Abstract
Writing on weaponized volunteering in these perilous times, one risks the perils Auden described of ‘lecturing on navigation as the ship goes down’. Aging and unarmed, this scholar proceeds to respond to the invitation of providing concluding remarks to the monograph issue. I address four aspects of weaponized volunteering, as introduced in the five articles presented in this issue: (1) the significance of the content of this phenomenon; (2) the scope and quality of initial presentations; (3) the refinement of criteria for the subject; and (4) the range of responses that are likely to greet initial efforts to develop this field. Researchers in this field, if they are to succeed, will need to be exceptionally introspective, reflective, and self-critical. It will not be difficult for their critics to attack them as apologists for one or another side in the conflicts they study, or even as advocates for violence or terrorism. Studies in this field will themselves require study, relating, for example, the depiction of groups targeted for study to the intellectual backgrounds and political orientations of the researchers themselves. And the field itself will expand in both time and space: the long history of weaponized volunteering will be discovered and explored as it unfolds in the many corners of the earth; alternative futures and their implications for social peace and justice will require charting. In short, this may become a lively and important field, one which opens a wide range of new issues and concerns to the researcher aiming to understand the broadened nature of voluntary and purposive social action.
Having been involved in the creation and development of the interdisciplinary field of voluntary action studies since the 1970s, I observe with interest the effort to cultivate ‘weaponized volunteering’ as a new area of intellectual concern within a variety of social science disciplines and subdisciplines (including sociology, anthropology, political science, and voluntary action research itself, among others).
Social science customarily aspires toward timeliness, and this issue of Contemporary Sociology is readied for submission just as the planet finds itself mesmerized by the massive creation of weaponized volunteering by a Ukrainian population opposed to the Russian attack of February 2022. Journalism, rather than social science, takes its typical lead in building an understanding of such current events, but the scholarly literature is not wholly without attention to such processes of citizen mobilization. In a searching analysis of the Lithuanian experience, Slekys (2019) observes that Lithuania from the mid-1990’s based its security on three pillars: conventional armed forces, insurgency/guerrilla formations, and civil resistance. . . Threat of war activates Lithuanian society militarily and politically. Therefore, curbing people’s enthusiasm on defense issues might be not wise or feasible. The military will have to accept a bigger role of amateurs and think more seriously about total defense.
A massive literature elaborating on the Ukrainian experience with weaponized volunteerism may be expected in the coming years.
Writing on weaponized volunteering in these perilous times, one risks the perils Auden described of ‘lecturing on navigation as the ship goes down’. 1 Aging and unarmed, this scholar proceeds to respond to the invitation of providing concluding remarks to the special issue. I will address four aspects of weaponized volunteering, as introduced in the five papers presented in this issue: (1) the significance of the content of this phenomenon; (2) the scope and quality of initial presentations; (3) the refinement of criteria for the subject; and (4) the range of responses that are likely to greet initial efforts to develop this field.
Weaponized volunteering: What it might be and why that might be important
The concept of volunteering is one of a set of core ideas in an interdisciplinary field variously known as voluntary action research, civil society studies, philanthropics, or third sector studies, among others. The core of this concept, as defined by influential thinkers within this academic field, surrounds those individual and associational actions aimed toward the improvement of the common good that are motivated not primarily to secure individual economic or political gain, nor personal comfort or gratification (Van Til, 1988).
Volunteering is typically considered by citizens, many of whom engage in its practice and those who study it, to be a benevolent and peaceful process. The scholarly discipline that has emerged around its study often assumes a boosterist character for actions deemed altruistic, selfless, peaceful, non-violent, and helpful. Pracademic, curricular, and consultative practices within the field are often linked to associations and foundations that advocate the extension and advance of behaviors and actions sometimes identified as altruistic or ‘do-gooding’. These actions are viewed as the core of society’s voluntary, nonprofit, or third sector.
The other major institutional sectors of society are best seen, following on the work of Talcott Parsons (1966) and Jurgen Habermas (1992), as those of economy, polity, and core culture (family and religion). Of these sectors, as David Graeber (2011) vividly notes, modern society has fallen into ‘a great trap’ between the first two, market and state (p. 71): We are constantly told that they are opposites, and that between them they contain the only real human possibilities. But it’s a false dichotomy. States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would recognize today.
