On 2 August 1919 in the Upper Adriatic port city of Trieste (as it was called in Italian) or Trst (as it was referred to in Slavic languages), nationalist youths harassed socialist children returning from a group outing. The incident escalated into a riot. Police opened fire, and one nationalist was killed. On 12 July 1920, a nationalist mob incited by Fascists looted and burned Narodni Dom, the Slovene cultural center. The carabinieri, Italy's state police, collaborated in the attack, or at the very least stood by and watched as the building was torched using gasoline obtained from the nearby barracks. The next day, Italian nationalist demonstrators torched the Croatian-managed Adriatic Bank. Police at the scene stood on the sidelines and watched the bank burn. In the autumn of 1920, Fascist squads attacked a funeral procession mourning a socialist worker killed in a general strike. The socialists erected barricades in the streets of the San Giacomo quarter, a working class neighborhood. Police leveled the undefended barricades and intimidated the quarter's residents during a house-to-house search. In 1921, a firebomb exploded in the offices of Il Lavoratore, the local socialist newspaper. Police watched the premises burn. In all five instances, the forces of public security in Trieste stood by, unable or unwilling to stem violence and restore order in the city newly annexed to Italy from the Habsburg empire. The Italian liberal authorities officially disavowed mistreatment of ethnic minorities and members of the political opposition, but they found themselves unable to deal effectively with the clash among ethnic groups and political parties precipitated by the transfer of the territory to Italian sovereignty. They sympathized with those adopting extra-legal and violent strategies that they perceived as useful to further state political agendas and promote assimilation, or at least quiescence, of the border population.

Three costly revolutions began in Poland between spring 1944 and summer 1946. The first two were primarily state-sponsored political and socioeconomic revolutions initiated by a minority comprising the Moscow-appointed and -controlled Polish Workers' Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza, P.P.R.) and their allies. Although they dominated the commanding heights of regional and national politics and administration, the P.P.R. and its supporters faced fierce opposition and waged these revolutions with only partial success, relying heavily on fraud and force. These ongoing state-sponsored transformations established an uneven hold on Polish society and depended upon the police power of the new Polish state and, ultimately, the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union was no longer willing to support its satellites in Eastern Europe by force of arms and the Polish people dismantled their regime's coercive power, much of the laboriously developed political and socioeconomic superstructure of the People's Republic of Poland collapsed.

The Archive of the Town Curator of Monuments in the Polish city Poznań contains material about streets, monuments, Old Town Square, the cathedral, and other valuable constructions there. A folder labeled Nowy Ratusz (New Town Hall) attracted my attention, because I knew nothing about such a building. The folder contained photographs of a large neo-Gothic building. It looked like a typical Prussian public building, similar to hundreds of other postal, school, and government offices throughout the Prussian/German state. But what of this building? Had it been another casualty of the Second World War? The postwar images showed, that although seriously damaged, the building still stood in the ruins of the Old Town Square.

The collapse of the Soviet Union unleashed a number of violent, usually secessionist ethnic conflicts. These conflicts were typically intensified (or “escalated”) by foreign intervention. Although there is a great deal of consensus about the fundamental forces driving these conflicts and their escalation, there remain considerable theoretical differences about how to understand these factors and assess their relative importance. These differences mirror debates in the broader literature on national identity and its consequences. This article seeks to clarify these debates by elucidating some theoretical distinctions among the factors taken to contribute to the outbreak and escalation of violent ethnic conflicts. These distinctions are then applied to post-Soviet conflicts in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and Tajikistan. The case studies bear out the relevance of the theoretical distinctions, but also reveal the difficulty of applying them unambiguously in any given case. These examples form the basis for some concluding suggestions. These suggestions aim to maximize the clarity with which theoretically distinct causal factors are empirically distinguished for purposes of testing hypotheses.

After the collapse of communism in Russia, which is the home of more than 14 million Muslims, there has been an Islamic revival that has been part of the process of political and intellectual liberalization of society. The major Islamic enclaves of the Russian Federation are located in the Volga-Urals, the North Caucasus, and central Russia. Russian Muslims are concentrated in the eight autonomous republics of Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Adyghea, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay-Cherkessia, Ingushetia, Dagestan, and Chechnya. Most Muslims belong to the Hanafi madhhab (the juridical school) of Sunni Islam, although Dagestani and Chechen Muslims adhere to the Shafii madhhab of Sunni Islam. There is also a small Shia community in southern Dagestan. A large number of Dagestanis, as well as Chechens and Ingushes, profess Sufism—a mystical form of Islam, which is also known as parallel Islam.