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Numerous approaches in the social sciences either refuse to consider or minimize the importance of conflict in community or else replace it with a Spencerian vision of the social struggle. Between these two extremes there is considerable space for us to consider conflict as a relationship; this is what differentiates it from modes of behaviour involving war and rupture. Sociology suggests different ways of differentiating various modes of social conflict. The question is not only theoretical. It is also empirical and historical: have we not moved, in a certain number of countries at least, from the industrial era dominated by a structural social conflict in which the working-class movement confronted the masters of labour, to a new era dominated by other types of conflict with distinctly more cultural orientations? Whatever the type of analysis, the very concept of conflict must be clearly distinguished from that of crisis, even if materially the two coexist in social reality.

Many of the fundamental questions in social science entail an examination of the role played by social institutions. Why do we have so many social institutions? Why do they take one form in one society and quite different ones in others? In what ways do these institutions develop? When and why do they change? Institutions and Social Conflict addresses these questions in two ways. First it offers a thorough critique of a wide range of theories of institutional change, from the classical accounts of Smith, Hume, Marx and Weber to the contemporary approaches of evolutionary theory, the theory of social conventions and the new institutionalism. Secondly, it develops a new theory of institutional change that emphasises the distributional consequences of social institutions. The emergence of institutions is explained as a by-product of distributional conflict in which asymmetries of power in a society generate institutional solutions to conflicts

Chapter 1: The sociological study of conflict, social movements, and collective behavior -- Chapter 2: Sources of social conflict -- Chapter 3: Crises of national unity in new states: origins of the Nigerian Civil War -- Chapter 4: Mobilization: the formation of conflict groups -- Chapter 5: Mobilization: participation in opposition movements, leaders and activists, opposition ideas -- Chapter 6: Mobilization, leaders, and followers in the Civil Rights movement in the United States, 1950 to 1970 -- Chapter 7: Social control and conflict regulation -- Chapter 8: Confrontation -- Chapter 9: Group violence

Revenge has been a subject of concern in most intellectual traditions throughout history, and even when social norms regard it as permissible or even obligatory, it is commonly recognised as being more counterproductive than beneficial. In this book, Kit Christensen explores this provocative issue, offering an in-depth account of both the nature of revenge and the causes and consequences of the desire for this kind of retaliatory violence. He then develops a version of eudaimonistic consequentialism to argue that vengeance is never morally justified, and applies this to cases of intergroup violence where the lust for revenge against a vilified 'Them' is easily incited and often exploited. His study will interest a wide range of readers in moral philosophy as well as social philosophers, legal theorists, and social/behavioural scientists