НАСИЛИЕ КАК СОЦИАЛЬНЫЙ ФЕНОМЕН THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER: VIOLENCE AS A SOCIAL PROCESS∗ Teresa Koloma Beck Head of the Research Group «Violence and Space» in the Franco-German Research Network «Seizing Europe» Centre Marc Bloch at Humboldt University Berlin FriedrichstraЯe 191, D–10117 Berlin A triangular reconstruction of the social dynamics of violence offers a means to bridge the gap between research on the micro- and meso-level dynamics of violent interaction on the one hand, and theories of power and domination on the other. <...> The origins of this approach are found in the phenomenological programme of social science violence research formulated by German sociologists in the 1990s (Sofsky, von Trotha, Nedelmann, and others). <...> Reconsidering their arguments in the framework of social constructivism, this article reconstructs violence as a triangular process evolving between «performer», «target» and «observer». <...> Disentangling the dimensions of the somatic and the social shows, however, that these are not the fixed roles of agents, but changeable modes of experiencing violence. <...> Violent interaction uses the suffering body to stage a positional asymmetry, i.e. a distinction between strength and weakness, between above and below, which can be exploited for the production and reproduction of social order. <...> In the late 1990s and early 2000s, violence research in Germany experienced a renewal, against the background of a rising number of violent conflicts in the post-Cold War world and an ongoing debate about organised violence in Nazi Germany. <...> One was the the socalled «Berlin School», which formed around the works of the Berlin-based anthropologist Georg Elwert and his concept of markets of violence (Elwert 1997, 1999) (2). <...> The second approach came to be known as phenomenological violence research and was inspired by the (highly controversial) studies of the sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky (1993, 1996, 1997, 2003) (3). <...> At a time when dominant discourses emphasised the barbaric and irrational character of contemporary violence (4), the Berlin School and phenomenological violence research set out to systematically analyse its functions in ∗ Статья впервые была опубликована в International Journal of Conflict and Violence. 2011. <...> Серия „Философия“» публикуется с разрешения автора. 100 Beck T.K. The Eye of the Beholder: Violence as a Social Process processes of social structure formation. <...> They took different approaches: In the framework of the anthropologically inspired Berlin School, violence was <...>