ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that civil violence is a significant topic of political inquiry. Aggression-prone victims of maladaptive socialization processes are found in every society, and among the actors in most outbreaks of civil violence, but they are much more likely to be mobilized by strife than to be wholly responsible for its occurrence. The only generally relevant psychological theories are those that deal with the sources and characteristics of aggression in all men, regardless of culture. There are three distinct psychological assumptions about the generic sources of human aggression: that aggression is solely instinctual, that it is solely learned, or that it is an innate response activated by frustration. One crucial element that frustration-aggression theory contributes to the study of civil violence concerns the drive properties of anger. The occurrence of civil violence presupposes the likelihood of relative deprivation among substantial numbers of individuals in a society.
