Conceptual and Theoretical Frameworks for Organised Violence

The possibility of violence is ubiquitous in human social relations, its forms are manifold and its causes complex. Different types of violence are interrelated but in complex ways, and they are studied within a wide range of disciplines, so that a general theory, while possible, is difficult to achieve. This paper acknowledges that violence can negate power and that all forms of social power can entail violence, proceeds on the assumption that the organisation of violence is a particular source of social power. It therefore explores the general relationships of violence to power, the significance of war as the archetype of organised violence, the relationships of other types (revolution, terrorism, genocide) to war, and the significance of civilian-combatant stratification for the understanding of all types of organised violence. It then discusses the problems of applying conceptual types in analysis, and the necessity of a historical framework for theorising violence. The paper concludes by offering such a framework in the transition from industrialised total war to global surveillance war.

Disrupted Turn Adjacency and Coherence Maintenance in Instant Messaging Conversations

This article reports on a study of coherence in text-based log files from 120 two-party Instant Messaging (IM) conversations among a group of international students at a design school. The goals of the study were to investigate whether disrupted turn adjacency was an obstacle to coherence and to identify the linguistic strategies employed to maintain coherence. Additional signs of problematic coherence creation were also investigated, focusing on explicit signs of miscommunication. In this particular context, disrupted turn adjacency was not found to be a problem. Whereas devices for textual cohesion can be important, links between utterances can also be identified based on timing and distinctions between different types of feedback, as well as sequencing. The additional signs of miscommunication were all related to different aspects of problematic grounding. The article concludes with suggestions for design improvements to the IM tool.