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7 - So Near, and Yet So Far: Group Relations between Victims and Perpetrators of Violence
- Raheel Dhattiwala, Universiteit van Amsterdam
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- Keeping the Peace
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Summary
Rumabanu, a Muslim housewife, has lived in Maniyarwada, a Muslim-majority neighbourhood of 900 residents, for the past 23 years. She shares the street with members of five other Muslim households, all of whom, she says, had witnessed the violence in 1985, 1992, and 2002. ‘I would be very happy to move to a place like Satellite (in western Ahmedabad), but can't afford it. They don't have to worry about riots and liquor and gambling.…’ Rumabanu was well aware of the fact that the Satellite neighbourhood was red-lined for Muslims, and to me she was merely voicing an aspiration. Rumabanu then takes me inside her house, and points to two to three jagged protrusions on the brick wall. It's a common back wall separating her from her next-door neighbour, a Hindu, residing in the adjoining Pithawali chali. ‘They tried to push swords through this wall in 2002! Nothing happened, but the mark is still visible.’ I was surprised that Rumabanu did not know the name of her neighbour with the common wall except that they were Hindus. ‘Our doors open on the other side, we rarely pass each other,’ she said.
—Fieldnotes, Gomtipur, 21 February 2015Who is a ‘neighbour’? Bulmer's words capture the most intuitive definition. They are ‘quite simply people who live near one another’ (Bulmer, 1986: 18). Indeed, geographical proximity is an essential characteristic of being a neighbour. Greater proximity leads to greater opportunity for contact between individuals. It follows then that people may choose to initiate contact and sustain it, depending on whether they find the outcome of engagement beneficial. The point is, proximity makes contact inevitable. As Cheshire (2015) says, even when it is someone whom you do not wish to actively interact with, physical proximity by itself makes it difficult to ignore them entirely.
Most studies favour contact between ethnic groups and find strong evidence supporting diversity in neighbourhoods. Mixing is desirable for it can not only encourage beneficial alliances across group boundaries but also reduce existing prejudice between groups (for example, Allport, 1954; also Piekut and Valentine, 2017; Pettigrew, 1998; Schmid et al., 2008), and may even deter future violence (Jha, 2014; Varshney, 2002). Spatial scale is crucial here. Parts of the world where different religions, races, and nationalities are in frequent contact are also prone to high levels of conflict, even violence.
List of Images
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Bibliography
- Raheel Dhattiwala, Universiteit van Amsterdam
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2 - Peace and Violence: Concepts and Theory
- Raheel Dhattiwala, Universiteit van Amsterdam
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In India, Hindu–Muslim violence is commonly referred to as ‘communal’ violence, with the term ‘ethnic’ reserved for racially and linguistically distinct groups. I prefer ‘ethnic’ for two reasons. First, following Gupta (2002) and Varshney (2002), conflict among Indian castes is properly communal because the opponent's national identity is not questioned; upper-caste Hindus accept backward-caste Hindus as legitimate members of the nation. ‘Ethnic’ mobilization, by contrast, reasserts national identity and defines the opponent as foreign; Hindus thus associate Muslims with Pakistan. I describe Hindu– Muslim conflict as ethnic or religious, as distinct from conflict among castes. Second, I follow Weber's classical definition of ethnic groups:
… those human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization and migration; this belief must be important for the propagation of group formation; conversely, it does not matter whether or not an objective blood relationship exists. (Weber, 1978: 389)
The book, therefore, makes use of the terms ‘ethnic’ and ‘religious’ interchangeably. It follows then that the label ‘ethnic violence’ is applicable to acts of collective violence, in which the ethnic difference of the parties involved is ‘integral rather than incidental to the violence … (wherein) violence is coded as having been meaningfully oriented in some way to the different ethnicity of the target’ (Brubaker and Laitin, 1998).
Some clarity on the labelling of violence is also important. Characteristic to violence in India, the state camouflages rationally motivated acts of violence against minority groups as spontaneous outbursts of emotions, notably anger, giving these acts a legitimate form of political expression (Brass, 2003; Hansen, 2008; Spodek, 2011; Tambiah, 1986). One may even compare these legitimized acts to informal justice systems in apartheid South Africa (Knox, 2001). The terminology is crucial here: organized violence is camouflaged as spontaneous, or a clash between antagonistic civilian groups whose members are overwhelmed by emotions. Would it then be appropriate to define such camouflaged yet planned attacks as riots?