When the financial resources of the market contest with the laws and other bureaucratic processes of the state, Graeber (2015) asserts, it is typically the market that prevails (The Utopia of Rules). But if we look across the sweep of human history, the importance of the other two sectors is clearly established. What forms a key component of exchange in many non-cash markets is not money, Graeber asserts, but rather marriageable young women. In addition, underlying those markets are typically complex patterns of social relations best identified in terms of the mutual interests represented in what Roger Lohmann (1992) identifies as the Commons. As Dennis Young (1988) has noted, what we moderns call the ‘third’ sector might better be identified as the first, for it is in our ability to recognize our mutual dependence on others that the necessary base of any viable society is formed.
Each of society’s four major sectors – economic, political, associational, and informal – is commonly identified by the primary motivation of its participants and is converted into its primary resource: money, power, mutuality, and basic need. Less often recognized is the reality that these motives are almost always mixed within every organization, regardless of the sector (cf. Shachar, von Essen, and Hustinx, 2019; Van Til, 1988). Thus, the prototypical voluntary nonprofit organization assumes a hybrid form – voluntary in that many of its participants are unpaid, business-like in that its bottom line is financial, and political in that it is necessarily engulfed in the power decisions of its time (cf. Billis, 2014).
The hybridity which characterizes many market, statutory, and informal organizations (such as families) often contains areas of ‘third space’, within which ‘whole persons come together to reflect and act upon what they need as members of a broader community and world’ (Van Til, 2008: 208). That space exists within, around, and between organizations of any kind: sometimes at its desks or in its meeting rooms, more often than expected through its email systems, and most evidently surrounding its water coolers, coffee machines, lunch rooms, hallways, and nearby bars.
Voluntary associations aimed toward the direct advancement of goals not formally defined as economic or political are often considered, mistakenly so, I would assert, to stand outside the third sector. They are seen as belonging to such fields as ‘social movements’, ‘political parties’, ‘labor unions’, ‘cooperative enterprise’, or ‘organized religion’. But these organizations, as with others more distant in their connections to business or government, are often advanced and powered by individuals who see themselves as volunteers. In many prominent formations, these volunteers are driven by mixed motives that include financial, political, and cultural gain. Viewed in terms of the third space, what is commonly seen to be a nonprofit organizational sector may be broadly defined and understood to occupy a far larger social space than the literature often credits. And, as it is with the form of such organizations, so it may be with the means by which they pursue their chosen goals and ends. The means employed by organizations in society’s third space may also include, in some instances, tactics involving the weaponized use of words and even arms.
Among the prominent 20th-century voluntaries to weaponize their participants may be included a wide range of organizations such as the IRA/Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland, the Ku Klux Klan throughout the American South, the Nation of Islam/Black Muslims from a Chicago base, the Weather Underground/SDS from the American 1960s, and the Gulen/Hizmet movement in Turkey. In recent years, some voluntary action scholars have begun recognizing such organizations as inhabiting the ‘dark side’ of the third sector (Smith, 2003). At the same time, actions that are weaponized, whether individually or organizationally, have come to receive considerable attention in the public eye. The actions of public officials and agencies are often identified as ‘weaponized’ in the contemporary press. Columnist Caroline Rampell, writing in the Washington Post under the title ‘Worried Trump might weaponize the presidency? He already has many times’, identifies the use of ‘the power of his office to punish personal enemies’ as the essence of presidential weaponization. 2 And a leading thesaurus presents related terms for ‘weaponization’: ‘arm, armament, armed, armourer, brandish, defuse, deploy, detonation, draw, duel, explosion, go off, heavily armed’. 3 The possible interpretations of ‘weaponization’ are explored in greater length in the introduction to the present issue.
An initial challenge to the founders of the new subfield of weaponized volunteering may be understood to include an exploration of the paths that run between the delivery of intentionally pacific and helpful social service to the use of armament directed toward goals seen to be of great importance to volunteer participants. Thus, first, a reframing of the configuration between civic and militarized actors.
A second step in conceptual development moves beyond conventional volunteerism by members of the military to the use of forceful tactics and strategies by members of a wider variety of non-governmental organizations. In their introduction to this issue, the editors point to the use of volunteers from the ‘community’ to support the operations of military, security and policing organizations, through community policing programs, volunteer networks for homefront assignments in times of emergency, or organized volunteering programs of army family members (mostly wives) to support military operations.
Thus, second, a broadening use of forceful societal actions by non-governmental organizations.
