Violent Time, Violent Space: Donald Black and the Behavior of Violence

Violence commonly alters intimacy, inequality, and diversity. As such, it is a movement of social time defined and punished as deviant. Most violence is also punishment of some kind that responds to other behaviors defined as deviant. Donald Black's work on conflict and social control has shown that patterns of intimacy, inequality, and diversity predict patterns of morality. They predict what behaviors offend people as well as how they respond to offenses. Black's discovery of the Rosetta Stone of morality helps to explain all kinds of moral behavior, including most violence and the behavior surrounding it. It can help us to explain when violence is most deviant, when it will be used as punishment, and what particular form it will take. Black and others who have used his approach and drawn from his theories have already gone very far in helping to develop a comprehensive theory of violence, and here I review this work systematically and point to directions for further theoretical development.