Tag Archives | Crime Reporting

From Social Alignment to Social Control: Reporting the Taliban in Afghanistan

Patrick Bergemann, Austin L. Wright

Sociological Science April 17, 2023
10.15195/v10.a9


In many settings, witnesses can report wrongdoing to internal authorities such as officials within an organization or to external authorities such as the police. We theorize this decision of where to report as rooted in the policing of group boundaries, as the use of different reporting channels symbolically affirms or disaffirms affiliation with different social categories. As such, both witnesses and other social actors have an interest in where witnesses report. We evaluate this theory using villagers’ reporting of illegal Taliban activity in Afghanistan in 2017 and 2018, where witnesses could report externally (e.g., to the national police) or internally (e.g., to village elders). We show how responses to wrongdoing arose from the interaction between self and others’ attitudes toward the Taliban, and we reveal how reporting can be simultaneously punitive for the wrongdoer and affiliative for the category to which the wrongdoer belongs.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Patrick Bergemann: Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine
E-mail: pbergema@uci.edu

Austin L. Wright: Harris School of Public Policy, The University of Chicago
E-mail: austinlw@uchicago.edu

Acknowledgments: The authors are grateful to the U.S. Military for granting access to the survey materials used in this study. A particular debt of gratitude is owed to Phil Eles, senior research scientist at NATO, for providing continued support for this research and related projects. The authors would also like to thank Amanda Sharkey and Daniel Karell for their helpful comments. This article benefited from presentations at the Comparative Research Workshop at Yale University and at the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine.

  • Citation: Bergemann, Patrick, and Austin L. Wright. 2023. “From Social Alignment to Social Control: Reporting the Taliban in Afghanistan.” Sociological Science 10: 286-331.
  • Received: January 12, 2023
  • Accepted: February 19, 2023
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Andreas Wimmer
  • DOI: 10.15195/v10.a9


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