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While researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and service providers ask increasingly for solutions to the enduring problems of youth violence, key issues have gone unaddressed. For example, questions remain about the disparity in the prevalence of violence for African American adolescents. It is unclear whether risk and protective factors for violent behavior differ for youth of color as compared to White youth, although several theories suggest that African American youth may be socialized differently to the use and outcomes of violence. To the extent that differences in violence and associated variables are understood, researchers and practitioners will be positioned to more fully meet the needs of particularly vulnerable and marginalized groups. The purpose of Chapter 3 is to distill key race differences in violence, as well as the many risk and protective factors found in the literature. Theories that position race in the etiology of violence are reviewed. The chapter examines race and ethnic differences in the prevalence of violence as well as group variation in risk and protective factors for violence.

Traces the establishment of international presence in Kosovo following the signing of the Military‐Technical Agreement (MTA) between NATO and Yugoslavia and the implementation of the UN Security Resolution 1244. The chapter points to the success of the Kosovo International Security Force (KFOR) deployed by NATO to ensure security on ground, and to the mixed record of the civilian United Nations Interim Mission in Kosovo in establishing effective presence. While the return of Albanian refugees was a success for UNMIK, the chapter argues that both KFOR and UNMIK failed to prevent revenge killings and that the poorly deployed UN police force was unprepared to stop inter‐ethnic violence, especially against Kosovo Serbs. Economic assistance and fight against organized crime are identified as some of the major challenges for UNMIK.

This book examines the origins, causes, transformations, and future of ethnic violence by focusing on its natural history. Drawing on insight from numerous disciplines combined with a theoretical approach that it calls “cognitive modernism,” the book explores all types of ethnic violence across the world and transformations in ethnic violence over time in order to understand what caused seemingly normal people to kill Others. It argues that modernity is the most common and influential cause of ethnic violence and that communal perceptions and concerns must be analyzed in terms of ethnic consciousness, emotional prejudice, and obligations. This introduction defines key concepts such as ethnic violence, ethnicity, ethnic consciousness, ethnic frameworks, and ethnic structures. It also discusses three cultural and historical factors that delineate ethnic communities and are commonly used interchangeably with ethnicity: nation, race, and religious community.

This chapter examines the role of the state in promoting or deterring ethnic violence. It begins with a discussion of the ways states can promote ethnic violence by using a number of examples, including the Rwandan genocide and statelessness/near-statelessness during World War II. It then considers how both the ethnicization of states and state effectiveness help explain why some states contribute to ethnic violence more than others through a comparative analysis of ethnic violence in two Indian regions: Assam and Kerala. It also explores how states affect whether mobilizational resources can be effectively employed to organize ethnic violence. Finally, it shows how modernity promotes some states that are willing and able to prevent ethnic violence and others that are willing and able to incite it.

This chapter examines the link between modernity and ethnic violence by focusing on Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Modernity interacts with and depends on the local social environment, and the social environments present at the onset of modernity varied by region. Two of modernity's most influential social carriers were colonialism and missionaries, whose biases and ulterior motives often promoted forms of modernity that fostered environments conducive to ethnic violence. The chapter first considers how colonialism promotes ethnic violence, with emphasis on how different combinations of insulation, competition, and stratification made possible “a remarkably stable system of [colonial] rule.” This is followed by a discussion of how missionaries contributed to ethnic violence by promoting ethnic consciousness, using Burma, Assam, and Vietnam as examples. The chapter concludes with an analysis of ethnic violence in the Americas.

This chapter examines two underlying motives of ethnic violence: emotional prejudice and ethnic obligations. It first considers how instrumental interests motivate ethnic violence before discussing arguments against this notion. It then turns to emotional prejudice, a motive that seems the polar opposite of instrumental-rational action. In particular, it looks at communally oriented emotions and explains how modernity promotes emotional prejudice. It also presents evidence showing that emotions and obligations are very influential motives for ethnic violence. More specifically, emotions and obligations are most likely to motivate ethnic violence when people possess an ethnic consciousness, a typical outcome of modernity. The chapter concludes with two examples that illustrate the impact of emotions and obligations on ethnic violence: genocide in Germany and Rwanda.

This chapter summarizes the book's major findings regarding ethnic violence before considering the future of ethnic violence and potential policy prescriptions that might help to limit the prevalence of ethnic violence. The book has presented strong and consistent evidence that modernity promoted ethnic violence by strengthening and proliferating ethnic consciousness. It has also identified two motives that commonly trigger ethnic violence: emotional prejudice and ethnic obligations. Furthermore, modernity enhanced diverse resources that facilitated the mobilization of ethnic violence. The chapter concludes the book by discussing the risk of ethnic violence among early and late modernizers, with a focus on Western Europe and North America. It also considers three policy options for limiting ethnic violence: multiculturalism, federalism, and consociationalism. Finally, it predicts that ethnic violence will continue near present levels over the next decade but should decline slightly due to lower levels of violence among late modernizers.

This chapter examines the nature and nurture of ethnic violence. It begins with a discussion of the behavioral problems of border collies and how they are related to ethnic violence, noting that both are promoted by the combination of group-wide genetic traits and changing social environments. It then considers the biology of ethnic violence by focusing on the propensity to divide people into ingroups and outgroups and how that propensity is linked to human emotions. It also offers a biological explanation for gender differences in ethnic violence and explores the social determinants of ethnic violence such as ethnicity, emotional prejudice, ethnic obligations, mobilizational resources, and political opportunities. Finally, it advances the notion that ethnic violence is caused by modernity.

