Revenge and Conflict: Social and Cognitive Aspects - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 82

4.4.3 The Kanun

When social and environmental circumstances change, groups start to enlarge, and
a different economy develops, revenge may become too costly to sustain and a
need for restraining revenge and regulating it could have emerged. This poses a
tension between the individual desire to take revenge and the need of societies
to restrain revenge because it has become too dangerous for them. Resolving this
tension requires to eradicate a behavior that is supported by evolved psychological
mechanisms that can be hardly modified, even when original circumstances that
produced them have changed or disappeared. Since it is unlikely that revenge can
be eradicated, an alternative and most effective solution would be to restrain it
somehow. There are two ways to make revenge less appealing: either limiting
the contexts in which revenge may take place, thus transforming revenge into a
regulated institution which is not anymore arbitrary (e.g., Kanun in Albania), or
promoting reactions that do not trigger feuds and may enforce social order in a less
costly way, like punishment and sanction (for a discussion, see Andrighetto et al.
2012 a).
The Kanuni I Lekë Dukagjinit (Gjeov 1989 ) is a customary set of laws passed
down mostly by oral tradition and it prescribes practices of daily life, including
rules governing blood feuds. The Kanun is applied mostly in northern Albania and
Kosovo, and it became more and more popular after the fall of the Communist party.
Among other things, the Kanun disciplines people's reactions to murder (blood
revenge or gjakmarrje ) and other offenses ( hakmarrje ), according to the roles and
degree of kinship of all the people involved. After a killing, the perpetrator and
his or her family take refuge in their homes, which are considered inviolate under
Kanun , for at least 40 days and seek forgiveness. If forgiveness is not accorded
to perpetrator, isolation of all the men of the perpetrator's family can continue
indefinitely. All blood feuds under Kanun involve honor: shirking revenge or taking
it without respecting the rules mean that honor cannot be restored, and the whole
family or clan is to blame. The Kanun puts honor at the core of social life and in
doing so it offers a way to measure and weight offenses that allows individuals to
even the score in a predictable and regulated manner. Turning individual revenge
into a social institution can be an effective strategy to reduce the danger of a
behavior based on personal suffering and aimed at inducing a harm proportional to
the experienced suffering. This quest for proportionality makes revenge potentially
disruptive at the social level, leading to an exacerbation of reactions and to the
reciprocal destruction of the actors involved. Controlling revenge was necessary
because if it is true, as we assume, that revenge is rooted in our evolutionary history,
then incentives are not enough to discourage it and the development of legal and
social sanctions became necessary in order to counterbalance the desire for revenge.