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The Micropolitics of Social Violence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Charles King
Affiliation:
Georgetown University
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Abstract

The debates of the 1990s over the causes of and responses to substate conflict were significant and wide ranging; there is now a sizable literature on ethnic conflict and civil war. But this literature makes few connections to long traditions of scholarly theorizing about collective violence in political science and in allied fields. This article examines two recent books by Mark Beissinger and Ashutosh Varshney that help turn mainstream theorizing about mass violence back toward its roots in problems of social order, state-society relations, and group mobilization. They break down the intellectual wall that has grown up between the study of something called “ethnic” or “nationalist conflict” and a long line of work on collective action in political sociology and cognate disciplines. These books are part of a new micropolitical turn in the field:a concern with uncovering the precise mechanisms by which individuals and groups go about trading in the benefits of stability for the inherently risky behavior associated with mass killing. The final section of the article assesses what such a turn might mean for research methods and theory making in comparative politics and international relations as a whole.

Type
Review Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 2004

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References

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19 Patterning can be seen in two unusual types of collective violence, one in which the victim is single and the perpetrators multiple (lynchings), another in which the perpetrator is single and the victims multiple (suicide terrorism). Pape, Robert A., “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” American Political Science Review 97 (August 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tolnay, Stewart E. and Beck, E. M., A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

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28 , Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Kalyvas, “The Logic of Violence in Civil War” (Book manuscript).

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34 The best recent application of this technique is Brass, Paul R., Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. A brilliant model—although one involving the killing of cats rather than people—is Darnton, Robert, “Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Severin,” in , Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre (New York: Vintage, 1984)Google Scholar. See also Kakar, Sudhir, The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)Google Scholar; and Malkki, Liisa H., Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

35 Horowitz (fn. 18), 478.

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38 On designing a research project that takes this point into account, see Laitin, David and Posner, Daniel, “The Implications of Constructivism for Constructing Ethnic Fractionalization Indices,” APSA-CP: Newsletter of the Organized Section in Comparative Politics of the APM 12 (Winter 2001)Google Scholar.

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42 Kanchan Chandra at MIT has been coordinating a multiple-researcher project looking at precisely these issues. See the project website at web.mit.edu/kchandra/www/caeg/.

43 In one recent tragic example, in January 2004 protestors destroyed several priceless manuscripts at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute near Bombay, simply because an American researcher had thanked several of the institute's scholars in the acknowledgments of his book. The protestors deemed the book offensive to Hindus. Martha Ann Overland, “Hindu Protestors Attack Prestigious Research Institute in India,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 23, 2004, A41.

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