Collective violence is often social control: self-help by a group. It typically defines and responds to conduct as deviant. When unilateral and nongovernmental, it appears in four major forms--lynching, rioting, vigilantism, and terrorism--each distinguished by its system of liability (individual or collective) and degree of organization (higher or lower). Following Donald Black's paradigm of pure sociology, the central assumption is that collective violence varies with its location and direction in social space--the conflict structure. I offer ten propositions that predict and explain the likelihood and severity of collective violence in general and the four forms of collective violence in particular. Conflict structures with a high degree of relational distance, cultural distance, functional independence, and inequality between the adversaries are associated with collective violence in general. Each of the four forms depends on the degree of social polarization between the parties as well as the continuity of the deviant behavior to which the violence responds.
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