organization increased their staff of business and negotiation specialists, and eventually reduced their reliance on force as they acquired legitimate property and made alliances with government officials. Here too the path to success was by limiting violence and substituting political arrangements. The Russian crime organizations were the world's most successful Mafia. They had unusual opportunities-- the chance to take over state properties during a time when socialism was privatizing-- and relatively weak opposition-- a crumbling government bureaucracy without a legal tradition setting boundaries between crime and the new capitalist system. Ordinarily, big crime-orgs expose themselves to government attack because their sheer size becomes hard to keep under cover; in the case of the ex-Soviet Union (here we should include most of the successor states besides Russia), they were able to move above ground and become the new Establishment.

In contrast to these successful Mafias, the Sicilian Mafia fought a series of bloody civil wars among themselves in the early 1960s, and again in the late 1970s-1980s, killing up to 1000 Mafia members including many bosses. There were over 100 separate Mafia families, and they were never able to achieve stable alliances. Under the advice of lordly American mafiosi visiting in the late 1950s, at attempt was made to set up a Peace Commission, but it broke down immediately when it was unable to resolve disputes. A split in the Commission over money owed in a heroin smuggling case set off the first Mafia War. This was a political war, not a drug war; the issue was the suspicion that the Commission was just a means for one faction to impose its domination over the others. (A similar issue would break up the Crips, when that attempt at a black-unity gang alliance fell apart in accusations of a power grab.)

Spiraling Mafia violence attracted government attention from the mainland; when investigating officials were assassinated (chiefly by bombs in roadways and cars), the Italian government escalated its crackdown, with mass arrests and maxi-trials. The Sicilian mafias fought not only with each other but engaged in war with the Italian government, probably because they were made arrogant by long-standing local political control and failure of national state penetration into Sicily. But the Italian government mobilized military and police forces far exceeding the strength of the divided Sicilian groups; mafiosi under death threat from rivals began to break their oaths of silence and provide evidence. By the end of the 1990s, the Sicilian mafia was largely destroyed; on the mainland, it was displaced by Calabrian and Neapolitan crime orgs. Fighting against the government proved to be a fatal mistake. As the New York Mafia and the Russian crime-orgs demonstrate, the most successful do best by corrupting the state rather than fighting with it.

Local neighborhood turf gangs

Turn now to the other end of the scale. Gangs are relatively small groups, controlling a few blocks of a city. Structures vary; some have elected leaders, others are informal. Their origins are in children's play groups, dedicated to having fun and getting into mischief. They may engage in crimes, but this is not necessarily an organized activity of the group. The clubhouse or hangout is a place where gang members can form ad hoc crews to carry out car thefts, burglaries, robberies, or extortions; i.e. the gang is more of an umbrella under which its members come together to commit their own crimes. Some gangs claim a percentage of their criminal profits, others collect dues, chiefly for the clubhouse and for parties. Neighborhood gangs are often like social clubs, fraternities for poor people, who support themselves to an extent with crime.

The identity of the gang is based on its violence, or more precisely, ostentatious bluster and threat. Elijah Anderson argues that the code of the street in the black inner-city is mainly projecting a tough demeanor; when this is done correctly, it establishes membership and deters violence. But the gang has to demonstrate some violence, both in initiation fights, and in threats against rivals who enter their territory, and occasional incursions into enemy territories. Gang "rumbles" existed since violent teen-age gangs appeared in the 1950s, first with Puerto Rican gangs in New York City. The early gangs were not fighting over drug business, nor even protection rackets; they existed largely for the prestige of fighting, and their main concern was "action".

Since the 1970s and 80s, it has become common for local street gangs to be connected with the drug business, usually at the low retail end, and violence can take place over prime vending locations. But this is not a necessary gang activity; gangs have existed without the drug business, either as an umbrella for crime crews, or just for sociability and the excitement of fighting. In the 1950s, gangs were often consumers of heroin, but not dealers. It is still the case now, when gangs sell drugs, either as a collective enterprise or as individuals protected by the gang, that gang members consume much of the drugs themselves; such gangs do not derive much profit from the drug business. Gangs with a lavish, hedonistic lifestyle accumulate very little wealth from crime-- including non-drug crimes. Here is another way gangs differ from successful Mafias, which are much more disciplined in their lifestyle. The most self-disciplined of all were the Russian crime-orgs, which reinvested their income in buying up legitimate businesses, and eventually raised themselves out of the crime world.

Symbol-based Alliances and Multi-gang Alliances: Diplomatic Peace Treaties

These are loose, horizontal alliances between gangs who adopt the same symbols. Symbol-based gangs, with their distinctive gang colors and signs (hand gestures, ways of strutting, etc.) are diplomatic peace treaties among those who belong. Instead of every local gang being the enemy of every other, half the gangs they encounter may be their allies. It is suggestive that the cities with the highest homicide rates--- Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia-- have no little structure beyond small gangs fighting each other every few blocks.

The Crips were created in Los Angeles in the early 1970s, during the Civil Rights movement, in an attempt to stop fighting among Black gangs and concentrate on their racial enemy-- hypothetically whites, but in practice Hispanic gangs. The Crips alliance did not hold together, and a split produced the Bloods, a rival gang who spend their time chiefly in hostility to the Crips, thus producing a grand division between two different segments of black gangs. In areas where there are only Crips and no Bloods, the alliance does not work, since its outside enemy does not exist; in these places Crips divide into local factions who fight each other. As is typical of gangs, most violence is inside their own ethnic group; black gangs usually fight each other, Hispanic gangs are against each other, with white gangs in yet a third arena (such as rivalries between motorcycle gangs). Racial segregation of violence in the gang world is evidence that their violence is largely honorific; despite occasional ideological claims of rebellion against dominant white society, gang violence is a local game in a racial arena, a way of claiming status simply by being in the action. * Compared to Mafias, who are after real power and use violence strategically to uphold their organization, gang alliances and their violence are largely adolescent-style bravado.

* Crips-vs-Bloods conflict was called off during the major race riot in Los Angeles in 1992, following the Rodney King verdict. For the moment, racial alliance was reestablished while there was open violence against whites and Korean store-owners.

Symbol-based alliances have no hierarchy. There is no national leader of the Crips or the Bloods. They are umbrellas joining together all those who display the same symbolism. They are simply dividing lines, telling you who to fight, and who not to fight. The component gangs inside these alliances may engage in various crimes, including the drug business. But the symbolic alliance per se does not engage in the drug business, or any other collective activities. An analogy in political history would be wars between Catholics and Protestants, with further subdivisions of radical Protestants (Calvinists, Evangelicals) against conservative Protestant churches (Anglicans or Lutherans).

A stronger form of alliance has been attempted in multi-gang alliances such as the People Nation (comprised of Blackstones, Vice Lords, Latin Kings, Bloods) and the Folk Nation (comprised of Gangster Disciples, Hoover Crips, Dieciocho). These mega-alliances brought together already large gang structures, and were created by gang leaders in prisons-- by imitation one right after the other in November 1978. These too were offshoots of the Civil Rights movement; they had explicit political or sometimes religious ideologies, keeping the peace among gangs to concentrate against white society. But criminal gangs are not well equipped to contest political power on the state level, and in practice the People Nation and Folk Nation operated as diplomatic alliances grouping many of the big gangs into two blocs, fighting each other. For the most part these mega-gangs just concentrated on displaying their identities by flashing symbols, and performed no coordinated action; leaders like Larry Hoover (who held the honorific title of Chairman) were figures of prestige rather than authorities giving orders.

