Contestation, Crime and Violence

Domination, authority and law do not guarantee automatic obedience -- societies always contain some degree of disagreement, and sociologists use the broad term contestation to cover this, since narrower terms like competition and conflict do not capture every form of dissent. Contestation can take fairly ordinary, institutionalised forms, such as elections, which function as a form of political competition, or youth counter-cultures and "rebellion" -- protests, sometimes expressed through hairstyle, clothing, language or lifestyle, against prevailing social norms. It can also take the form of open dissent against particular laws or authorities. Democratic societies tolerate a fair amount of this kind of disagreement -- disagreeing over politics or arguing about traffic rules does not threaten the basic fabric of a shared society. Social order, in other words, does not require sameness or unanimity; but how much dissent a society is willing to tolerate, and where it draws the line, is always a significant and historically variable question, because that line marks the boundary between the legitimate and the illegitimate.

Crime is one specific, more clearly bounded form of crossing that boundary. Although the word carries a strong moral charge in everyday speech, sociologically a crime is simply an act that violates an existing law -- nothing more and nothing less. Legality and morality are not the same thing: if a law itself is believed to be unjust, breaking it can be seen as a highly moral act by the person doing so, and even celebrated by others. When Mahatma Gandhi broke the colonial government's salt law at Dandi, he was, technically, committing a crime and was arrested for it -- yet the act was deliberate, and Indians took pride in it precisely because the law itself was seen as illegitimate. Crime, then, is best understood as the point where legitimate dissent turns into a formal breach of the law, whatever the moral standing of the act itself. …