This book investigates the ideological and political conditions that allow, and sanction, the undisguised political violence of our times. It is concerned with the regnant demands of nationalism and of history writing, and the unity and uniformity upon which these insist.

Analyses violent conflict and its impact on local institutional and development processes. It shows how the behaviour of individuals helps us understand the complex dynamic links between conflict, violence and development.

Most human action has a technical dimension. This book examines four components of this technical dimension. First, in all actions, various individual, organizational or institutional agents combine actional capabilities with tools, institutions, infrastructure and other elements by means of which they act. Second, the deployment of capabilities and means is permeated by ethical aspirations and hesitancies. Third, all domains of action are affected by these ethical dilemmas. Fourth, the dimensions of the technicity of action are typical of human life in general, and not just a regional or culturally specific phenomenon. In this study, an interdisciplinary approach is adopted to encompass the broad anthropological scope of this study and combine this bigger picture with detailed attention to the socio-historical particularities of action as it plays out in different contexts. Hermeneutics (the philosophical inquiry into the human phenomena of meaning, understanding and interpretation) and social science (as the study of all human affairs) are the two main disciplinary orientations of this book. This study clarifies the technical dimension of the entire spectrum of human action ranging from daily routine to the extreme of violent protest.

An international manual is like a world cruise: a once-in-a-lifetime experience. All the more reason to consider carefully whether it is necessary. This can hardly be the case if previous research in the selected field has already been the subject of an earlier review-or even several competing surveys. On the other hand, more thorough study is necessary if the intensity and scope of research are increasing without comprehensive assessments. That was the situation in Western societies when work began on this project in the summer of 1998. It was then, too, that the challenges emerged: any manual, espe cially an international one, is a very special type of text, which is anything but routine. It calls for a special effort: the "state of the art" has to be documented for selected subject areas, and its presentation made as compelling as possible. The editors were delighted, therefore, by the cooperation and commitment shown by the eighty-one contributors from ten countries who were recruited to write on the sixty-two different topics, by the con structive way in which any requests for changes were dealt with, and by the patient re sponse to our many queries. This volume is the result of a long process. It began with the first drafts outlining the structure of the work, which were submitted to various distinguished colleagues. Friedheim Neidhardt of Berlin, Gertrud Nunner-Winkler of Munich, and Roland Eckert of Trier, to name only a few, supplied valuable comments at this stage.

Close to three hundred stores and supermarkets were looted during week-long food riots in Argentina in December 2001. Thirty-four people were reported dead and hundreds were injured. Among the looting crowds, activists from the Peronist party (the main political party in the country) were quite prominent. During the lootings, police officers were conspicuously absent - particularly when small stores were sacked. Through a combination of archival research, statistical analysis, multi-sited fieldwork, and taking heed of the perspective of contentious politics, this book provides an analytic description of the origins, course, meanings, and outcomes of the December 2001 wave of lootings in Argentina.

In 2002, armed Hindu mobs attacked Muslims in broad daylight in the west Indian state of Gujarat. The pogrom, which was widely seen over television, left more than one thousand dead. In Composing Violence Moyukh Chatterjee examines how highly visible political violence against minorities acts as a catalyst for radical changes in law, public culture, and power. He shows that, far from being quashed through its exposure by activists, media, and politicians, state-sanctioned anti-Muslim violence set the stage for transforming India into a Hindu supremacist state. The state's and civil society’s responses to the violence, Chatterjee contends, reveal the constitutive features of modern democracy in which riots and pogroms are techniques to produce a form of society based on a killable minority and a triumphant majority. Focusing on courtroom procedures, police archives, legal activism, and mainstream media coverage, Chatterjee theorizes violence as a form of governance that creates minority populations. By tracing the composition of anti-Muslim violence and the legal structures that transform that violence into the making of minorities and majorities, Chatterjee demonstrates that violence is intrinsic to liberal democracy.

Tadjoeddin uniquely explores four types of violent conflicts pertinent to contemporary Indonesia (secessionist, ethnic, routine-everyday and electoral violence), and seeks to discover what socio-economic development can do to overcome conflict and make the country's transition to democracy safe for its constituencies.