Some mega-gangs pushed further. The Latin Kings began as an organization of Puerto Rican gangs in Chicago, with a breakaway eventually transferring its center to New York. The Latin Kings attempted an political hierarchy, with top leaders adopting titles like the Inca-- identifying with non-Western symbols, much as some of the big Chicago gangs identified with Islam. In the Puerto Rican neighbourhoods of New York, Latin Kings ventured above ground, taking part in Puerto Rican nationalist rallies and political movements. Their move into legitimate politics was not successful, since it did not deter government officials from arrest sweeps and RICO prosecutions. This points up an important difference between even very large gang alliances and the various Mafias: Mafias prospered where they were able to corrupt government, acting surreptitiously and keeping their identity secret; whereas all of the American-style gang alliances have been very ostentatious, flaunting their colors and gang signs in public. This left them in no position to corrupt the government secretly; and it made them easy to identify when the government cracked down.

Multi-gang alliances were not organizational bases of the drug business. Their members might be in the drug business, but the mega-gang gave them little help in this respect. In New York in the 1990s, the Latin Kings became antagonistic to Dominican drug wholesalers who supplied Puerto Rican street dealers. With their increased political consciousness, the leaders of the Latin Kings recognized that the Dominican wholesalers were franchising out drug sales to another ethnic group, who received the smallest share of profits, and took the greatest risk of street violence and arrest. In effect, the Dominican dealers were capitalists exploiting Puerto Rican labor. The ideology of the Latin Kings shows that a large, politically conscious crime-org may actually oppose the drug business.

As Naylor [2004] has pointed out, wholesale production and distribution of illegal drugs is most effective when it is decentralized. It is prudent to employ isolated individuals or small groups, who have little information about supply chains as a whole. An expectable percentage of smugglers are arrested and their drugs confiscated; a wholesaler needs to be decentralized, especially on both sides of an international border crossing. Similarly with the manufacture of raw materials into drugs such as heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine: economies of scale are not desirable, due to the danger of detection and exploitation (either by the government or by rival crime organizations); many decentralized plants are better than a few large ones. Ethnic networks are often useful, since they provide a degree of cultural filtering to provide trustworthy connections, but to speak of a Dominican mafia or cartel would be misleading: its effectiveness is in staying decentralized. It is not surprising that a big, unusually centralized (and out-front) organization like the Latin Kings, would be in low-end drug retailing, and exploited by a decentralized (and much more secretive) network of wholesalers (who are unified only by being Dominican).

Large Corporate Hierarchical Gangs: an exception, but temporary

For a time during the 1960s through the 1990s, large hierarchic gangs built up, chiefly in Chicago. Among the most famous were the Blackstones (with various name changes) and the Vice Lords, each reaching 60,000 members. As we know from Venkatesh, who penetrated the middle levels of the organization, there was an unusual amount of top-down control: low-level members were paid salaries, assigned regular hours, and inspected by managers. Earnings went upwards through middle ranks to the top of the hierarchy, a board of directors who made considerable incomes and held property through their mothers or families. These corporate gangs were to a large extent based on the drug business, not only staking out particular territories (typically staircases in the public housing projects) but also controlling access to wholesalers. It wasn't all drugs; the corporate gang collected protection/extortion money, not only from illicit businesses such as prostitution but also from "gray-market" or "off the books" businesses inside gang turf, such as persons who operated hair salons, grocery stores, or other businesses without getting licenses from the city. It would be misleading to think of the corporate gang as a drug business that operated protection rackets on the side; the key is having sufficient political power to control a territory. If it has this power, it can turn it to any criminal use, including the drug business; but those are outcomes of the criminal organization, not determinants of it.

The Chicago corporate gangs are the major exception to my argument: crime organizations that are indeed centrally based on the drug business. But the big Chicago gangs were largely destroyed in the 1990s; not by eradicating the drug business, but by attacking the political vulnerabilities of the crime-org and its territorial base. Federal prosecutors used RICO indictments pioneered against the Mafia. Especially fatal was the city of Chicago tearing down the massive pubic housing projects in the black neighbourhood-- huge buildings that were effectively no-man's-land where the police would not venture. It was like a real-life experiment, changing the crucial variable. Once their protected turf was gone, the big corporate gangs broke up. Today the old gang names remain, but without economic clout nor violent backup from the hierarchy; Gangster Disciples and others mingle on the streets, warily negotiating mutual threats on the level of small groups. [see forthcoming analysis by Joe Krupnick and Chris Winship]

The Mexican Cartels: Theory and Predictions

The situation of Mexican crime organizations is distinctive because there are so many organizations-- at least 11 major ones. The original cartels were in geographically distinct areas-- the Gulf cartel along the south-east Texas border; the Sonora cartel on the Arizona border; the Arrelano Felix organization in Baja California; the Sinoloa cartel on the major port cities on the Pacific side such as Mazatlan. They were cartels in the true sense, dividing up non-competing territories. More recently they stopped being cartels, as they have invaded each other's territory. The name "cartel" serves as a term of convenience, but it is inaccurate. To call them "drug cartels" involved in a "drug war" is doubly inaccurate. Popular terms are impossible to eradicate, but they hide reality. Mexican crime-orgs are less like rival businesses than rival warrior states of the pre-modern era.

Over time, the situation of territorial cartels developed into multi-sided wars. This came about by a combination of political processes.

Because there are so many players, various alliances were possible. When any one crime organization attempted territorial expansion, counter-alliances were created. Some organizations sent expeditionary forces-- military aid-- to their allies, thereby also expanding their territorial reach, and provoking further defensive reactions. Alliances could change when the host organization felt threatened by the outsiders and made new alliances to throw them out.
A defeat in war, or arrests by the government, would result in a power vacuum. When one organization was weakened, outsiders could move into their territory; or a split would occur within the organization, creating a power struggle among new factions that might crystalize into separate organizations if there were no clear-cut winner. Thus a multi-sided struggle became even more multi-sided as time went on.

Examples: this happened as the Arellano Felix Organization in Baja California split when its older leaders were arrested; when the Sinaloa cartel was split by the Beltrán Leyva brothers; and when Los Zetas broke from the Gulf Cartel. The government acts as a complicating factor in the multi-sided situation, bringing the total number of players to 12 or more, depending on how many independent factions there are in the Mexican government. Above all, government strategy of decapitating the most prominent cartels kept stirring the mix; far from destroying organizations, it kept creating new opportunities for local factions and rival cartels to expand.

