Violence Workers by Martha K. Huggins, Mika Haritos-Fatouros, Phillip G. Zimbardo (review)

violence. The material is well presented and flows well, and the text is well augmented with maps and data. I highly recommend this eminently readable and very informative book. Steven L. Tuylor Troy State University Huggins, Martha K., Mika Haritos-Fatouros, and Phillip G. Zimbardo. Violence Workers. Berkeley/Los AngelesILondon: University of California Press, 2002. Violence Workers is a timely publication for an era when political violence is rampant and acts of destruction are hailed as precursors of international peace and harmony. The eleven chapters and the conclusion in this book go a long way to expand our horizon on the dynamics of the statesanctioned violence. Although, the book’s research focus is on police torture and murder in Brazil, implications of the findings transcend all territorial and disciplinary boundaries bringing us face to face with a form of violence that lives in the heart of civilization and feeds on ideological rhetoric. The work begins with the most pertinent questions that should be raised in any analysis of political violence: “How do violence workers manage their secrets about atrocity? How do they account for, explain, and excuse violence work? How do secrecy, training, ideology, and organizational insularity interact to shape, promote, and support violent conduct? How does work in repression create personal and public identities? What physical and psychological impact does violence work have on its perpetrators?” (p. 7). With respect to organization process, diffusion of responsibility, and relative involvement of all actors in acts of atrocities, the authors repeatedly ask: “To what extent are the police who carry out extreme violence is essentially different from those who do not‘? What role in such violence do those members of a police unit who are less immediately involved play‘?How do a police unit’s immediate supervisors contribute to its violence? What role do political and high-level police officials play in fostering police violence? What role do violence facilitators--colleagues, supervisors, and officialswho ignore, excuse, support or even reward it?” In explaining the dynamics of state-sanctioned terrorism, the authors go beyond the typical etiological schemes that attribute violence either to unique personalities or to unique societies or cultures. They see little value in either the psychobiological or in cultural deterministic perspectives. However, the author’s own perspectives at times come across as one of situational determinism. The book’s strength is in bringing together many empirical and Book Revircvs 143 theoretical bases of political violence. The show how members of the special units in Brazilian police who pcrpetrated sonic ofthe most egregious barbarities for the state were not initially different social and psychologically from the rest of the force. Rather than blaming a particular pcrsonality disposition for state-sanctioned atrocities, the authors try to delineate the working of a complex set of historical, political, sociological, and organizational processes. This is an empirical work based on in-depth interviews with many police officers and governmental agents who had engaged in torture and murder. Given the complexity of obtaining data on self-reported acts of violence, the authors of this work ought to be congratulated for their fine research. Locating and interviewing atrocity perpetrators are not easy tasks. As the authors point out, this is the first systematic study those who had been involved in torture and murder as part of their routinized professional work. Contrary to much descriptive and ethnographic research, this qualitative inquiry is also replete with theoretical insights. Social psychological, situational, organizational and cultural perspectives all nicely come togcthcr in this book. Much of the bureaucratization of violence is traccd to a culture of masculinity that provides a normative background for the definition of rational conduct within an organization. The authors succccd in showing how violent workers by losing their human agency and their place in a network of emotional relationships, become simply a functional component of an organization. They become violence “organization men.” Reconstructing the professional careers of many violence workers, the authors locate the seed of political violence not in the pathological personality but in the atrocity environments. A common denominator of “atrocity environments” both in Brazil and the United States is a sociopolitical climate that designates a segment of population as “enenties o f the...