In Western societies, penal regulation is largely considered the best way to deal with conflicts or, more widely, with trouble. Indeed, penal regulation is seen as one of the most efficient tools for maintaining the cohesion of collective life. However, some research has questioned this efficiency, noting that only a few problematic situations were addressed by the penal system. We can hypothesize, then, that other forms of defining and regulating trouble exist and function outside of any institutional field. The present study develops this hypothesis by analyzing how people experience conflicts in everyday life. In this way, we attempt to discover whether these social modes of identifying trouble still remain and under which conditions this survival is possible.