These multi-sided conflicts and repeated power vacuums push cartel members into switching sides. Such switches of allegiance are typical in multi-sided geopolitics; the history of European diplomacy is full of them, with the English, French, Germans, Russians and others switching between friends and enemies numerous times over the centuries. The Zetas have been the most aggressively opportunistic. They began as elite airmobile Special Forces set up by the Mexican government distrustful of their own regular military and police. Their very isolation made them amenable to being recruited as bodyguards by one of the quarreling leaders of the Gulf cartel in the early 2000s. Within a few years, as the Gulf cartel was weakened by the government offensive, the Zetas broke free of their underground employers and became another crime-org in its own right. This disloyalty is typical of what happens to paramilitary forces set up by governments outside of normal bureaucratic channels-- for instance in Africa and the Middle East [Schlichte 2009]. Not only are the Zetas not a cartel in the technical sense, but they lack a distinctive territorial base-- being tied neither to particular drug routes nor local roots. They have expanded into anywhere in Mexico where there has been the hint of a power vacuum.

Similarly, vigilante groups set up to keep out intruders or punish criminals the weak state cannot touch, themselves can turn into crime organizations. This has been the pathway of La Familia in Michoacan (far from the major drug routes, but including the Pacific port nearest to Mexico City). It started as a religiously-based rehabilitation movement for drug addicts (not unlike the Synanon movement in California during the 1960s and 70s, which evolved from a group psychotherapy drug cure into a religious cult and eventually into a violent organization). La Famiglia Michoacana (which means "the Michoacan family") gradually shifted from a local self-protection group, defending the region against incursions by the Zetas and others, into the business of protection/extortion and eventually into drug dealing itself. Local loyalties have remained especially strong, since La Famiglia not only maintained its public image as a protector but siphoned its criminal income back into supporting local churches and institutions. The pattern resembles the Latin American tradition of a populist revolutionary movement gone corrupt.

We now have a structural mechanism to explain a distinctive feature of the Mexican cartel wars: spectacular public violence. These are not just killings but tortures and beheadings; displaying corpses-- or parts of them-- in public places; leaving notes on the bodies giving warnings, insults, or explanations.

This raises a technical question in the sociology of violence. In order to torture and mutilate someone, it is necessary to capture them first. This is difficult to do. Many kinds of criminal organizations are unable to do this. American street gangs do not engage in torture and mutilation of their enemies, because their style of violence is brief confrontations or drive-by shootings. Street gangs have narrow territorial boundaries, and lack information about what happens outside their turf.

To capture an enemy requires stealth and planning; this requires information, and therefore informants. A high level of information is displayed also in extortion threats; for instance phone calls to victims telling them details of their families' daily routines.

The structural situation of multi-sided conflicts produces much switching of sides; and this generates useful informants with information about enemies' routines. Internal splits in an organization also creates informants, since whoever leaves one faction can tell the other details about the routines of those they have left.

The situation worsens. As the cycle of defeats and victories, power vacuums, and side-switching goes on, informants themselves are targeted. Informants are the most important weakness for an organization, therefore it tries to deter informants by using spectacular punishments-- more tortures and beheadings.

Public violence has a second purpose: it can be used to send propaganda. Messages attached to bodies can proclaim that it is done to protect the local communities against terrorists, drug cartels, and criminals-- as in the propaganda of La Familia Michoacana. This is propaganda to create local legitimacy. Or propaganda of violence can be used to intimidate possible enemies. But the intimidation is usually not definitive, since in a situation of multi-sided instability, side-switching inevitably happens and the cycle of spectacular violence continues.

What can we predict, using our comparisons among the political structures of crime organizations?

First: drug business is not the key determinant of what they will do. Drugs provide one source of income, and the variety of drug routes provides bases on which some-- but not all-- of the cartels originated. But the main resource of a crime-org is how much violence it can muster, and that depends on its political reach and strength of organizational control. Once the military/political structure exists, it can be turned to different kinds of criminal businesses, whether these involve running a drug business (or any other illegal business); or merely raking off protection money from those who run an illegal business; or extorting protection money from ordinary citizens, including kidnapping. A crime-org might start out in the drug business and shift its activities elsewhere, or vice versa. Randolfo Contreras has shown that in the 1990s when the crack cocaine business dried up in the Bronx, former street dealers went into other areas of crime. In Mexico, when increased border surveillance cut into drug deliveries to the US, crime-orgs expanded into extortion and kidnapping for ransom. The Zetas, because of their organization as Special Forces, were less directly connected with the drug business itself; when they became independent of the declining Gulf cartel, they have moved aggressively into more purely predatory use of violence against other cartels' territories. This is not so much an effort to monopolize the drug trafficking business, as a different political strategy, leveraging their special skill, highly trained military violence.

It follows that ending the illegal drug business-- whether by eradication or by legalization-- would not automatically end violence. Mexican crime-orgs could intensify other types of violent extortion (and so they have, with increased pressure on the US border), as along as they still held territories out of government control; and wars between the cartels would not cease. It is a non sequitur to argue that if the US would stop drug consumption, Mexican cartels and their violence would disappear.

A second prediction comes from historical similarities. The Mexican situation from 2000 onwards resembles the Sicilian Mafia wars that took place from the 1960s through the 1980s. The Sicilian mafias also engaged in corruption of local governments, and a system of protection/extortion covering all economic activities. Surveillance was provided by a large network of informants; and spectacular violence was used when mafiosi were challenged. As in Mexico, there were a large number of Sicilian Mafia families. The wars were multi-sided, both among the different mafia coalitions, and against the Italian national government.

The situation in Sicily was precisely what the US Mafia had organized the Commission to avoid: lengthy civil wars; public violence; and attacks on government officials. After the fall of the crime regime in 1920s Chicago headed by Al Capone-- who was too blatantly public about his political control, and his drive-by machine guns in the street-- the New York mafia ruled by secrecy. There was no effective Peace Commission in Sicily, no centralized organization by which the top Mafia bosses exercized selective violence to keep discipline inside the organization.

The Prognosis: The Italian government won the Sicilian Mafia war; as their local war escalated into attacks on officials of the national government, the government counter-escalated until the Mafia was largely destroyed. Mexico could go the same path. It would be a long war, but winnable-- it took 20-30 years for the national government to reassert control in Sicily.

An alternative pathway could be a change in government policy. Since the PAN administration of President Calderón took office in 2006, the policy has been to pursue all-out war against all the crime organizations, resulting in at least 50,000 persons killed through 2011, with the yearly number rising to 15,000. It is possible that an electoral victory by PRI, the long-time former ruling party known for its history of corruption, would result in a new policy of accommodation. Some of the more stable and least expansive cartels would be given tacit recognition in their region, while the more aggressive and territorially expansive groups-- above all the Zetas--- would be targeted for extermination. The result might be something like the fate of the Russian mafia of the 1990s: ending their mutual turf wars, reducing conflict among themselves, and finding acceptance by corrupt government officials sharing in their wealth. In the case of Russia, the whole process was finished in about 10 years. Given that the intense cartel wars in Mexico so far have gone on about 5 years, the Russian example suggests a decline in violence in a few years might be feasible.

