Siniša Malešević's comprehensive work combines an impressive collection of theoretical insights with a sweeping review of violence, warfare, and coercion throughout the ages. The book argues that contrary to the view of optimists that modernity has brought with it a more civilized, fair, and pacific way of life, social development creates bureaucracies whose primary modus operandi is to accumulate coercive power. This power is reinforced through rationalizing ideologies, explaining why the twentieth century saw such profound destruction despite its unprecedented social and political development. This is an extraordinary, insightful, and intellectually exciting read.

Malešević sets up his argument by detailing the absence of violence and warfare in modern social theory. In a thorough review of old and new literature, he argues that contemporary sociologists have been blind to the fact that violence and coercion underlie virtually every social institution that exists, even though Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and others were quite aware of war as a social process. In contemporary social theory, scholars like Charles Tilly, Michael Mann, and Randall Collins are dubbed “organizational materialists” because they draw on the classical militarist view that the state is effectively an organized bureaucracy meant to coerce. In this vein, the author agrees with Tilly's dictum that “war makes the state, and the state makes war.”

Malešević's own contribution to this literature is the addition of ideology to the state-as-coercer formulation. He argues that it is impossible to understand how states are able to mobilize support and achieve legitimization of violence without understanding the reinforcing ideologies that allow them to do so. Thus, he argues that no social or political institution can be analytically decoupled from the dual processes of the “cumulative bureaucratisation of coercion” and “centrifugal ideologisation.” These two processes are mutually reinforcing, although ideology is really born out of the collective bureaucratization, because the ideology is meant to justify the accumulation of coercive authority. Essentially, as these states modernize, they routinize the cumulative bureaucratization of coercion and its attendant ideologies in a way that makes these processes so normal that they are virtually unnoticed in modern societies.

Malešević begins by arguing that violence does not come naturally to human beings, and that war itself only began with social organizations capable of mobilizing and justifying this unnatural act. He argues that “intensive social development” (p. 117) set this process in motion, resulting in the “[i]nstitutional innovation, complex administrative capacity, cultural advancements and technological progress” that people commonly associate with modernity (p. 94). War is truly an exceptional, modern phenomenon requiring mass mobilization, organization, and systematic consent of peoples. Ultimately, “the bureaucratic mechanisms used to control soldiers easily found their application in the civilian sphere—the civil service, industry, education, communication and many other areas” (p. 116).

One of Malešević's most interesting observations is that nationalism is neither a cause nor a product of war, but rather a process that accompanies social development to justify the bureaucratization process already underway. He rejects the notion that nationalism is a psychological or ethnicity-based phenomenon, arguing instead that “[i]f speaking different languages, performing dissimilar rituals or worshipping mutually incompatible deities would automatically lead to violent confrontation, then warfare would be a permanent feature of nearly all societies at all times” (p. 184). In contrast, he argues, warfare is a quite rare and recent phenomenon requiring considerable social organization and a justifying ideology. Here I see room to develop this argument further: If the entire raison d'être of states is to accumulate coercive power and devote resources to justifying the exercise of this coercion to their own populations, then warfare should be ubiquitous. It is not clear how Malešević's argument copes with the rarity of warfare. When precisely do these war-ready, organized bureaucracies turn on one another? What actually activates full-scale conflict?

Malešević similarly denies that propaganda is valuable in mobilizing troops for warfare. On the contrary, he presents evidence showing that soldiers in the battlefield often tend to end up engaging in “de-propagandisation” when they recognize the humanity of their adversaries, because “[c]lose-range killing often demands nothing short of the tearing apart of a person's moral universe” (p. 229). According to the logic of the state, the rational course is to use technology (such as large artillery or drone strikes) to distance soldiers from their enemies, thus readying them to engage in killing. This is why, according to the author, technology and modernization have such destructive effects: Whatever humanity exists on the battlefield disappears once face-to-face combat disappears (p. 226).

What is puzzling here, however, is why organized bureaucracies would devote time, energy, and resources to the development of propaganda if it is only justifying a system to which the audience has already consented. In the author's formulation, propaganda is only a symptom of the cumulative bureaucratization of coercion, but does not have an independent effect on the willingness of soldiers to fight. If propaganda is simply reinforcing sentiments that already exist, then it seems like a colossal waste, and one that should be puzzling if states are indeed the efficient coercers that Malešević would have us believe them to be. His answer to this puzzle is that “one needs propaganda when the dominant interpretation of social reality is … contested by (external) others”—a situation made real by war (p. 215). But if propaganda (and nationalism) are natural functions of society as a whole, then it is not clear why states would have to divert resources from the war effort to spend on propaganda—particularly if nationalism is such a daily exercise.

Although the work is theoretically rigorous and empirically detailed, Malešević tends to essentialize “bureaucracies” in a way that obscures why they emerge, who their primary agents are, and the conditions under which different elements of bureaucracy may (or may not) be in conflict with one another. For example, who is accumulating coercion, and who is directing the ideologization of the bureaucracy? Are not bureaucracies comprised of multiple competing actors? The way the author portrays them suggests that bureaucracies have minds of their own. In the conclusion, he argues that social organizations are not “superhuman forces that determine how we think or act. Rather, they are both creations of the ongoing social actions of thousands and millions of individuals and, as such, they remain dependent on human agency,” even though “the cumulative character of these powers puts severe constraints on their possible transformation” (p. 332). This argument is troubling because it assumes that “thousands and millions” of people are all driven by the same logic—a logic that is becoming increasingly institutionalized and therefore less possible to defeat. Ultimately, if one follows Malešević's argument to its logical conclusion, we would expect that humankind will destroy itself before it is able to cast off the constraints required for change.

This is true unless these bureaucracies are willing to limit use of their destructive capabilities. Within international relations theory, for instance, defensive realists are those who believe that states are basically interested in survival and will only resort to war when they perceive a threat to their survival, usually because they perceive a powerful nation to have hostile intentions (Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances, 1990). It is not clear from Malešević's analysis, however, that he does see state survival as the end game. Instead, modernity leads simply (and inadvertently) to destruction.

In his chapters on nationalism, propaganda, social stratification, and gender (a particularly persuasive chapter), Malešević demonstrates how scholars could meaningfully incorporate his insights in order to correct misunderstandings in the sociology canon. In terms of policy applications, his proposed solution is that “it seems reasonable to have more competing social organizations and ideological doctrines of equal or similar strength that can counterbalance and challenge each other without allowing either the emergence of a single hegemonic entity or an anarchic dissolution into war-lordism” (p. 334). But it is not clear why multilayered globalism will necessarily defeat (or constrain) these processes of bureaucratization and ideologization. After all, the same bureaucracies that are accumulating coercive power are also creating supranational organizations like the European Union. One would assume that the same logics that pervade these states will extend to such institutions, or that the institutions themselves will be rendered incapable of stopping the bureaucratization process even if they tried to interfere.

All in all, Malešević's cautionary conclusion is that “rather than taming our supposedly innate aggressiveness, the civilizing process in fact creates institutional conditions for the proliferation of violence on a much grander scale” (p. 332). This argument, though undoubtedly controversial in many circles, certainly resonates given the seemingly senseless violence that persists around the world—especially between or within countries that claim to desire peace and justice over all else.