ABSTRACT
The history of theoretical approaches to violence is introduced here. New approaches and insights into the violence process have also been gained from recent, historical, and empirical studies of violent outbreaks in parts of the world such as India and Indonesia. They are considered here for their contribution to analytical methods because they explore the subjectivity of violence by trying to establish who or what starts the violence, how subjects experience it, what maintains it, and what causes it to stop. Many of these studies involved violence on a very large scale in modern nation-states, but it remains possible to identify in them the “violence process”, the subjective experience for participants, and how they come to understand and rationalise its meaning. The findings appear to apply equally to full-scale wars, large riots, coups, and even small-scale skirmishes, and they suggest commonalities with those historical Pacific cases examined later in this account. These possibly universal characteristics of the violence process, the role of human personality and agency, and its connection with ideas of blood and honour are also considered here. Such more recent approaches to the study and interpretation of violence – the processual and subjective aspects – are then used in subsequent chapters to interpret evidence from the primary source material of sailors’ journals, and also indigenous sources.
