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Priority Themes for Research on Collective Violence
Pages 40-48

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From page 40...
... Collective violence assumes such disparate forms as terrorist activity, brawls, pogroms, riots, communal violence, vigilante violence, forced expulsions, insurrections, civil wars, revolutions, and genocides; at times, it has been defined to include state-sponsored terror and interstate warfare as well. Significant and largely separate literatures exist on all these subjects, and several generations of research on these topics has produced agreement within the scholarly community that no single explanation for collective violence is possible.
From page 41...
... Until the last decade the study of collective violence and the study of ethnic conflict remained largely unconnected; generic theories of collective violence tended to ignore ethnicity or to subsume it within larger analytical categories of collective violence, assuming that there is nothing about the relationship between ethnicity and collective violence that would distinguish it from collective violence over other types of issues. At the same time, scholars focusing on ethnic conflict have tended to assume that interethnic violence flowed logically out of the intensity of cultural allegiance, and that these emotional attachments constituted the single, cohesive set of motivations for those perpetrating acts of violence.
From page 42...
... constraints to policing and the use of indiscriminate reprisals by incumbents that amplify small rebellions into full-fledged insurgencies. Recent large sample studies also address the duration of civil wars, and their termination and recurrence, starting from the empirical observation that negotiated settlements tend to be less common in civil as opposed to interstate wars.
From page 43...
... Indeed, in most societies at most times, strong taboos and institutional constraints of varying degrees of effectiveness exist against participation by individuals in acts of violence and even more so, in acts of collective violence. Yet, in most pogroms, ethnic riots, or other instances of intermittent acts of mobilized collective interethnic violence, violence enjoys substantial public support within specific micro-contexts and involves significant participation by societal members in these acts (though usually direct participation is confined to a minority of community members)
From page 44...
... This would allow us to have a better understanding of the disparate motivations underlying participation in mobilized interethnic violence, and how these disparate motives become focused and mobilized within the context of violent action itself. Second, like acts of nonviolent collective action, most acts of violent collective action depend upon networks of friends, coworkers, and acquaintances for mobilizing individuals.
From page 45...
... Media and demographic sources are simply insufficient here, and access to police records would seem to be of critical value, both by furthering our systematic knowledge of the factors shaping the patterning of violent collective action and by providing qualitative insights into what occurs specifically within the event to turn the unimaginables of violence into the thinkable. TRANSNATIONAL DIMENSIONS OF COLLECTIVE VIOLENCE IN MULTIETHNIC SOCIETIES An increasingly important dimension of collective violence in the United States and the Russian Federation is the transnationalization of violence.
From page 46...
... While some work has focused on the role of international organizations in regulating (or in some cases, condoning) interethnic violence, relatively few works have focused specifically on the transnational spread of violence or on transnational networks of violent entrepreneurs.
From page 47...
... . Fruitful collaborative research on the ritualized dimensions of collective violence could potentially focus on a number of themes: collective violence as a type of performance, with attention specifically to the relationship between performers and audience in various contexts; the role of collective violence in the creation and maintenance of ethnic identity boundaries; and how rituals of collective violence are created and reproduced.
From page 48...
... American Political Science Review 90 (December)


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