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REFERENCES
Anderson, Elijah. 1999. Code of the Street.
Brotherton, David C., and Luis Barrios. 2004. The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation.
Chin, Ko-lin. 1996. Chinatown Gangs: Extortion, Enterprise, and Ethnicity.
Chu, Yiu Kong. 1999. The Triads as Business.
Contreras, Randolfo. forthcoming. The Stickup Kids.
Curtis, Ric. 2003. “The negligible role of gangs in drug distribution in New York City in the 1990s.” In Louis Kontos, David Brotherton, and Luis Barrios (eds.) Gangs and Society.
Decker, Scott, and Barrik van Winkle. 1996. Life in the Gang.
Gambetta, Diego. 1993. The Sicilian Mafia. The Business of Private Protection.
Gootenberg, Paul. 2008. Andean Cocaine. The Making of a Global Drug.
Grayson, George W. 2010. Mexico: Narco-violence and a Failed State?
Jankowski, Martín Sánchez. 1991. Islands in the Street.
Kaplan, David E., and Alec Dubro. 2003. Yakuza: Japan's Criminal Underworld.
Krupnick, Joe, and Christopher Winship. forthcoming. "Keeping Up the Front: How Young Black Men Avoid Street Violence in the Inner City." Harvard Dept. of Sociology
Naylor, R.T. 2004. Wages of Crime. Black Markets, Illegal Finance, and the Underworld Economy.
Rabb, Selwyn. 2006. Five Families. The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Families.
Schneider, Eric C. 1999. Vampires, Dragons and Egyptian Kings. Youth Gangs in Postwar New York.
Schneider, Eric C. 2008. Smack: Heroin and the American City.
Schlichte, Klaus. 2009. In the Shadow of Violence: The Politics of Armed Groups.
Venkatesh, Sudhir. 2006. Off the Books. The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor.
Venkatesh, Sudhir. 2008. Gang Leader for a Day.
Volkov, Vadim. 2002. Violent Entrepreneurs. The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism.

MOBY DICK AND HEMINGWAY’S BULLS: ON THE LEARNING OF TECHNIQUES OF VIOLENCE

Moby Dick is usually regarded as a novel of deep symbolism. No doubt this accounts for much of its literary appeal. But it is built on a practical observation. Herman Melville, through his experiences on whaling ships, recognized that a harpooned whale essentially kills itself. By running away, the whale dragged a boat-load of sailors for several miles until the whale was exhausted, and this eventually allowed the harpooner to close in and finish it off. A whale is much bigger and stronger than its pursuers; if it fought them head-to-head in the water it would win. But whales are not belligerent animals, and they are frightened, and this is what drags them to their death.

Moby Dick is a thought-experiment. Melville imagines what it would be like if a whale were as intelligent as a human. Instead of running away it would turn and fight. Moby Dick, the white whale, is scarred with harpoons still tangled on his back; these are wounds or trophies from previous encounters with humans, but he always turned and wrecked the harpooners’ boats. As literary critics have generally recognized, he is white to indicate he is nearly human. But no one in the novel explicitly recognizes wherein his humanness lies-- that he recognizes the tactic humans rely on to kill whales. The limits of humans’ perceptiveness of animals come out in their seeing Moby Dick only as supernatural or diabolical (and in the case of the critics, as symbolic). Moby Dick is not necessarily malevolent, but he is intelligent enough to see that running away will kill him, and that his only chance is to turn and counter-attack.

In this respect, Moby Dick also illustrates a main principle of human-on-human conflict. Winning a fight generally begins with establishing emotional dominance; and most of the physical damage occurs after one side emotionally dominates the other (Collins, 2008, Violence: A Macro-Sociological Theory).

Ernest Hemingway gives a parallel but much more explicit analysis of bullfighting (1932, Death in the Afternoon). A mature fighting bull is much bigger, stronger, and faster than the humans who try to kill him in the bull ring. The bull weighs 800 to 1000 pounds, runs faster than humans for short distances, and has horns that are sharp and penetrating as the swords and lances bullfighters use against him. The only way humans can kill a bull (without resorting to guns or poisons, that is) is wear him out. The team of bullfighters lure the bull one way and another by waving bright colored capes and cloths on sticks at him, getting the bull to chase the human but getting out of the way of his horns (if the bullfighters are skilled and lucky) while the bull follows the lure of the cloth. Near the beginning of the fight the humans also stab the bull in the shoulders with lances and mini-harpoons so that the bull will spend the rest of the fight goaded into anger, and indeed looking a little like Moby Dick; also this is done to tire the bull from carrying his head high where he can use his horns to stab a human in the chest. The bullfighter’s main technique for wearing down the bull, however, is the fancy spins and side-steps with the cape, which not only cause the bull to miss the man-- and make the audience cheer-- but make the bull turn abruptly in his tracks. This is a way of using the bull’s weight and speed against himself; the bull cannot turn in a radius less than the length of his own body, and if he tries, he twists his spine and eventually reaches a point where he can barely charge, and cannot keep his head up where he can kill the man with his horns. At this point, the matador lures the bull’s head downwards with the bright red cloth in one hand, while he reaches in over the horns with a sword and kills him through a spot in the back of his neck.

Hemingway explicitly mentions that the bullfighters’ technique is like that of a big-game fisherman, tiring a big fish by letting it run on a rod until it is so exhausted that it can be hauled out of the water to die. He doesn’t mention Moby Dick, and presumably no fish have been intelligent enough to use Moby Dick’s tactic against the fisherman. But bulls appear to be good learners. In fact, Hemingway states, the cardinal rule of the modern bullfight is that the bull should never have fought a human before it enters the bullring. It has never seen the inside of a bullring before, nor a crowd, nor the bright-colored capes nor the bullfighters and their weapons. It follows the lure of the bright-colored cloths and misses the humans it aims at with its horns. It tires itself out chasing and dies when it is worn out.

For bullfighting, this is more than a thought-experiment, as Hemingway describes occasions where experienced bulls fight humans again and again. The first-rate bullrings in the big cities use only new, inexperienced bulls, but bullfights in smaller towns, and especially those where amateurs fight, use cheaper bulls-- used bulls. Like used cars, the principle is buyer beware, since used bulls are experienced bulls, and they have learned the tricks humans are up to [pp. 19-21, 94, 104, 111-114]. Hemingway mentions a bull that killed sixteen men and wounded another sixty; no humans were ever skilled enough to kill it in the ring, and it was eventually disposed of in a meat slaughter-house. Experienced bulls soon recognize that they are only being lured by the bright cape; they will stand still and refuse to charge, then pick out one particular human in the throng and chase him down, refusing to be distracted by the others, until the bull has caught his victim and tossed and gored him as many times as he can. The bull who has fought before no longer charges straight at the bright cloth, but chops sideways and cuts with his horns looking for the man behind it. Hemingway comments that even inexperienced bulls can learn during the course of a 15-minute bullfight, so that if they are not sufficiently worn down by the bullfighters’ tactics the bull will become increasingly dangerous and able to kill the man before he kills him. The most intelligent bulls are the most dangerous, and a bull that has successfully gored a man gains confidence and aims to gore him again.

