ABSTRACT
“Belonging and the Question of Violence” looks at the construction of what kind of person was considered appropriate to belong to a given society. In the era of national self-determination, who was included in the collective “self” doing the determining mattered deeply at the level of both the social community and formal politics. This became a much larger question of who could be included and excluded from the new nation, and it was pursued by both official and unofficial forces, some very organized and others highly ad hoc. Since the question of belonging also beings up the question of exclusion (and the methodologies of such exclusion), this chapter also addresses the differences in violence between western and eastern forms of population engineering, and argues that the western form should not be lightly dismissed.