Contents
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Dedication
- Raheel Dhattiwala, Universiteit van Amsterdam
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9 - Ethnic Violence: Connecting the Macro with the Micro
- Raheel Dhattiwala, Universiteit van Amsterdam
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The terrible violence in Gujarat in 2002 demands explanation, as one of the worst episodes of ethnic violence that has occurred under a democratic government. While the death of 59 Hindu karsevaks in a train fire in Godhra town was immediately declared as premeditated, the widespread attacks on Muslims that followed were termed spontaneous clashes. Since then, most observers have argued that the attacks were not spontaneous, and that the state government was complicit, at least, in the killings. But this does not explain why violence varied so widely across the state. Further, if political incentive accounted for violence in some constituencies, why did adjoining neighbourhoods experience different levels of violence? This book has aimed to bridge the wider political factors that foment ethnic violence, and the behaviour and interactions of individuals who eventually participate in it and are affected by it. In this final chapter, I attempt to establish a meaningful connection between these spatial scales to enhance our current understanding of collective violence.
Spontaneity and Deliberateness in Violence
In asking whether the variation in violence was random or could be sociologically explained, my principal aim was to test the ruling BJP's spontaneity thesis— that the attacks were emotionally charged outbursts of so-called mob behaviour. I first compiled an original data set of killings in Gujarat, down to the level of the neighbourhood. Then, by comparing peaceful with violent towns and rural areas of each district in Gujarat, I began this book with a systematic investigation of the social, political, and economic factors associated with the killings. Empirical evidence strongly refuted the spontaneity thesis. Instead, findings support state-approved orchestration: the worst killings occurred in places where the BJP faced the greatest electoral competition and not where the party was weak or even dominant. Muslims were most vulnerable where the BJP had previously won around 33–36 per cent of the vote, indicating that the party had to attract more voters to secure victory in the next election. Analysis also demonstrates that violence did boost the party's votes in the subsequent election. Attacks were, therefore, strategic, not spontaneous. Surely this is not a new finding, for it simply bolsters the evidence from other studies that violence in India against minority groups, whether Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, or Dalit Hindus, is politically orchestrated.
4 - Ahmedabad
- Raheel Dhattiwala, Universiteit van Amsterdam
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With a population of 7.2 million, Gujarat's largest city, Ahmedabad, is often mistaken as the state capital. This could either be for its size or the ‘shocks’— as Spodek (2011) terms its paradoxes—it portends. Ahmedabad abounds in paradoxes. A city that Gandhi chose to make his home from 1915 to 1930 had attained notoriety for its frequent and brutal episodes of violent ethnic conflict by the turn of the twenty-first century. In the period from 1950 to 1995, Ahmedabad and its neighbour Vadodara accounted for nearly 80 per cent of the total deaths in Hindu–Muslim violence in Gujarat (Varshney, 2002). Notwithstanding the series of violent conflict and natural calamities in the new millennium, such as the devastating earthquake in 2001, and floods in 2000 and 2006, Ahmedabad has withstood economic and industrial retrogression over the years. It could be because of what many call ‘resilience’—a word almost synonymous for enterprising Gujarati merchants known for ‘their ability of “bending with the wind”’ (Maloni, 2008: 193; also Frontline, 12–25 March 2005).
In hindsight, Gandhi's decision to adopt Ahmedabad as his temporary home was pragmatic, stimulated by the financial sustenance that the citizens could provide. It was also likely to have been rooted in the anxiety over imminent violence between caste and religious groups. Powerful institutions which he went on to establish in Ahmedabad, such as the provincial branch of the Indian National Congress and the Textile Labour Association (TLA), served as effective centres of governance and peace-building by way of creating and sustaining associational ties between Hindu and Muslim workers (Spodek, 2011; Varshney, 2002) as well as between upper-caste Hindus and Dalit workers (Jaffrelot, 2017). By the early twentieth century the textile industry in Ahmedabad had reached its pinnacle. In 1961, a year after Gujarat's secession from Bombay State, one-third of the residents of the city were migrants from the Indian states of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Maharashtra, working as labourers in the mills. However, the mid-60s pronounced the beginning of the decline of the textile mills and rising unemployment and, by the 1980s, the mills had collapsed as a result of domestic restructuring of the textile industry in India, producing a bulk of unemployed, skilled workmen.
