ABSTRACT
This book demonstrates the centrality of cultural issues to the study of conflict and violence. It looks at national culture-at state policies and ideologies of control, containment, and development-in dynamic tension with local populations, pictured as actively formulating their own cultural commitments, modes of control, and politics. The book exposes the distortions of top-down formulations of culture and change that concentrate on the powers of the state, formal institutions, and national leaders, projecting passivity and ignorance onto the wider public. It analyzes states, opposition movements, and local groups with a concern for how conflict produces culture-not just, as some have phrased it, how cultural difference promotes conflict. The book argues against conceptions of violence that privilege physical harm and fails to question the ways in which cultural and political practices mediate the experience of violence. It attempts to refocus studies of conflict on cross-cutting internal divisions, dislocations, and voices of dissent.