Then, in a further reach, the editors of this issue note that some ‘vigilant groups try to re-legitimize their operations by representing their work as a bottom-up, voluntary-based initiative’. They add, Other types of civic-military entanglements involving volunteerism are created when militaries, police units and private security firms engage their personnel in volunteering activities beyond their regular security-related tasks. Such events often take place in cooperation with non-governmental organizations or with welfare and educational institutions and are often framed as ‘volunteering’ or ‘community engagement’. They may range from facilitating activities for children, the elderly, or people with disabilities to delivering food and other services to the needy.
Therefore, third, the entry of private and publicly organized force-using organizations into the realm of voluntary service.
The convening editors conclude their introduction by noting ‘an increasing mobility between the civil society and armed forces, which conjoins militaristic ethics with a glorification of “volunteering” and “community engagement,” enabling carriers of weapons and (potential) violence to appear as “doing good”’. Thus arise ‘challenges to classical perceptions of civil society as . . . non-violent terrain or as autonomous from state intervention and disentangle the identification of volunteering with morality’. Thus, fourth, an extension of the boundaries of civil society may include socially acceptable volunteering by users of force.
Varieties of weaponized volunteering are detailed in the contributions to this special issue. These and other forms of voluntary and public action are at the core of the neologist presentation of the concept of weaponized volunteering. Of its two components, the volunteering may seem the simpler part to understand, defined as it is commonly as involving the participation of individuals without direct financial or political gain.
The more polysemic, and likely more fascinating, portion of the concept involves the idea of weaponization. This phrase is often used as synonymous with ‘assertive’ or ‘forceful’, indicating words and deeds that remain non-violent, but are strong and unexpectedly aggressive.
Students of the third sector tend to assert that advocacy forms an important aspect of voluntary action, serving as a valued and effective way of asserting the interests of citizens and communities (Van Til, 2008). But both organizations and scholars typically shy away from implying or defending the use of violence in processes of advocacy. Arthur Feinsod, 4 in his analysis of Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from the Birmingham Jail’, notes that defensible protest requires a deep and consistent commitment to the stern regimen of ‘direct nonviolent action’.
Such civil disobedience asserts the immorality of specified laws and their enforcement, but it also recognizes that the laws will most likely be applied despite their protest . This test, when applied to a variety of social actions of recent times involving truck blockage or the storming of capitol buildings, reveals the essence of what may be deemed ‘uncivil disobedience’ – direct protest that seeks to deny, rather than alter, the workings of the law.
The concept of weaponized volunteering moves directly to, and at times beyond, such often but not universally accepted organizational and scholarly understandings. Sometimes, indeed, the scholars whose work is presented in this issue examine organizational activities that directly involve the use of actual, and even deadly, weapons. Whether and how they, and those they study, come to assess and normatively evaluate such tactics and actions will have important implications for both the practical and academic fortunes of this new concept.
The scope of these field-founding papers
The social scientists whose papers are presented in this issue share their observations with a commitment to understanding the world by means of open, theory-based, and testable field research. In this section, I focus on conceptual development, findings, and values as developed by these authors.
Weapons themselves
A brief meander through the social science literature turns up papers that refer to a wide range of weapons in contemporary organizational life, including ‘cyberspaced honeypots’ (Wallace and Visger, 2018) and the use of ‘weaponized nature’ in the Mexican freedom struggle (Boyer, 2015). If this adjective is to become part of the intellectual armory of social scientists, it will be very important to know what we intend for it to mean.
To the authors of the papers in this issue, the term ‘weaponization’ is generally used to suggest a direct or indirect relation to a physical weapon capable of the exercise of violence. Israel’s ‘conscripted volunteers’ leave the use of their omnipresent weapons at the door when they enter the nonprofit world. Shachar explains that ‘Conscripted volunteering thus appears as a somewhat unexpected terrain through which the Israeli militarist project is fortified, while being aligned with globalizing trends of volunteering promotion’. More a conventionally civic activity than an extension of weaponized defense, the Israeli soldier’s acting as a volunteer serves as much as a student receiving classroom credit for volunteering or a corporate employee assisting in the creation of ‘corporate social responsibility’. They may be considered ‘indirectly weaponized’ rather than employing the direct use of arms during their volunteer service. Such weaponization might best be seen as taking the form of action that is in some way suggestive of being ‘unusually aggressive’.