6 - Monitoring and Control in Two Peaceful Neighbourhoods
- Raheel Dhattiwala, Universiteit van Amsterdam
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The sudden appearance of a vividly coloured building in the middle of a dreary slum neighbourhood takes me by surprise. This is Shamshad's house or ‘don ka makaan’ (don's mansion), as they call it in Ram Rahim Nagar. It is a mansion indeed in comparison with other houses in the neighbourhood: two-storey high with freshly painted walls. I am being told that one of Shamshad's two cars is parked inside and the other outside in a shed opposite Santoshnagar. Most striking are the three mosaic–stone benches, overlooking the window in the courtyard. Anyone familiar with city municipalities in Gujarat would know that these benches were donations by municipal corporators and MLAs to their respective wards and constituencies from their welfare budget, with their name engraved on it in Gujarati. It was a gift to their constituency voters in exchange of their votes. What's not familiar is to find them inside the residential premises of a voter's house. Three benches in Shamshad's courtyard, each bearing names of the ward's three municipal corporators—this was an unabashed signal of who's in charge.
—Fieldnotes, 15 November 2011Describing the distinctive southern culture of the United States, where specific cultural traditions legitimate violence, John Reed (1982: 147; emphasis in original) had said, ‘Sometimes people are violent because they want to be and there is nothing to stop them. But sometimes people are violent, even when they don't want to be, because there will be penalties [disgrace is a very effective one] for not being violent.’ In the days following the death of karsevaks, many Hindus believed they were obligated to defend the ‘lost honour’ of the community. It was the coward who dared protest. ‘Some of us were paid to attack Muslims, others like me had to do it because everyone around me was doing it … we didn't want to be disapproved by our own relatives, Raheelben,’ Jagdish, a Hindu rioter from Parikshitlal Nagar had told me in 2015.
In times of such opportunistic violence, when neighbourhoods go against the grain and stay peaceful, solidarity among the residents becomes implicit. It is assumed that every individual belonging to the group, shares the group interest and behaves in accordance with their group norms.
8 - The BJP's Muslim Supporters in Ahmedabad
- Raheel Dhattiwala, Universiteit van Amsterdam
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This was during the days after the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992. Then chief minister of Gujarat, Chimanbhai Patel, was looking for a Muslim police officer to get a hold on the tension in Surat. He called upon the services of A I Saiyed (real name), a senior police officer posted as deputy municipal commissioner in Ahmedabad. Saiyed told him: ‘When I put on the uniform, I am not a Muslim police officer. I am just an officer, and my caste and creed stay at home.’ He was not asked again. Saiyed retired as the additional director general of police (DGP) of Gujarat a few years later. Today, not many remember him for this incident which he penned in 2008 in a newspaper article. Most, however, do remember him as the man who could have been the ‘ first Muslim mayor of Ahmedabad under the BJP’ after municipal elections in 2010. Saiyed lost the election but managed to create enough recall with his 13,000-odd votes, presumably of Muslims, in Sarkhej ward so as to be most likely picked as the Hindu nationalist BJP's Muslim candidate in the December assembly elections in 2012. But the BJP's candidates list that year did not provide representation to any Muslim. Despite that, Saiyed aspired to hold the hands of his co-religionists to a brighter future of quality education and healthcare, one in which ‘we are no longer seen as a homogenous mass of illiterate people who refuse to assimilate’. ‘Only with education can Muslims realize what's best for them,’ he had said to me a few days before the BJP had declared its candidates, as we sat over a cup of tea in his house in Juhapura. The transformation was telling: a police officer who refused to use his religious identity as a bargaining tool had found a reason to join a right-wing political party and do just that as the only hope for the betterment of his community. In 2017, when I met him again, I did not find the same zeal in him. His stoicism intact, he still called himself a BJP supporter but not someone who could be considered for candidature anymore. Political times were different by then. Modi was now the Prime Minister of India, though any hopes of Muslims like Saiyed to find political representation had long been destroyed.
Preface
- Raheel Dhattiwala, Universiteit van Amsterdam
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In October 2001, I interviewed Ahsan Jafri, a Muslim politician, at his residence in Ahmedabad for the Times of India. Mr Jafri was an interesting man, I had heard—a former Congress minister, with a preference for communism, who expressed his abhorrence for militant Hinduism with the same vigour as he detested radicalization among his co-religionists. I was a freelance journalist then, writing occasionally on the city's freighted history of ethnic tensions and the extreme segregation I had grown up experiencing in my everyday life. It was just a month after the World Trade Centre bombings in the United States and my intention behind interviewing Mr Jafri was also to get a larger picture about the social ramifications of the event in India.
