Author: Donald l Horowitz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2002
Language: English
Pages: 606
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0195661109
Description
This consideration of the structure and dynamics of ethnic violence is the first full-scale, comparative study of the deadly ethnic riot-an intense, sudden, lethal attack by civilian members of one ethnic group on another ethnic group. With its deep scholarship and incisive analysis, this book will become the definitive work on its subject.
Serious, destabilizing, and episodic, these events often result in large numbers of casualties. This book examines approximately 150 such riots across fifty countries, mainly in Asia, Africa, and the former Soviet Union, as well as fifty control cases.
Furious and sadistic, the riot is directed against a precisely specified class of targets and conducted with considerable circumspection. The author scrutinizes target choices, participants and organization, the timing of and supporting conditions for the violence, the events that precede the riot, the prevalence of atrocities, the location and diffusion of riot, and the aims and effects riot behavior.
He finds that the deadly ethnic riot is a highly patterned but emotional event that tends to occur during times of political uncertainly. He also probes the significance of rumors in triggering riots, the surprising limited role of deliberate organization, and the striking lack of remorse exhibited by participants.
Horowitz writes clearly and eloquently without compromising the complexity of the subject. With impressive analytical skill, he takes up the important challenge of explaining phenomena that are at once passionate and calculative.
With its deep scholarship and incisive analysis, this book will become the definitive work on its subject. It will interest scholars of politics, sociology and ethnicity studies.
EXCERPT FROM REVIEW
For years now, Donald Horowitz has been a leading scholar in the field of ethnicity… The book deserves to be widely read. Its breadth of scholarship, the mastery of detail, and the attempt to weave together a vast variety of materials into a comprehensible pattern is impressive.
-Ashutosh Varshney, author of Ethnic Conflict and Civil life: Hindus and Muslims in India
This consideration of the dynamics of ethnic riots is joined to a distinctive theoretical argument and will become a major point of reference… in debates about ethnic riots.
-Rogers Brubaker, author of Nationalism reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe
An outstanding book that will be the definitive work on its subject for many years.
-John Darby, editor of the Management of Peace Processes