The distinction between direct and indirect weaponization may also be applied to the South African experience with community crime prevention organizations. As Diphoorn and Cooperknock observe, in many cases it is through the personal and organizational connection to arms bearing officials that the community volunteer asserts her or his link to the power of the gun. And in both the Mexican and the German cases analyzed by Dunlap, it is primarily the establishment force, business backed by government, that holds the hand on the gun and then seeks to weaponize the unarmed citizen force to do its will. When direct weaponization enters the hands of civic organizations, the military force becomes anxious and may seek to reestablish its direct control over weaponization.
‘Volunteerism’ itself
The broader literature on volunteerism begins by examining its third sector motivational and organizational forms, and has spread in recent years to considering institutional interaction with state, business, and cultural organizations. The processes of social ‘co-production’ well demonstrate how multi-sectoral goals may be achieved (cf. Pestoff, 2018). For example, the provision of community order, security, and crime control may be enhanced by the collaborative working of neighborhood organizations and the police force. At the core of the idea of community policing is the idea of co-producing the social good, lower rates of crime, by means of coordinated public and private activity. The South African study by Diphoorn and Cooperknock analyzes a number of variants of this process, including ones that benefit individual entrepreneurs, and also weaponize them, at the expense of the community good.
Co-production, the process by which civic and statutory organizations work together to achieve goals they share, is clearly a core factor in the various instances of military collaboration with voluntary organizations described in Israel. When the corporation seeks to enlist community organizations to support its efforts to extract natural resources, its strategy is transparently one of co-production between itself and its citizen neighbors, though heavily weighted in its own favor, as Dunlap illustrates. The business sector, in the cases he presents of Mexico, Peru, and Germany, enters the co-productive arena and manipulates the putatively civic actions of voluntary associations claiming it to speak for the interests of affected residents. Dunlap concludes that such counter-organizing is intend(ed) to appear as ‘pure’ volunteerism to defend extractive development projects (and transnational capital). The fact remains, however, that these groups are often paid, qualify for welfare programs or are recipients of ‘donations’ to ensure a continuous and supportive presence in the targeted areas.
The result of this hybridized conflict pattern may lead to counter-insurrectionary interventions, armed and unarmed volunteerism, and the division of community over the support or opposition to ‘natural resource extraction in times of widespread ecological and climate crises’.
Segregative devices
At various points, Diphoorn and Cooperknock discover different notes and tones in the structural unfolding of weaponized volunteering in Durban neighborhoods. Weaponized volunteering, it would appear, often recognizes the interests of the powerful more favorably than those of underprivileged citizens. While nonprofit organizations expect to gain in their production of services by attracting volunteers from the military forces, it is clear that these forces can be withdrawn at any time and that their participation is conditional upon enhancing the reputation of the voluntary military force as a benign servant of the nation.
The cases of corporate social responsibility/self-interest explored by Dunlap reveal a face of weaponized volunteering that moves beyond the controlled placing of arms in the reach of civic organizations. Here, it is the corporation that extends its control by means of philanthropic donations and civic organizations it moves to control. This form of weaponized volunteering we might identify as CCWV – corporately controlled weaponized volunteering.
The refinement of criteria for the subject
In this section, three questions are explored as particularly important for future consideration:
What weapons and what behaviors are employed in the practice of weaponized volunteering?
Pretty clearly, the weapons used in weaponized volunteering are of two sorts, as illustrated in the venerable children’s rhyme. On the one hand are ‘sticks and stones’ with their bone-breaking capabilities; on the other are ‘words’, which, the adage observes, ‘can never hurt me’.
The rise of social media has led to a dramatic expansion of words as weapons and the recognition that indeed they can act in hurtful ways. Just ask Hillary Clinton or any of the myriad of bullied school children or forthright academics (on the left or right) who have been bullied by their political opponents, classmates, friends, or colleagues to significant amounts of personal or psychological loss. The word weaponization practiced by Donald Trump and his ilk, however exhaustive and exhausting it may appear, has been sufficiently effective to allow his personal capture of a major political party in the United States.
Within the voluntary sector, the use of words as weapons confronts traditions of civility and dialogue. The conventional discourse within the third sector is peaceful, seeking to expand the provision of hands-on assistance to those in need. Service, sociability, and advocacy are the dominant approaches within ‘our sector’, and the claims of advocacy have typically been presented assertively rather than aggressively.
