| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Charles Tilly. The Politics of Collective Violence. (Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Pp. xii, 276. Cloth $65.00, paper $23.00.
In this ambitious new work, Charles Tilly seeks to account for significant variations in the quantity, character, and intensity of collective violence across time, place, and social setting. He also proposes answers to some important real-world puzzles. Why do people who have lived in relative peace for years suddenly start to kill each other? Why do certain kinds of political regime appear to host different levels and forms of collective violence? Building on his own and other scholars' work on large-scale social change, "contentious politics," and "social inequality," Tilly sets out to address these questions by proposing an unusual two-dimensional typology of collective violence. The key variables in this typology are the "salience" of violence in the overall interaction among contending parties, and the degree of "coordination" among violent actors (pp. 14–16). Using this schema, Tilly identifies six broad categories of collective violence, which he names according to their most typical manifestations: violent rituals, coordinated destruction, opportunism, brawls, scattered attacks, and broken negotiations. The unique characteristics of each type are then examined in separate chapters, each of which draws fruitfully upon a wide range of historical examples.	1
Tilly advances two principal arguments in the book. The first is that significant variation in the form and incidence of collective violence can best be explained by reference to a number of crucial causal "mechanisms" and "processes." The book identifies several such mechanisms, including, for example, "category formation," "boundary activation," "polarization," and "brokerage." It also usefully highlights the key roles played by "political entrepreneurs" and "violent specialists" (i.e. soldiers, policemen, gangsters) in these processes.	. . .

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