ABSTRACT
This paper seeks to address one of the central puzzles in the study of ethnic conflict: what prevents ethnic violence from (re-)occurring in places with recent history of violent conflict? The absence of violence—although not necessarily conflict—in the city of Osh, site of the largest and bloodiest inter-communal conflicts in post-Soviet Central Asia, is indeed empirically as well as theoretically puzzling. As a result, understanding what happened in post-Soviet Osh constitutes a particularly useful starting point for examining the more general question of identifying the factors that helped maintain inter-ethnic peace.
