Vigilante violence - when people take the law into their own hands

Having been shocked himself when witnessing the extreme brutality of vigilante violence, sociologist Muhammad Asif decided to study why people take the law into their own hands. His work culminated in a new theory of the causes underpinning vigilante violence, which combines various explanatory factors, such as distrust of the state or the police, and strong emotional reactions to violations of moral values. Asif's study took place in Pakistan, but his insights are also relevant to other cases of collective violence around the globe. He will defend his PhD thesis on Wednesday, 2 February, at the University of Amsterdam. On 15 August 2010, two teenagers were brutally beaten by a group of people in the city of Sialkot in Pakistan. It seems the teenagers were suspected of robberies in a neighborhood nearby. After seeing footage of the incident, Asif decided to look into the phenomenon vigilante violence: 'I had never witnessed such brutality in my life.