ABSTRACT
Emilio Kosterlitzky was a transnational warrior, one man among many who specialized in violence while crossing empires and borderlands. In 1906, the cosmopolite, who purportedly spoke Russian, German, Spanish, French, Polish, Italian, Danish, Swedish, and English, became Colonel Emilio Kosterlitzky in the Mexican Army. When the Mexican Revolution spread to the borderlands, Kosterlitzky was caught between United States troops and revolutionaries in a fight in Nogales in 1913. As Kosterlitzky's story illustrates, histories of violence seldom come in neat packages or with internal coherence and clear beginnings and endings. Many social conflicts in the West seemingly carry quite explicit transnational characteristics relating to industrialization, class warfare, and racial tensions, the heated questions surrounding the development of the modern world. For anyone interested in discussing the global linkages of Western violence, histories of genocide are at the same time one of the more interesting, polarizing, and, until recently, strangely absent issues in the field.