But there are times in which anger and frustration mount, rhetoric sharpens, and talk of ‘direct action’ rises to the fore. Fifty years ago, a group of leftist revolutionary activists in a voluntary organization called the Weather Underground set about the preparation of a bomb to be detonated later that evening at a dance at an Army base in New Jersey. During the preparation process, the bomb exploded, killing three young zealots engaged in its construction. One of their fellow members in the association, Mark Rudd, recently reflected on his learnings from that event: 5
‘Violence is easy; it only takes a small cadre of the very committed to, say, build a bomb’. And now, 50 years later, ‘Violence is once again threatening our social fabric, this time from the far right. There’s constant talk of civil war. They have grievances – which I don’t share – about the slipping away of what they have always seen as ‘their country’. Oddly, I get it: Take away the white supremacy and leave the pain, and it’s not that different from my friends and me 50 years ago’. But, Rudd adds, ‘There is one big difference. Over many decades the left has developed a strong consensus – as a result of study and reflection – to control its violent fringe. Sadly, no such restraint exists today on the right. From the president and Fox News on down to the dregs of the internet, threats, many actual acts of violence, and loose talk of civil war are tolerated, and even encouraged’.
To be sure, as I have observed (Van Til, 2009: 1079), Outright advocacy argues that sometimes enough is too much. Band-Aids are fine for minor injuries, but if it is cancer, major surgery is needed. There are, after all, abortion clinics some will picket and others protect, electoral processes some will seek to enlighten and others to influence, and enough corporate greed and malfeasance for many to reveal and others to conceal – a variety of conflicting wrongs in the eyes of so many divergent reformers, zealots, and defenders of what is seen to be right.
And thus the big question raised by the weaponization of volunteering: what are the conditions, if any, that justify advancing the interests of a voluntary organization by the intentional use of sticks, stones, knives, guns, and other such harm-inducing weapons?
If we examine the papers in this pioneering special issue, we find a Hobbesian justification in Israel and South Africa for voluntary organizations to develop a closer relationship to the use of arms for their participants. Life is often nasty, brutish, and short in many corners of the world. In Israel, this emerges as members of a mandated military force step forward, guns at the door, to serve as ancillary volunteers in the school system and elsewhere in the voluntary sector; in South Africa, it is by the establishment of close relations between armed forces, sometimes police and sometimes private security, and neighborhood watch or crime prevention organizations.
In what ways may weaponized volunteering be co-produced?
The papers in this issue suggest clearly that weaponization of volunteers is enhanced when conducted in collaborative partnership with corporate or statutory organizations. The Ukraine crisis shows that serious and effective forms of weaponized volunteering are co-produced between state and citizen volunteers. The State provides that official police and military agencies exercise the vastest portion of legitimate use of arms and other weapons of violence in society, but the involvement of third parties from the voluntary sector can significantly augment those putative monopolies of armed action. To be sure, in countries like the United States, the widespread distribution of guns among the population provides a considerable temptation for direct and non-governmental usage by disaffected, and usually informal, citizen paramilitaries. These instances, in the many varieties of their form, merit a prominent place in the emerging subdiscipline of weaponized volunteering. The examinations of ‘securitized volunteering’ (by Grassiani and Gazit) and community policing (by Diphoorn and Cooperknock) in this issue open to examination critical dimensions of this phenomenon: nationalism, militarism, racism, classism, and the personal empowerment of those empowered to hold and use guns.
How might weaponization level (at least some) fields of social decision-making?
A central topic in contemporary social science involves the impact of social practices and policies on levels of inequality between persons and groups. Voluntary citizen movements often claim that their use of weapons is directed toward egalitarian ends. Many supporters of the right to bear arms, enshrined in the American Constitution’s second amendment, justify their support of what they perceive as an egalitarian protection of citizens against the power of the state. Revolutionary as well as counter-revolutionary movements often flaunt the carrying of weapons, arguing that ‘power comes from the end of the gun’.
The initial studies presented in this issue do not appear to support the contention that weaponizing volunteering contributes in any substantial way to the reduction of social inequalities. When soldiers enter Israeli schools as volunteers, their organizations gain in community support, but at the apparent expense of the pre-existing voluntaries. When corporations in Germany seek to remove protesting demonstrators from forests they wish to mine, inequalities in legal standing are matched by the inequalities in instruments of force. When those seeking to protect farmland in Israel from a variety of incursions take on the role of arms bearing nationalist defenders, their organizational leaders amass gains in both power and public resource. When neighborhood participants in community watch organizations in South Africa develop close relations with private security forces, not only do some members achieve compensated armed positions, but also do their neighborhoods receive security advantages, while areas less privileged on dimensions of race and class experience increased police repression.