It is difficult, he told me, to profess liberalism in a society which sees the Hindu and the Muslim as primordial antagonists or ‘blood enemies’. His lament at the increasing thrust on dogmatic ritual within Islam had annoyed a considerable section of Muslims in his constituency who did not take his reformative aims very well. On the other hand, many Hindus incorrectly believed him to be a doctrinaire Muslim. On 28 February 2002, outside his home in Gulbarg Society in eastern Ahmedabad, Jafri was hacked and burned to death by a violent crowd of more than 5,000 Hindus, as the Ahmedabad Home Guards ‘watched and laughed’ (Human Rights Watch, 2002). His brutal murder at the hands of radical Hindus erased the complexity of religion and identity that he embodied.
Indeed, during my field research on the violence in Ahmedabad in 2010, and even earlier as a journalist, both Hindus and Muslims I spoke with would tirelessly favour the primordial argument. Hindus and Muslims fight, they would say, because ‘they are ancient enemies’. That the ‘enemies’ in some places choose to keep peace, despite the opportunity to engage in violence, was rarely noticed.
This book focuses on explaining why some places remained peaceful during times of extreme violence in 2002. It identifies the risk factors that led to different levels of violence across towns, villages, and neighbourhoods and, more comprehensively, factors that framed the behaviours of people who participated
5 - Spatial Configuration: Variation in Violence across Neighbourhoods
- Raheel Dhattiwala, Universiteit van Amsterdam
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Ram Rahim Nagar has good leaders and many of us listen to them. But I would say jadoo naqshe ka hai! The magic lies in the geography. This place can be intimidating for a tola (crowd). Just as we know the ins and outs of this place, the lanes and bylanes, corners and dead-ends, they do too. Even if a handful of us decide to put up a fight, they know they won't be able to escape. They simply don't dare to enter.
—Shafibhai, Muslim resident of Ram Rahim Nagar, 9 April 201128 February 2002: Dawn. Munaf and Amjad, Muslim shop-owners of Kabadi Market-2 in Ahmedabad awoke to horrifying news. A train had been burned in Godhra town the day before, ostensibly by a Muslim crowd, and ‘40 to 50’ Hindu passengers were thought to be killed in the fire. The two shop-owners had witnessed violence in 1969 and 1985 and knew that this was a trigger of astounding magnitude. Wary of reprisals, Munaf, along with other shop-owners of Market-2, hastily visited their shops around 8 am, instructed the three Muslim watchmen there to keep guard from within the market's colossal iron gates, and left for their homes. At 9 am, a crowd of Hindu attackers killed two of the watchmen, and looted the shops. At 10 am, the second market, Kabadi Market-3—half a kilometer away—was targeted in an equally potent attack. Puzzlingly, the outcome of the attack made on the second market, which bore goods worth three times more than the first, turned out to be different—no killings or looting occurred there.
Within the same electoral constituency, what explains different levels of violence across streets and neighbourhoods? When I first started fieldwork in neighbourhoods of Ahmedabad in August 2010, my primary objective was to test the hypothesis of political incentives. This was the most obvious next step following from Chapter 3 and Chapter 4. It was necessary to explain why patterns of violence should vary at the micro level when political incentives and politicized networks of attackers prevailed across an entire constituency. This is where the behaviour of people became the focal point of the explanation.
Acknowledgements
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Index
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List of Tables
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1 - Explaining Variation in Violence: An Introduction
- Raheel Dhattiwala, Universiteit van Amsterdam
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In the middle of August 2010, I witnessed two men being chased by a group of people through the narrow lanes of Ram Rahim Nagar, a slum neighbourhood in the heart of Gujarat's largest city, Ahmedabad. I looked towards Salman, my Muslim informant. ‘It's just a skirmish between two of our own people … a Hindu and a Muslim,’ he said. It was startling for a visitor like me that anything related to Hindu–Muslim violence should occur in Ram Rahim Nagar, a neighbourhood best recognized for its long history of peacefulness (Berenschot, 2011; Dhattiwala, 2006; Malekar, 2009; Times of India, 3 March 2002). When I expressed my concern, Salman laughed and said in Hindi: ‘H–M is a separate issue. These are scuffles, between drunks … H–M doesn't happen here.’ I grew up in Ahmedabad and was well-acquainted with the abbreviation H–M, two letters of the English alphabet that even the illiterate preferred to use over ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ when speaking of an ethnic riot. Standing next to Salman, Ruaab Khan, a Muslim from the neighbouring Santoshnagar, frowned and said, ‘Yes he's right, H–M never happens in Ram Rahim Nagar. Never did on our side too, you know … until that day. Those brutes came in hordes that day,’ he spoke of rioters who had looted his house in 2002.
