Beschreibung:
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>The sociology of violence still struggles with two critical questions: What motivates people to act violently on behalf of groups and how do they come to identify with the groups for which they act? <jats:italic>Methodologically</jats:italic> the article addresses these puzzling problems in favor of a relational sociology that argues against both micro‐ and macro‐reductionist accounts, while <jats:italic>theoretically</jats:italic> it proposes a twofold reorientation: first, it makes a plea for the so called cognitive turn in social theory; second, it proposes following praxeological accounts of social action that focus on the dynamic interpenetration of cognition and socio‐cultural practices. The argument is that <jats:italic>symbolic boundaries</jats:italic> constitute the “missing link” that allows for overcoming the micro‐macro gap in violence research: Symbolic boundaries can cause people's participation in collective violence by providing the essential relational resources for violent action and by triggering the cognitive/affective mechanisms necessary for social actors to become drawn into mobilization processes that can cause their engaging in coordinated attacks on sites across the boundary. The article offers a new theoretical argument by drawing on knowledge from violence research, social action theory and cognitive science allowing for a non‐reductionist theory of action that explains how and why people engage in collective violence.</jats:p>