This chapter examines the link between modernity and ethnic violence. It begins with an overview of the origins and forms of modernity as well as the factors that caused the processes constituting modernity to develop in different ways. It then considers opposing arguments about the impact of modernity on ethnic violence, focusing on the classic modernist view, which contends that modernity promotes peace, and the revised modernist view, which counters that modernity increases violence. Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness offers a clear example of the classic position that equates modernity with peace. In particular, Conrad linked ruthless violence to primitivism and peaceful social order to modernity. The revised modernist position is exemplified by the works of Hannah Arendt, Michael Mann, James Scott, and Andreas Wimmer. The chapter concludes with a discussion of quantitative and qualitative evidence that lends support to the revised modernist view.

This chapter examines a paradox in the connection between modernity and ethnic violence: the earliest and most successful modernizers experienced severe ethnic violence prior to World War II, yet cases of ethnic violence have been relatively rare among early modernizers over the past seven decades. It begins with a comparison of Nazi and postwar Germany to show how the country transformed from extreme ethnic violence—and more specifically genocide—to relative peace. To further elucidate the causes of relative peace in early modernizers, the chapter considers the conflict resulting from the Quebec nationalist movement, which gained strength beginning in the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on the German and Canadian experiences, it discusses a variety of factors that limited ethnic violence after World War II by shaping the strength and contours of ethnicity, reducing emotional motivation, limiting ethnic obligations, and minimizing the opportunity for mass violence.

This chapter focuses on the emergence of opposition nationalist movements in Russia's republics. It first compares the level of mass support for nationalism in each of Russia's sixteen republics, with particular emphasis on mass demonstrations and ethnic violence. It then considers mass attitudes regarding republican declarations of sovereignty and the right of the republics to secede from Russia. It also discusses the explanations of nationalist mobilization in the post-Soviet politics literature on secessionism in terms of both their logic and their empirical predictions. These arguments are analyzed against evidence from Russia to determine whether they offer sufficient explanations for the emergence of nationalist mobilization or its variance across the republics.

This chapter examines the origins of ethnic pluralism. Most countries have populations with multiple and opposing ethnic consciousness, and such ethnic pluralism is a necessary condition for ethnic violence. In order to explain ethnic violence, one must therefore consider why only some places turned out like France—a country that has been successful at popularizing a common national consciousness. To help explain the French case, the chapter compares the nation-building processes in France, Spain, and the UK in the context of unity and disunity. It also discusses the interrelationships among path dependence, situationalism, and ethnic consciousness before assessing ethnic pluralism in large empires such as the Ottoman Empire and the former Soviet Union. Finally, it explores the role of overseas colonialism and missionaries in promoting ethnic diversity by focusing on Rwanda, Burundi, and Burma.

This chapter argues that education contributes to ethnic violence, in contrast to popular beliefs and the literature suggesting that it promotes peace and tolerance rather than hatred and violence. The chapter first considers a variety of grounds to debunk universal claims that education promotes peaceful social relations before discussing the educational backgrounds of intolerant, hateful, and violent people by focusing on two notorious hate groups of all time: the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). It also shows that terrorists have relatively high levels of education and cites mounting evidence that education commonly contributes to violence against Others. Again using the Nazis and their doctors as examples, the chapter shows that education might strengthen ethnic consciousness, intensify emotional prejudice, create ethnic obligations, and provide mobilizational resources.

This chapter discusses the harmful psychological consequences of conflict and violence, including changes in the nature of identity and self-concept (both individual and group) of many members of all parties. These changes for members of the victimized group (as well as some members of the perpetrator group) often include the experience of post-traumatic distress and psychological woundedness. Survivors also tend to feel vulnerable and to see other people and groups as threatening and dangerous. This can lead them to engage in unnecessary defensive violence. Harm doers increasingly devalue the scapegoated group or ideological enemy, which can lead to them excluding the “other” from the human and moral realm and justifying greater violence. When the violence is stopped, perpetrators usually continue to devalue their victims and defend their actions, in part to defend against guilt, shame, and distress, and to maintain their moral standing in their own eyes and reestablish it in others' eyes.

This chapter investigates the ferocious three-year war between Greece and Turkey between May 1919 and September 1922. It examines three key episodes of the war in detail: the Greek landing in Smyrna in May 1919, the violent Greek retreat from the Yalova-Gemlik region in 1921, and the mass deportations of Pontic Greeks by the Kemalists in 1921–2. In all three cases, the Allied decision at the Paris Peace Conference to partition off the Ottoman Empire triggered radical local ethnic violence. The chapter concludes with the crucial impact that the Greek–Turkish War and the subsequent population exchange between the two states had on international politics: these further disillusioned Western audiences with regard to the justice of the Paris peace settlements, and at the same time established patterns of ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of minority populations as viable tools of international politics.

This concluding chapter discusses how understanding the distinct patterns of state failure in weak states with immobile capital can inform our study of regime change, ethnic violence, and security sector reform—both comparatively and in the postcommunist region. The analysis of weak states is relevant as it offers a new look at the forces motivating local elites, whose political calculus involves accessing rents and whose actions are defined by the limitations imposed by immobile capital. As the examples of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in this book reveal, these structural and strategic factors combine to erode institutions from within and they can be decisive in perpetuating state power or leading a country into state failure.

This chapter focuses on the secessionist campaigns launched by Russia's republics in the early 1990s. More specifically, it examines why some republics made strong demands on Moscow for increased autonomy, sovereignty, or even independence while others did not. After describing republican campaigns for sovereignty, the chapter codes republican secessionism based on actions initiated by the republics as well as their responses to policies initiated by Moscow. It then considers how democratization at the center produced a shift in political accountability and how mass nationalist mobilization influenced republican separatist campaigns. It also presents evidence showing how secessionism relates to ethnic mass demonstrations and ethnic violence. It concludes with a discussion of how mass nationalism affected the secessionist campaigns of three republics: Tuva, Yakutia, and Mari El.