There is another way in which bulls learn their fighting skills, although this part has nothing to do with humans. Bulls out on the range fight with each other, head to head; using their horns like fencers, blocking and parrying; if one bull gets through and gores the other, he may not let it get up but keeps it off balance and gores it again until it is dead. Once getting the momentum, the dominance of energy and psychology, the victorious animal may push his advantage to the death. If two sparring bulls develop their skills at the same rate, their fights end in stalemates, like skilled boxers who block all the dangerous blows and wind down in respectful equality. But a bullfight with humans is designed to end in death on one side or the other; and if a bull is able to get through the human’s tricks of distracting his attention with bright colored cloths, he has the skilled moves with his horns that he learned against other bulls. Bulls who are only two or three years old are not very dangerous yet, and novice bullfighters can use them to practice their own skills on; but five-year-old bulls have learned too much and only the best bullfighters are supposed to fight them (and vice versa).

Hemingway comments that a bullfight is not designed to be a fair fight or a sport, but a spectacle to show off certain human skills and generate emotions from the apparent risk of human death. Hemingway was a meticulous observer and did not take other people’s word for anything, but checked out the details himself. (In this case, he saw 1500 bullfights.) He was one of the great sociologists of micro-interaction, 30 years before Goffman and 50 years before we started examining human-on-human interactions in detail with audio recordings and now photos and videos. Not many sociologists have studied human-animal interaction (although recently an increasing number; see especially the works of Colin Jerolmack on pigeons). My chief caveat is about claiming that human-animal confrontations-- i.e. violence-threatening confrontations-- are the same as human-on-human confrontations. Humans confronting each other come up against a wall of confrontational tension/fear (ct/f), a tension arising from the hard-wiring in humans that makes us especially susceptible to rituals of mutual solidarity, Interaction Rituals in the specifically sociological sense. (This is very different from the way ‘ritual’ has been used by animal ethologists where it means genetically determined gestures of dominance and submission; see Collins, Violence, pp. 25-29). Successful instances of human violence come from getting around the barrier of ct/f, sometimes by chance, but also by techniques that persons skilled in violence learn to use.

The kinds of violence that Hemingway describes in the case of bullfights come close to the claim that both humans and animals can lose fights by fear, and by the dominant side taking advantage of the other side’s fear; (elsewhere Hemingway makes somewhat similar arguments in the case of big-game hunting: see especially The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber). Apropos of bulls, Hemingway also claims that some animals and humans are just inherently braver than others (how would we prove this?); and that they get killed not out of being emotionally dominated but out of stupid moves that they make out of bravery and that get taken advantage of by the other side’s conscious anticipation and trickery (which is probably true). Thus the skilled human bullfighter finds it easier to fight a brave bull than a less aggressive but more intelligent, strategic bull. With big-game fish like marlins, the equivalent of bravery seems to be the energetic drive that makes them run and pull to their deaths. With whales, the animals seem easily put into a state of fear and avoidance; and for a whale to act like Moby Dick would take an unrealistically human quality of intelligence that tells him the best strategy is not to run but to use his superior strength in a counter-attack.

The comparison makes it puzzling why whales, which are regarded as closer to humans in their intelligence, are not as good at learning fighting skills (and seeing through the techniques that humans use on them) as bulls, of a species never regarded as very intelligent. The entire question suggests that we are dealing with multiple dimensions, and that neither a biological generalization across all species, nor a gradation of nonhuman-to-human intelligence, will get at the key sources of variation. In my own work on the micro-sociology of human violence, I have avoided generalizing beyond humans, because I have not systematically looked at the primary data on infra-human animal interactions; and judging from my own experience with what other researchers have said about human violence, I don’t trust many researchers to make a well-justified theory out of what first-hand observations actually show.

With Hemingway on bulls, and Melville on whales, we have a couple of careful observers who came to their own conclusions. I’m not prepared to go much further than this, but one point seems justified: skills at violence are learned, certainly by humans, and apparently by animals where we can carefully observe them in various situations. The main aspect of violent skill is a social skill: being able to pick out a favorable opponent, recognize the opponent’s weakness-- above all the moment of emotional weakness-- and in more highly skilled forms, to recognize the tactics the opponent is using and make allowance for them. Fighting bulls, who otherwise don’t seem very intelligent, are good at this, just as humans who fight bulls have collectively evolved a set of techniques for fighting animals who also have such capacities. Perhaps this is an unusual case in humans-vs-animals conflict. But it illustrates well the character of human-vs-human conflict in our own history.

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THE INFLATION OF BULLYING: FROM FAGGING TO CYBER-EFFERVESCENT SCAPEGOATING

Bullying was once a fairly well-defined phenomenon. Recently the term has been expanded by journalists, politicians, and in popular expression. What difference does it make what we call these events? The word is being used to cover differing types of conflict, which have different causal paths, and thus very different implications for what to do about them, and for the damage done.

Traditional bullying is picking on network isolates-- victims who are lowest in the group status hierarchy, who lack friends and allies, and lack the emotional energy to defend oneself. Bullying is a repetitive relationship, the same bullies persistently domineering and tormenting the same victims. The classic version was in British boarding schools, where older boys were allowed to make a younger boy into a servant, carrying their books, cleaning their rooms, and generally deferring and taking orders. Nineteenth century school administrators regarded this system as a salutatory way for boys to learn discipline; but it often intensified into maliciousness, physical abuse, and commandeering the younger boy’s possessions. Some boys became school bullies. [sources in Collins, Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory, chapter 4.] The system was called fagging and the younger boys were called fags; this was the origin of the slang term for homosexuals, although that was not its original connotation.

Bullying is not a single event but an ongoing relationship, i.e. a network tie with asymmetrical content: one side bullies the other, never vice versa. It has a specific network location: bullies are not the top of the status hierarchy, but middle-ranking, not very popular themselves, but aggressors rather than victims. Bullying should not be confused with a dominance contest over who is the top-ranking male, which centers on the top contenders, and matches good fighters and leading personalities against each other. Bullying is exploitation by a particularly predatory type of individual from the middle against the bottom. In effect bullies make up for not very good social skills by picking on those who are even worse. Being a bully is not just anybody who fights; it is a specialized role in the status hierarchy, and not a very honorific one.

Classic bullying arises in total institutions like prisons, boarding schools or camps. Key conditions are: there is no escape from close contact with the same set of people; reputations are widely circulated; and the split between control staff and inmates creates a code of no snitching which cuts off victims from protection by authorities. The totalness of institutions is a continuum; as the strength of these variables increases, we may expect bullying relationships to be more frequent.

Classic bullying should be distinguished from scapegoating, where everyone in the group gangs up on a single victim. Usually this is someone who is blamed for a community catastrophe, or otherwise becomes the center of hostile attention. Scapegoating tends to be a single-shot event, rather than an ongoing relationship. The scapegoat might be low-ranking, an isolate, new arrival or cultural deviant; but scapegoats can also be selected from the elite. This happens in scandals, where the secondary scandal-- threatening supporters of the scandalous individual with contagious blame if they don’t join the condemnatory majority-- can rapidly strip even eminent persons of support.

