In relation to like the Middle East, Albania, Sicily etc, they seem to have a big problem of families fighting each other and having blood vendettas for years on end, however in most of the West as I know, this is largely absent. Is this the case? Or has it merely taken a different form, or, if this is not the case, how did we in the Western world outgrow it?
Space? They had an entire continent to settle. If you’re living in Italy in the same small town that your family’s been in for fifteen generations, those jerks from the other side of the river are still going to be there five generations from now.
Effective civil authority tends to mostly solve the problem.
Sicily is instructive here. The mafia only got as big as it did because the transition from feudal lords to the new national Italian government didn’t go so smoothly.
If you don’t feel you’ll get justice from the local authorities, it’s easier to justify taking matters into your own hands. But once you have effective, not too corrupt, local justice, people tend to settle down.
That said, you still had weird things like the Hatfield-McCoy feud to fairly recent times, which itself had roots in the US Civil War, i.e. a breakdown in civil authority.
Even in the East, you see this. For example, you don’t see family vendetta enacted so much in blood these days in Japan. That was a deliberate step taken by the government when Japan decided to modernize. Not that people really want to kill or die as a first choice, but having somebody in charge tell you “no” is an effective disincentive when things get heated.
What’s the situation like in Turkey? I heard they have this problem pretty bad, and I would say they have pretty good governance.
The rule of law that most people can live with and believe is not corrupt. Jared Diamond in his book, The World Until Yesterday, makes the point that western justice systems are not so much as about justice as they are about conflict resolution.
If someone kills their brother, a person in the Western world will probably live with the murderer getting some sort of punishment versus starting a blod fued that will cause just more bloodshed and grief.
In a society or subsociety (gangs, etc.) that believes it can’t get some resolution or that is unwilling to use the existing system, they will likely seek revenge. A revenge killing also serves as a warning not to mess with this group/family as they will come back at you.
Parts of Europe had a long history of blood money as a way of conflict resolution. I wonder if this also influenced the way the West handles these things.
You don’t need good governance (Japan more or less had that before the 19th century), you need civil authority to have an interest in enforcing such a code and to be strong enough to do so.
If you have effective civil authority but it turns a blind eye to vendettas or just plain doesn’t care about them, nothing’s going to change.
ETA: note this is sort of what happened with the Hatfields and McCoys. You had the Civil War and its aftermath. And many of the local authorities were related to one family or the other, so there wasn’t much of a neutral third party to resolve that conflict.
I’m not sure exactly which situation you mean in Turkey, but if it involves ethnic minorities, well, you have a clear answer there - the local authority may not be all that interested in changing the situation.
The short answer is “widespread belief in the effectiveness of law”.
The long answer is more interesting - namely, how that arose.
One way-station on the road to widespread belief in law was the medieval practice of “compurgation” (also known as “trial by law” or “wager of law”).
Way it worked was this: each side to a dispute gathered as many valuable supporters as they could (sometimes limited to 12); each side’s supporters (“oath-helpers”) would swear an oath that their side was right; then the oaths were in effect “added up” and the side with the most oaths “won”.
The thing was, not everyone’s oaths were weighted equally. They depended on the status of the individual. A nobleman’s oath weighed a lot more than a commoner’s.
Now, obviously this had little to do with fairness - all it demonstrated was that one side was stronger than the other, not that one side was right. This was a feature, not a bug … because the whole point was to replace the blood-feud with a method that achieved the same result, but without the blood. In effect, each side was saying 'these are the people who will support me if it comes to swords and axes … '.
That’s why it worked - the “loser” is basically told that, if they start a feud, they are likely to lose it - so bloodshed is averted.
What was to stop a malicious asshole from abusing this system and just doing what the hell he likes if he has the support? In theory, nothing; in reality, the people he gets to “oath-swear” for him would be reluctant to blacken their reputations by publicly supporting his assholishness. The point of the procedure is that everything is open and public. You do not want to be publicly swearing oaths on behalf of an asshole.
Good points. There were plenty of blood feuds in the West - in addition to what was already mentioned, you had the incessant Clan warfare in Scotland, Border Reiver-related vengeance raids, various Viking conflicts, and other quid-pro-quo violence. If you have any British ancestry you are almost certainly descended from someone who took part in one of those conflicts. Why aren’t we still fighting? It’s still in our blood. The answer is we don’t see the need to anymore.
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This works both ways, I think. As the State becomes more powerful and involved in peoples lives, it both becomes more capable of stopping extra-legal violent, and more interested in doing so.
But people in such states also start to identify with that State more and more, and with their clans/tribe/whatever less and less, and so the incentive to go and risk your life for a conflict that only involves you via your third cousin or whatever, becomes smaller and smaller.
Eventually, you end up replacing blood-feuds that involve large groups of people fighting, with duels, which involve just one-on-one fighting.
Indeed duels seem to have bridged the gap between blood-feuds and purely legal means of conflict resolution for a few centuries. They still let you kill the guy you have a beef with, but limited violence to just a one-on-one fight, and with a bunch of rules and social expectations that kept the bloodshed from perpetuating into cycles of escalating violence.