ETHNIC AND NATIONALIST VIOLENCE

Work on ethnic and nationalist violence has emerged from two largely n onintersecting literatures: studies of ethnic conflict and studies of political violence. Only recently have the former begun to attend to t he dynamics of violence and the latter to the dynamics of ethnicizatio n. Since the emergent literature on ethnic violence is not structured by clearly defined theoretical oppositions, we organize our review by broad similarities of methodological approach: (a) Inductive work at v arious levels of aggregation seeks to identify the patterns, mechanism s, and recurrent processes implicated in ethnic violence. (b) Theory-d riven work employs models of rational action drawn from international relations theory, game theory, and general rational action theory. (c) Culturalist work highlights the discursive, symbolic, and ritualistic aspects of ethnic violence. We conclude with a plea for the disaggreg ated analysis of the heterogeneous phenomena we too casually lump toge ther as ''ethnic violence.''