Until 15 or 20 years ago the concept of disinhibition was the dominant explanatory paradigm in theories about alcohol's role in violent behavior. Alcohol was thought to loosen behavioral constraints by affecting specific brain centers or intellectual capacities. Because the conceptual power of this paradigm has been compromised, and because no replacement scheme has emerged, progress in understanding the relationship of drinking to violence has been slow in the last decade. The first of the explanatory directions, the pathological framework, implies that alcohol use causes violent behavior due to a pathological condition in the drinker. The cultural framework shows that heavy drinking is associated with violence in some cultural groups but not in others. In deviance disavowal, blame and responsibility for behavior after drinking are deflected from the individual and ascribed to drinking itself. The situational view suggests that drinking norms and subsequent behavior vary with the drinking context. Ultimately, comprehensive understanding of the drinking and violence relationship is likely to require that sets of factors from each framework be included in a model that explicates their relationship to each other as well as their independent effects (if any) on violence. 36 references.