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Roger D. Petersen: Understanding Ethnic Violence: Fear, Hatred, and Resentment in Twentieth Century Eastern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 312 pages, ISBN: 10-0521-00774-7.
In the context of the post-Cold War world, international attention (often via the media) and political science itself have turned increasingly to the problem of "ethnic violence" around the world. When faced with the violent conflicts that typified the 1990s - Somalia, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia - a commonly heard interpretation of the source of such violence is the eruption of "ancient hatreds" among ethnic groups that have been simmering beneath the surface, waiting for an incendiary cause. Roger Petersen's Understanding Ethnic Violence, a study of violence throughout the 20th century in Europe, represents a challenge to this interpretation. seeking a valid place for emotion in the study of violent ethnic and nationalist conflict, Petersen creates a model of four emotions which he applies to various case studies, in hopes of explaining the motives of individual perpetrators through a chain of structural causes. A professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Petersen specializes in comparative politics and ethnic violence. This work represents a significant contribution to the growing body of literature in ethnic relations which seeks a more interdisciplinary means of explanation.
Petersen defines emotion as "a mechanism that triggers action to satisfy a pressing concern".1 Of the four emotions Petersen identifies - Fear, Hatred, Resentment and Rage - only Rage is noninstrumental, each of the other three in some way prepares the individual to satisfy a desire or concern. The analysis' primary concern is the motivation for a shift in relations between different ethnic groups from relatively peaceful coexistence to violent conflict or discrimination. It assumes that ethnic relations within a given country or region are structured in a hierarchy which can be identified through specific indicators, such as language policy, ethnic composition of the police and high-level civil and military service, land distribution policy and other symbolic indicators.
The analysis offers a purely structural explanation for the development of these emotions, and, in turn, of ethnic violence. Both gradual modernization and abrupt shocks produce "information that is processed into beliefs that in turn, almost inevitably, create emotions and tendencies toward certain actions".2 Each instrumental emotion predicts...