In his lecture, Andrew Linklater speaks about the meaning of symbols.
"I am not a sociologist. My background is in Political Sociology". Societies have always had problems controlling their conflict resolution capacities. Certain groups in society, such as women and children, were excluded from the violence. Jonathan Fletcher, in his book on Violence and Civilisation, portrayed this uniquely. Elias also uses the example of German society in his book "On Germans". Elias answered this political science question in a sociological way. He interpreted it as part of a civilising process.
The question is, what symbols form in societies to create identity-building symbols to rule out harmful behaviour? The existence of such symbols seems to be significant for the level of development of a community.