In “Why Humans Fight: The Social Dynamics of Close Range Violence”, Siniša Malešević offers a novel sociological answer to the age-old question: why do humans fight? Instead of focusing on the motivations of solitary individuals, Malešević emphasizes the centrality of the social and historical contexts that make fighting possible. He argues that readiness to fight is not an individual attribute but a social phenomenon shaped by one’s relationships with other people. Drawing on recent scholarship across a variety of academic disciplines as well as his own interviews with former combatants, Malešević shows that one’s willingness to fight is a contextual phenomenon shaped by specific ideological and organizational logics. The book explores the role that biology, psychology, economics, ideology, and coercion play in one’s experience of fighting, emphasizing the cultural and historical variability of combativeness. Participants in the seminar are: Danilo Mandić (Harvard University), Aleksej Kišjuhas (Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad), Gazela Pudar-Draško, Petar Bojanić, Jelena Vasiljević, Marjan Ivković, Vujo Ilić and Marija Mandić (IFDT), and author.

Siniša Malešević is Full Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University College, Dublin. He is also a senior fellow and associate researcher at Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (CNAM), Paris, France. Previously he held research and teaching appointments at the Institute for International Relations (Zagreb), the Centre for the Study of Nationalism, CEU (Prague) — where he worked with the late Ernest Gellner — and at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He also held visiting professorships and fellowships at Université Libre de Bruxelles, the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, the London School of Economics, Uppsala University, and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Amsterdam. He is an elected member of the Royal Irish Academy and Academia Europaea. His research interests include comparative-historical and theoretical study of ethnicity, nation-states, nationalism, empires, ideology, war, violence, and sociological theory. He is author of ten books and over one hundred journal articles and book chapters. Recent books include: The Sociology of War and Violence (2010), Nation-States and Nationalisms (2013), The Rise of Organised Brutality (2017), Grounded Nationalisms (2019) Classical Sociological Theory (2021), Contemporary Sociological Theory (2021) (both with S. Loyal) and Why Humans Fight: The Social Dynamics of Close-Range Violence (2022).

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