ABSTRACT
The following study seeks to be reasonably comprehensive by organizing and interpreting available knowledge about reprisals in the international system (and to a lesser extent in other social orders) under four headings reflected in the title of this work. First I examine reprisals as acts of revenge having no discernible social function, and I show that reprisals do tend to take place in open-ended series. Then I consider reprisals as forms of ritual activity. In this connection I use the term ritual in the sense it is employed by H.L. Nieburg: “to designate the general tendency of actions to acquire a symbolic meaning which tends to have a function different from the raw act.”3 Reprisals in this sense can be understood as having an established place in the functioning of the social order.
