ABSTRACT
There has been considerable scholarship on the perpetration of violence against civilians as a political strategy, particularly in ethnoreligious and intrastate conflicts. In the United States, where white supremacism has been a significant source of such violence, scholars have examined how racist groups practice and promote violence, how they decide that violence is a plausible and effective tactic, how they mobilize members and encourage them to enact violence, and the varying consequences of such violence on racial minority victims and communities, bystanders, and society at large. This chapter argues that research on US white supremacism is circumscribed by frameworks of inquiry that may be implicated in studies of violent perpetration in other historical and social contexts. It illustrates how these frameworks affect research by revisiting two major eras of white supremacist activity in the United States. Agency is a pervasive analytical framework in ethnographies of white supremacism. A second interpretive framework is that of the allure of the extraordinary.
