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Reports of Working Groups - Priorities for Research on Collective Violence
Pages 7-16

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From page 9...
... Obviously the three topics overlap. On the topic of collective violence, however, it is especially important to determine · Which among the many competing efforts to explain collective violence or its major varieties look most promising?
From page 10...
... Beissinger and Stathis N Kalyvas Students of collective violence employ four rather different general approaches to explaining violence: cognitive-behavioral accounts concentrating on the individual cognitions, emotions, beliefs, and constraints that affect participation in collective violence; ethnographic approaches that locate violent practices and relations within their social and cultural settings; organizational process accounts conceiving of violence as a component or outcome of organized social interaction; and epidemiological accounts relating the incidence of violent acts or events to characteristics of their settings.
From page 11...
... This has unfortunately served to cut the study of interethnic violence off from the study of other social processes that remain closely connected to it. Before the l990s, studies of collective violence and analyses 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.
From page 12...
... restrictions on population mobility generate grievances and conflict, how the location of a region in the Soviet Union's political economy affected its post-Soviet conflicts, how the pattern of Soviet withdrawal affected subsequent struggles for power, and to what extent and how Soviet-era elites and officials struggled for and acquired post-Soviet power in different regions.
From page 13...
... 3. Onset, duration, and termination of sustained violent conflict, using multiple cases for comparison and quantitative analysis, including specification of micromechanisms and process tracing by close analysis of particular cases Specialists in Soviet and post-Soviet studies should consider provisional results that are coming in from large quantitative international studies, which provide relatively robust findings concerning conditions for onset of sustained, large-scale collective violence, plus some indications concerning duration, termination, and recurrence.
From page 14...
... diffusion and containment of related events For all these issues, it would be extremely valuable to assemble systematic, comparable narratives of violent episodes, including nonviolent interactions among the parties preceding, during, and after the direct infliction of damage. A well-documented collection of this kind would facilitate both analysis of transitions to or from violent interactions and comparisons with otherwise similar interactions in which little or no violence occurred.
From page 15...
... Again, the construction and activation of we-they boundaries (which is crucial in a wide variety of violent conflicts) involves political processes that certainly draw on previously existing cultural materials, but by no means simply reproduce commonly accepted distinctions.
From page 16...
... , on the one hand, and activation or deactivation of such boundaries when they are already available, on the other. Studies of rituals and boundaries require collection of evidence not only about violent episodes themselves but also about the contexts of violent struggles emphatically including nonviolent forms of contention in those contexts.


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