Scapegoating is not carried out by bullies seeking individual dominance, but is genuinely mass-participation ritual of community solidarity, self-righteous Durkheimian unity at its least attractive. Scapegoating tends to arise in tightly integrated communities-- not the hierarchic ones characteristics of bullying; in complex societies, scapegoating requires a huge media frenzy to generate a comparable amount of focus and social pressure. On a smaller level, there is some evidence that girls focus their attacks (mainly verbal) on the lowest-ranking girl-- i.e. a collective action of the entire group against the bottom. This fits with females as being more solidarity-oriented than males, using verbal and emotional attack to keep up group unity at the expense of common target. In contrast, boys tend to fight it out over individual status at the top [studies reviewed in John Levi Martin, Social Structures, 2009, chapter 4]

What Isn’t Bullying?

It is misleading to refer to all kinds of personal conflict as bullying, even if it does happen in school or among young people. Bullying, as a repetitive, unequal relationship among individuals, where distinctive bullies target low-status isolates, has a very different structure and causality than two-sided fights. Among the latter are:

Individual honor contests: two rivals square off against each other, whether with fists, blades or guns, informally or under conventional rules like a duel. Honor contests are almost never top against the bottom, because there is no honor to be gained unless you show you can beat someone of considerable prowess, or at least stand in with them. This is a reason why bullies have mediocre status at best.

Intergroup fights: horizontal struggles between rival gangs, ethnic groups, schools, or neighbourhoods. These can be pretty nasty; in part, because the antagonists tend to be mutually closed Durkheimian communities, so they have no moral compunctions against vicious tactics; on the verbal level, they are prone to derogatory stereotyping, including racial slurs. And because confrontational tension makes fighting difficult to carry out in real life, groups are most successful when they engage in ambushes, drive-bys, or ganging up on outnumbered members of an opposing group who happen to stray into vulnerable territory. Thus actual incidents between gangs or ethnic groups may have something of the look of bullying, where a stronger group beats up on a weaker. News stories about a single incident cannot tell us whether it is bullying or not. Horizontal conflict is not a repetitive relationship of institutionalized inequality, but generally a sequence of alternating tactical advantages.

Another important difference is that inter-group violence chooses its targets as members of a group, not as low-status isolates. For this reason, intergroup violence is probably not as psychologically debilitating as being a bully victim, and may even give emotional energy and solidarity. In contrast to bullying, which leaves victims with very negative self-images, intergroup violence often gives members meaningful self-narratives-- one of the main attractions of belonging to a fighting group. [This is brought out vividly in Curtis Jackson-Jacobs, Tough Crowd: An Ethnographic Study of the Social Organization of Fighting; unpublished ms, UCLA.]

Some intergroup fights combine with aspects of bullying, where a weaker group is repeatedly attacked by a stronger. Instances include school majority black students attacking academically better-performing Asian minorities (e.g. in Philadelphia high schools in 2009-10). But although one side is dominant in the violence, there is an element of horizontal conflict as well, as the two groups compete with different resources-- violence vs. academic capital.

Insult contests: individuals bragging, boasting and making gestures about their alleged superiority to others. This can be done in a tone of entertainment and humor, or it can be hostile and malicious, attempting to establish emotional dominance; it can remain contained, or escalate in emotional tone and physical violence. Ethnographies of gangs and youth culture show a great deal of this. Although insults can be part of a bullying relationship, where they serve to maintain emotional dominance, or to provoke the victim into futile and humiliating outbursts; nevertheless much insults are not part of a unequal relationship. Moves in an insult contest are often reciprocal, and may be compatible with equality and even a ritualistic form of play producing solidarity. An observer cannot simply classify all insults as bullying, without seeing what kind of relationship it is.

Malicious gossip: This is a form of insult, but instead of being in your face, allowing the possibility of direct response, negative gossip is indirect. Gossip is felt to be more unfair, because it is harder to counteract. Nevertheless, malicious gossip is not necessarily bullying. It does not always, or even generally, take the form of attacks on those at the bottom; often it is an attack on those at the top, and on leaders of rival groups. Nor need gossip originate from bullying specialists (although it could-- persons who initiate malicious gossip might be structurally analogous to bullies, although we lack good data on this aspect of gossip networks). Most importantly, malicious gossip is often two-sided, between factions mutually attacking each other.

Research on children’s and adolescent status systems shows that girls tend to engage in more verbal attacks than boys. This is sometimes referred to as bullying, but before deciding, we need to examine the structure of relationships. Outcomes can be quite different, depending on whether the target is isolated, or herself a well-integrated member of a clique. Girls’ two-sided quarrels in the goldfish bowl of school or neighbourhood may well be the equivalent of gang fighting for boys, manufacturing a sense of excitement and meaningful narratives for their lives. How you experience this depends on your network location.

Homophobic attacks: conceptual confusions and real consequences

With increasing public focus on attacks based on sexual orientation, there has also been considerable muddying of what is actually going on. Homophobic attacks are bullying if there is a repetitive pattern of attacks by individuals or bully cliques on isolated, low status individuals; and their target is homosexual. What if the target is not an individual but an entire group of gay persons? Most of the reported evidence among school children is not about group confrontations, but attacks on isolated individuals, although group violence sometimes happens among adults when a gay bar or hangout is attacked by homophobic outsiders. [For examples see Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Suzanna Crage, 2006, “Movements and Memory: the Making of the Stonewall Myth,” American Sociological Review 71: 724-751.] What difference does it make, if it’s all bad? From the sociology of violence we can infer that isolates are much easier targets than groups; unless there is an extreme imbalance in numbers or weapons, attacks by one group on another usually abort. Homosexuals are more likely to be harassed and attacked in classic bullying conditions-- a reputational goldfish bowl of a quasi-total institution, with isolated individuals at the bottom of the status hierarchy. A reasonable hypothesis is: where there are groups (i.e. real networks) of homosexuals in schools, they are less likely to be attacked.

What if the attack is not repetitive but an ephemeral incident? Again, what difference does it make? But differences in degree do matter; subjectively, most of the damage of being on the receiving end of bullying relationship comes from the constant harassment, leaving a feeling of hopelessness and inability to act on one’s own volition.

Homophobic attacks where the entire community unites in ganging up on a victim, are not bullying, but scapegoating. In schools, this ranges from mocking and jeering, to pranks (playing keep-away with one’s things, stealing his possessions, locking a boy in his locker, dumping him into a trash bin) in a progression to varying degrees of violence. What difference does it make how we classify it? It makes a big difference in terms of practical counteractions. Scapegoating versus bullying is the difference between trying to change the entire culture and dynamics of a school, and trying to control or remove a small group of bullying specialists. It is the difference between a lynch mob (and the community structure and mentality that fosters it), and dealing with a small number of criminals, and not very popular ones at that. [On the structural conditions for lynch mobs, and the network relationship between them and their victims, see Roberta Senechal de la Roche, 1997. “The Sociogenesis of Lynching,” in W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South.] If the problem is homosexual bullying rather than homosexual scapegoating-- and most detailed evidence seems to indicate the former-- this is an easier problem, giving optimism for the future.

Another variant may be called pseudo-homophobic insult. Here homosexuals are not involved at all, but only invoked rhetorically. Such homosexual taunting operates as part of a repertoire of insult. It can be used both horizontally or vertically.