The range of responses that are likely to greet initial efforts to develop this field
It is to be expected that interest in the subject of weaponized volunteering will expand: through disciplines, by web reception, by books, and (probably sooner than we might imagine) by media attention to a subject of wide, though still latent, interest on the part a wide range of viewers and readers. ‘Weaponized volunteering’ sounds, at the very least, to be an intriguing concept.
Large steps, however, exist between a catchy phrase and a theoretically productive concept in social science. The editors of the special issue seek to bridge that gap by offering a clear and concise definition in the introduction: ‘We use the term “weaponized volunteering” to characterize various activities that are organized by armed groups and organizations, or by organizations that are potentially violent or aimed to support violence’.
There are those who hold to the view that the values of the social ‘scientist’ should play no role in the research process she or he pursues (Lundberg, 1947). This vision of value-free social science is more, as far as voluntary action research is concerned, an ideal in abeyance rather than one of actual practice. And it is not only volunteering that gives rise to the normative cast of research in this field; most every field involved in the study of human beings pursuing their various images of what is right or wrong in society tempt the social observer to the labeling of virtuous underdogs and dastardly overlords (Lynd, 1939). The goals, funding, and inclinations of researchers are often tied to larger organizational and institutional structures with clear interests, and, often, the money and power with which to back up these interests.
The student of weaponized volunteering will surely find it a challenging task to surmount the heights aspired to by convinced and pious advocates of value-free social science. The usual temptations – sympathy for the underdog, disdain of the unprincipled, deference to the funder – will all present themselves.
The emerging subfield of weaponized volunteering, like any other venture by social scientists to say important things about matters over which fellow beings fiercely struggle, will be directly confronted by accusations of bias and attachment to the various loyalties seen as heroic or nefarious in the worlds of armed social conflict. Researchers, however they protest their scientific objectivity, will often be seen as agents of one side or the other.
Of course, researchers will carry their own predilections into the fields in which they venture. I hope they will not try to hide behind unsustainable claims to their own objectivity. And I hope as well that they do not shy from relating the actions and goals of those they study to normative considerations that have been central to social theory for hundreds of years, issues that cannot be escaped or denied by any competent social analyst. The social scientist who fails to recognize the intellectual debt she or he owes to Locke and Hobbes; Durkheim, Weber, and Marx; Pareto and Parsons – just to name a few – will not be advantaged in their efforts to untangle the empirical and normative issues involved in the study of weaponized volunteering (cf. Van Til, 1988).
Researchers in this field, if they are to succeed, will need to be exceptionally introspective, reflective, and self-critical. It will not be difficult for their critics to attack them as apologists for one or another side in the conflicts they study, or even as advocates for violence or terrorism. Studies in this field will themselves require study, relating, for example, the depiction of groups targeted for study to the intellectual backgrounds and political orientations of the researchers themselves. And the field itself will expand in both time and space: the long history of weaponized volunteering will be discovered and explored as it unfolds in the many corners of the earth; alternative futures and their implications for social peace and justice will require charting. In short, this may become a lively and important field, one which opens a wide range of new issues and concerns to the researcher aiming to understand the broadened nature of voluntary and purposive social action.
Envoi: the theory of weaponized volunteering
What of the future? And what of theories that might unlock its dimensions and directions? Hapless social scientists like myself have often concluded our articles and books with prophecies for the future which have proven to be misguided and even useless. So, why not then add one more forecast to this tall and largely unread pile?
I will conclude this essay by asserting that a good deal of the theory of weaponized volunteering has already been developed and published with extraordinary acumen. I refer, dear reader, to the vast corpus of publication by the most remarkable social theorist of the last half century. His work rests on data collected over a millennia from hundreds of human societies. It establishes clearly that, of the four basic sectors of society, Dennis Young (1988) was correct in his assertion in that the third sector stands at the head of the line. This work also develops clearly that violence, the fundamental tool of weaponized volunteering, has been from the beginning and remains in the present the key element for the understanding of how societies are structured, how they function, and how they change and will continue to change in the future.
The grand theorist of weaponized volunteering to whom I refer and already have discussed is the anarchist and anthropologist David Graeber. In the many pages of his several books (particularly in the one he titled Debt) may be found the history of weaponized volunteering, the explanation of its structure and functioning, and the outlines of its future in the years ahead.
Weaponized volunteering? It’s been around since the beginning and it shows no signs of leaving. As the world has learned to say: ‘Slava Ukraini’. End of prognostication.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.