Ending Violence? Sociological Research on Exiting Violence

Violence remains a central concern across sociology and the social sciences, yet the question of what it means to end or exit violence remains comparatively underdeveloped. Scholarship has often focused on victimization, trauma, criminalization, or the interruption of violent acts, sometimes reducing “ending violence” to physical separation, institutional intervention, or the cessation of abuse. Less attention has been paid to the broader social, relational, and structural processes through which individuals, families, groups, and communities attempt to move away from violence, reconstruct meaning, and renegotiate power, responsibility, and social belonging over time.

This joint session invites sociological reflections on the meanings, conditions, and limits of ending violence. Rather than adopting a single definition, we approach it as a complex and processual phenomenon embedded in institutions, inequalities, histories. Contributions may examine institutional facilitators, practitioners, discursive frameworks, and the power relations that enable change, desistance, accountability, and the reconfiguration of social ties.

The session also welcomes contributions on the trajectories of people who have exercised violence and who seek, resist, or negotiate forms of disengagement or transformation. Exiting violence cannot be understood solely through victimization; it also requires examining how violent behaviours are socially produced, reproduced, normalized, interrupted, or reconfigured across the life course.

By bringing together diverse empirical and theoretical perspectives, this session aims to rethink violence as a contested social process of endings, continuities, and possible futures. We welcome work on interpersonal, family, gender-based, political, structural, racialized, institutional, economic, digital, or symbolic violence, particularly around rupture, continuity, safety, accountability, and repair.