The QUB Sociology team held a public lecture to launch their new Political Sociology Special Interest Group at Queen’s.

Organized by Dr Jonathan Heaney, the talk was given by renowned sociologist Prof. Siniša Maleševic (UCD), who spoke on several themes from his most recent book Why Humans Fight: The Social Dynamics of Close-Range Violence (2022, Cambridge University Press), which won the 2023 ‘outstanding book award’ from the American Sociological Association and was shortlisted for the 2023 Conflict Research Society book prize.

In this talk, Prof Maleševic focused on the emotional dynamics of the battlefield and the act of killing in warfare. This act has usually been understood from two main perspectives: the Neo-Darwinist, which tends to see the taking of life as relatively 'easy', and the micro-sociological, which tends to suggest that this is exceptionally ‘hard’, and traumatic. Challenging both approaches and drawing on primary research with the ex-combatants from wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (1991–1995), the paper foregrounded the variable and complex emotional dynamics in play in close-range violence, which may give rise to highly variable outcomes.

The talk combined key research interests of the Sociology team, combining political sociology and the sociology of war and violence with the sociology of emotions.