ABSTRACT

In this chapter, we aim to highlight how recent research leads to revisit traditional assumptions about the interplay between ethnicity, violence, and conflict. Instead of asking the usual questions about how conflict between ethnic groups would lead to collective violence, it urges us to develop new questions about the way ethnic categories themselves are shaped by political violence grounded in multilayered social conflicts and struggles over power. This challenge will be taken up here in three steps. In the first section, we will confront the increasing prominence of ethnicity as a descriptive and explanatory concept in studies on collective violence, with its lack of definitional and analytical precision. We will critically revisit the notion that ethnic conflict, or even diversity, lead to ethnic violence, and stress the need for specific explanations of the qualitative shift from nonviolent conflict to violent conflict. In the second section, we will review work showing how political violence not only transforms intergroup relations, but also the “ethnic in-group”: how it dramatically affects moral climates and the social fabric in the midst of communities that are supposed to be struggling together against a common enemy. In the third section, we will discuss in more detail processes through which complex experiences of violence are transformed into simple in-group narratives by way of directed forgetting, how these narratives provide prescriptive frameworks for actions against declared enemies, but also how and when they can be effectively challenged. This will finally lead to discuss the potential contribution of criminal tribunals to social reconstruction following political violence: how can their work help to clarify boundaries of responsibility, agency, and power, which are typically obfuscated by reifying depictions of “ethnic conflict”?