Insults are a major part of horizontal conflict, between rival groups or individuals [patterns summarized in Collins, Violence, chapter 9], and are more common than violence itself. Ethnographic literature on black gangs shows it is fairly routine to call someone ‘nigger’, either playfully or as a degrading expression. To call someone ‘gay’ can operate in a similar way. We lack good comparative evidence on which contexts are where this is likely to happen; but the following gives at example where pseudo-homophobic insult is routine. [personal communication June 2010, from Anthony King, Univ. of Exeter sociologist engaged in research on training and combat practices of US Marines and UK Marines.] In combat training to clear a building, British Marines line up closely one behind each other in a “stack”, ready to fan out once they are inside. American Marines deride the stack as “gay”. This does not mean they literally believe the Brits are gay; they are critical, in part on practical grounds that the stack makes them more vulnerable to all being shot in the doorway; and even more so out of inter-service rivalry between elite, high solidarity combat teams that are otherwise quite similar. The close bodily formation of the stack brings an ironic association with homosexuality as a readily available insult. The insult itself is a ritual of rivalry among equals.

Vertical pseudo-homophobic insult can be a way that boys mock low status isolates. To call someone gay is a form of rhetoric, an escalated insult meant to be especially wounding. The perpetrator may or may not believe the insult to be true (another detail awaiting good research). The consequences can be severe; there is evidence that in a considerable proportion of school rampage shootings, the shooters are striking back at those who insulted them in this fashion [Katherine Newman et al. 2004, Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings]. But investigating cases of school rampages are sampling on the dependent variable. Some recipients of pseudo-homosexual insults do not strike back, but commit suicide. But if calling someone gay is a popular-- and therefore frequent-- form of insult, in the great majority of instances it must be the case that the recipient neither strikes back with murder nor commits suicide. Here the pattern is similar to the sociology of violent interaction: most conflicts go no further than verbal bluster. It remains to be found: what are the conditions under which pseudo-homosexual insults result in escalation, or not?

In both non-sexual violence and homophobic conflicts, there are many contingencies between occasions for taking offense and subsequent escalation. Some persons are more touchy than others, and this touchiness is sociologically grounded in situational dynamics and network positions. Understanding what makes a chain of events worse, or better, is not simply a matter of a static culture of homophobia. The interactional patterns and locations of the individuals involved are what is fateful for the paths they follow.

Research Methodology Makes a Crucial Difference

There are widely disparate reports on the amount of bullying in schools. Some recent reports reach as high as 80% of students claiming they are victims of bullying-- if true, this would be a huge break from the well-documented pattern of low-status isolates as victims. Detailed studies of traditional bullying found about 16-18% of second graders as victims, and 3-5% of 9th graders, with girls always the lower number than boys (Dan Olweus, 1993, Bullying at School.) High estimates come from using survey questions that ask whether someone is subjected to being left out of activities, name-calling, rumours, teasing, sexual comments, threats, pushing or hitting [e.g. Bradshaw et al., “Assessing rates and characteristics of bullying through an internet-based survey system.” Persistently Safe Schools, 2006]. But we have no way of knowing from such answers whether these are two-sided fights, insult contests, or teasing games; or if they fit the bullying pattern of repeated, asymmetrical aggression between specialists in domineering and isolated low-status victims. We can only tell the dynamics of bullying-- and other varieties of violence-- if we explicitly ask whether these aggressive actions are reciprocated; if they are repeated, and between whom; and what the network positions are of these individuals are in the status hierarchy.

As it stands, there is no good evidence to suggest there is any more widespread bullying than in the past; conceivably real bullying could be lower, as schools have become more control-oriented. What seems certain is that the appearance of an epidemic of bullying has been created by inflating the definition, so that it now includes all kinds of horizontal fighting, and indeed any negative expressions at all among school children.

Cyber-bullying

This is a recent journalistic term for insults, malicious rumours, and degrading images and videos spread via the Internet and other electronic media. The effects of high-tech character assassination can be very negative, including some wide-publicized suicides. Since such instances constitute sampling on the dependent variable, however, it is not clear what proportion of the presumably vast amount of negative postings lead to what kinds of results. If nasty cyber-communication is very widespread, (with surveys ranging from 20% to 50% of youth saying they have been targets: Sameer Hinduja, and Justin Patchin, Bullying Beyond the Schoolyard, 2009; National Crime Prevention Council, report Feb. 2007 ), the majority of victims may simply accept it as the new normal and shrug it off, or otherwise depending on their network position.

Is it bullying, or another kind of common conflict? Let us go through a brief check-list, reversing order and starting with the major types of two-sided fights:

Individual honor contests: conceivably the e-media can be used for public quarrels between two individuals, by means of which they get greater honor and eliteness. But the e-media are more widely participatory, giving audiences a chance to take part; unlike duels, where there is a sharp break between the audience who are supposed to keep their place, and the duelists in the center of attention, e-media audiences tend to spill into the fight itself, usually in an unrestrained and undignified way. Anonymity and lack of physical presence make it easy to do so. I conclude it is difficult to get elite status by fighting on the internet.

Intergroup fights: These horizontal brawls seem fairly common on the e-media. Much of what is called cyber-bullying may be of this sort.

Insult contests: In the early days of the Internet, so-called flame wars were common; given the opportunities for making long-distance connections with persons one is unlikely to ever meet, plus the use of pseudo-identities, insults were much more common than they are in everyday discourse. This is the opposite of what happens in real-life talk; conversational analysis (CA) concludes from a wide survey of evidence there is a preference for agreement in face-to-face encounters. The social media make it easier to spread negative messages. Here intergroup fights and insult contests collapse into the same thing, since there is little one can do in a fight in cyber space except make insults -- along with trying to release damaging information, or to hack the communications device itself, or its finances. IMPORTANT TANGENTIAL POINT: There is little in the pattern of hackers’ behavior to suggest they follow any of the conflict patterns I have listed. The topic of hackers remains a gaping hole in our sociological knowledge of the contemporary world.

Malicious gossip: Compared to direct word-of-mouth insult, indirect gossip has more of a Durkheimian quality, constructing the collective reality of a community defining an individual, especially if the network is large and its boundaries are vague, so circulated insults take on the anonymous and objective quality of “what everyone knows”. Gossip could be ganging up on an individual; but it is likely that much of the negative gossip spread by E-media is mutual recrimination among rival gossip networks. Probably most of this is horizontal, or even upward carping (as is most hacking), rather than the downward pattern of bullying.

Now for the forms of conflict that are asymmetrical, picking on an isolated individual:

Traditional bullying: there is little evidence of what proportion of cyber-negativity is repetitive aggression by habitual bullies against isolated, low-status victims too cowed to retaliate. Certainly there is no cyber equivalent of the original fagging pattern, where the bully made his victim into a servant, or a sexual slave as in prisons. Cyber attacks can hurt, but they seem incapable of forcing anyone to do their will. From particular cases, we know there is some genuine cyber-bullying; some of it adds cyber-mediated insults and rumours to face-to-face harassment, jeering, pushing and hitting. How much is bullying exclusively on-line, without personal contact? Research is needed to tell us which is worse, and what difference it makes.

Note that mediated bullying, or at least harassment, is not new. The tools of harassment include anonymous telephone calls (probably most prevalent in mid-20th century; some data is available since this is a category routinely collected in police reports, even now). This should remind us that all communications media, historically, could be used for harassment-- further back in time, it was poison-pen letters.