The coterminous slums of Santoshnagar and Ram Rahim Nagar had seemed indistinguishable to me when I had first visited them as a researcher in 2010. It was hard to tell where the boundaries of one ended and the other began, as years of encroachments had blurred visual dividers between the two. Yet each neighbourhood was distinct to the people who lived in and around them. Pointing to a municipal water pumping station, Santoshnagar resident Arunbhai's observation was instructive, ‘Do you see this pumping station here? You could say that our boundaries end here and Ram Rahim Nagar's begin.’ Indeed, the 500 rioters who looted and burnt shanties in Santoshnagar twice, on 1 March and 14 April 2002, had clearly recognized this demarcation. Ram Rahim Nagar was not attacked. Violence had stopped near the pumping station.
List of Figures
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3 - The Political Logic of Violence: Anti-Muslim Pogrom in Gujarat
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This chapter begins by formulating testable hypotheses, and then enunciating the methodological procedure for compilation and analysis of data. The implicit political logic of why some places did not witness violence is demonstrated. More specifically, I demonstrate that (a) spatial variation in the violence was not random but strategically organized in those districts and constituencies where the BJP faced the greatest electoral competition in the December 2002 state elections, (b) consequently, the violence enabled victory for the BJP at a time when the party was very likely to have lost.
In January 2001, nearly 14,000 people were killed in a massive earthquake in Gujarat (Times of India, 26 January 2016). The BJP drew widespread criticism for its response to the calamity. This was a turbulent period for the party, for its grip on the state had begun to wane. Candidates had fared poorly in civic and district panchayat elections in 2000. Following the earthquake, the party lost two by-elections in September 2001: one for the State Assembly, and one for the Parliament in Delhi. The chief minister at the time, Keshubhai Patel, resigned, to be replaced by Modi. Under Modi, however, the BJP lost two further Assembly seats in three by-elections in February 2002. In those four by-elections for the State Assembly, its vote fell on an average by 14 percentage points from 1998. A complete revival of the party in Gujarat was vital, particularly for the new chief minister, before the state elections that were scheduled for the end of 2002. Thus, the political logic articulated by Wilkinson was clearly relevant to violence in 2002. Second, several accounts and legal petitions have directly blamed Modi and other elected BJP politicians, particularly those who were cabinet ministers or ministers of state, for fomenting anti-Muslim violence. Kodnani's conviction in 2012 is illustrative. Third, emotionally distressed and angry BJP supporters were likely to have reacted violently towards Muslims.
Based on this, three hypotheses can be laid out:
Hypothesis 1a: Muslims were more likely to be killed where the BJP faced greatest electoral competition.
Hypothesis 1b: Muslims were more likely to be killed where the elected member of the legislative assembly (MLA) was from the BJP.
Hypothesis 1c: Muslims were more likely to be killed where the BJP had the greatest electoral support.
Frontmatter
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Keeping the Peace
- Spatial Differences in Hindu-Muslim Violence in Gujarat in 2002
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In times of extreme violence, what explains peace in some places? This book investigates geographic variation in Hindu-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002, an event witnessed closely by the author. It compares peaceful and violent towns, villages, and neighbourhoods to study how political violence spreads. A combination of statistical and ethnographic methods unpack the mechanisms of crowd behaviour, intergroup relations, and political incentives. Macro-level risk factors that led to the violence are analysed to provide a close understanding of the behaviour of people who participated in the violence, were targeted by it and, often, compelled to carry on living alongside their perpetrators. Findings systematically demonstrate the implicit political logic of the violence. Most of all, by moving up close to the people caught in the middle of violence; findings highlight the interplay between politics, the spatial environment, and the cognitive decision-making processes of individuals.