This volume offers political and institutional explanations for communal conflicts in India. The volume complies influential and lesser-known yet significant interventions to present the most comprehensive social scientific analysis of communal violence in India.

Or contain the violence.

This is a major new contribution to comparative and multidisciplinary scholarship on the alignment of religion and violence in South and Southeast Asia.

Transcript of lectures organized by the Centre for Research in Rural and Industrial Development, Chandigarh; chiefly in the context of India of the eighties.

Papers presented at the Workshop on Religious Mobilisation and Organisation of Violence, held at Roskilde during 3-4 April 2003.

Why does religion become a fault line of communal violence in some pluralistic countries and not others? Under what conditions will religious identity - as opposed to other salient ethnic cleavages - become the spark that ignites communal violence? Contemporary world politics since 9/11 is increasingly marked by intra-state communal clashes in which religious identity is the main fault line. Yet, violence erupts only in some religiously pluralistic countries, and only in some parts of those countries. This study argues that prominent theories in the study of civil conflict cannot adequately account for the variation in subnational identity-based violence. Examining this variation in the context of Nigeria's pluralistic north-central region, this book finds support for a new theory of power-sharing. It finds that communities are less likely to fall prey to a divisive narrative of religious difference where local leaders informally agreed to abide by an inclusive, local government power-sharing arrangement.