The chief difference with cyber media is that they are so widely networked that negative rumours can spread very rapidly, and leave permanent records, and hence the victim’s sense that a huge, impersonal collective consciousness has them skewered in its scornful attention. Thus the pressure of cyber-attacks may be stronger and more emotionally damaging than other kinds of mediated reputational attacks. But we don’t know this from systematic evidence; and it may not be true, since there are other kinds of exacerbating and mitigating factors in the realm of social relationships and resources. The research is yet to be done.

Scapegoating: the entire community, or a large segment of it, gangs up on a target of its outrage. This sounds like what happens when cyber-attacks go into a feeding frenzy, drawing in more and more participants. But maybe cyber-attacks only give the appearance of a community-wide feeding frenzy. Email can append long lists of recipients, and by carrying along a growing tail of previous messages, a dozen persons may generate the illusion of a huge number of messages, when in fact they are mostly recycling the same messages with additions.

I have personally observed such email-cascades develop on a half-dozen occasions during my presidency of the American Sociological Association in winter-spring 2011. (Most of these were campaigns from inside ASA membership; one was an attack on the ASA and its leaders from a right-wing political movement.) Not to say that these were all character assassination campaigns, but they shared the pattern of a flurry of messages being sent in a period of days, growing rapidly more importunate, denouncing a particular situation or policy and urgently demanding something be done. What I want to emphasize is a common pattern: once a critical mass was reached (sometimes after a slow start), messages came more rapidly and with more vehement content; but then the flurry dropped off again within 3-5 days. Upon careful inspection of each set of messages, I concluded that less than 20 people were sending and resending the great bulk of the messages. Especially during the up-phase, the process gave the impression that a huge and growing number of persons were involved, an exploding Durkheimian collective consciousness promising to engulf everything in its path. Where did this sudden bout of emotional enthusiasm and mutual entrainment come from, and why did it die off so rapidly? The timing of the emails (conveniently time-stamped for researchers) showed them getting closer and closer together, until the peak; thereafter, as the intervals between messages began to lengthen, the emotional urgency in their contents began to drop off precipitously, as did their numbers. At its height, a cyber-flurry exemplifies the “circular reaction” that Herbert Blumer and other collective behavior researchers have described for the flow of mutually supporting emotions in an excited crowd.

Although a set of people linked only through their computers or hand-held media devices lack the physical co-presence that I have argued is a precondition for a successful interaction ritual, it can generate a high level of collective effervescence when participants ramp up their sending and resending of messages to a rapid rate. At peak moments, I felt the excitement myself, even though I was more on the fending-off side than the side mobilizing the cascade, finding myself anticipating the period of hours, then minutes, when the next message would come in. When the pace slowed down, so did my excitement. Rhythmic entrainment generates emotional excitement, amplified by Durkheimian solidarity, as if we are all collectively pedaling a set of interlinked bicycles together, mutually rushing toward a speed-record. But as Durkheim noted, periods of collective effervescence are limited in time. The collective process of building excitement passes a second turning point (second after the critical mass of takeoff), where the sense of rushing forward together begins to flatten out, loses its enthusiasm and then begins to dissipate. The energy and entrainment depends on the sense that our collective enterprise is continually growing, adding more members (which, as noted, may well be an illusion of the cyber-format). This ephemeral community of communication relies on the sense of acceleration; when this palpably falls off, its jolt of emotional energy declines.

My inference is the following: cyber-bullying is really cyber-scapegoating, or rather a cyber-effervescent version in which a moderate size group of people become excitedly entrained in their common enterprise of trashing someone via E-media. Unlike bullying, where the chief link is between bully and victim, the former draining the latter of emotional energy and thereby getting a little status surge, in cyber-effervescent-scapegoating, the important emotional tie is among the posters of the negative messages. The victim is just a focal point, virtually a non-person, who serves only as content to circulate messages about.

A lurid example is the so-called “Kill Kylie” campaign. In 2004 a group of classmates ganged up on an eighth-grade girl in Vermont, proliferating websites and posts filled with homophobic attacks, and urging her to commit suicide. [www.deseretnews.com/schoolyard-bullying-has-gone-high-tech, August 19, 2006; analysis in paper by Jason Haas, University of Pennsylvania, 2011.] In my terminology, this was probably pseudo-homophobic insult, since it is unclear that Kylie was gay; nor did she appear to be low status or a social isolate.

The middle-class kids who tried to drive her to her death might seem unusually vicious. But their behavior, I would suggest, is largely to be attributed to the collective effervescence of the cybernetwork experience, very likely a higher emotional rush than anything they had experienced previously. In this respect they are like members of lynch mobs, who often describe their experience retrospectively as unreal, a lapse from their normal consciousness. (In his lectures at Berkeley in 1964, Blumer described in this way a lynch mob that he observed in Missouri in the 1920s; see also “forward panic” in Collins, Violence, chapter 3). The perpetrators probably experienced their network scapegoating cascade more as antinomian than as evil, an exciting alternative reality, a festive holiday from morality (AKA “moral holiday”) but bound together in an emotional community of primitive Durkheimian solidarity. In short, they were doing it for the shared buzz. In lay terms, as some survey evidence suggests, kids do cyberattacks because they are fun.

Girls take part in cyber-bullying more than boys [Hinduja and Patchin, 2009]. This is not surprising, since girls do more scapegoating than bullying. An ironic conclusion is that girls’ greater concern for group solidarity makes them more attracted to the effervescence of cyber-scapegoating. The other major form of cyber-troublemaking, hacking, is much more the province of boys, and is oriented not to their group but to the disruption they can cause to authoritative organizations.

Bottom Line

Many different kinds of conflicts can take place in closed communities like schools, both in direct confrontation and via old and new media. Bullying has the most severe results for its victims, chiefly because they are in isolated network positions. Other kinds of conflict may actually generate a good deal of solidarity and meaningfulness for participants, albeit at the cost of some physical casualties and organizational disruption.

But bullying can only be recognized if one knows the location of participants in their social networks. Teachers may not have a very good sense of the network and status structure that is the context for any particular event of name-calling, exclusion or violence. It may seem that the best policy is simply to ban everything that is the slightest bit aggressive or negative. School administrators, who are even further from the action, are even less likely to know the social realities on the ground.

Kids themselves can generally tell the difference between the class bully being mean to an isolate, and playful teasing among friends, honor contests, or group rivalries. Officials trying to impose discipline by blanket orders, prohibiting all less-than-ideal-middle-class-politeness, may get a certain amount of surface compliance-- if they invest enough resources in monitoring. But such authorities also convince the kids that adults are rigid doctrinaires, clueless about what is really going on. The result may be nothing worse than to reinforce the normal suspiciousness on the part of the youth underground against official authorities. More seriously, it may make some kids feel they are being unjustly punished for acts misunderstood by self-righteous adults, reinforcing a spiral of alienation and defiance that is a component of criminal careers.

The practical advice may not be easy to carry out, but it is this: learn the network structure of the group, and judge all conflict in terms of its location.

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