Ethnic violence

Ethnic violence refers to violence expressly motivated by ethnic hatred and ethnic conflict. It is commonly related to political violence, and often the terms are interchangeable, or one is used as a pretext for the other when politically expedient. Forms of ethnic violence which can be argued to have the character of terrorism may be known as ethnic terrorism or ethnically-motivated terrorism. "Racist terrorism" is a form of ethnic violence dominated by overt racism and xenophobic reactionism.

Ethnic violence in an organized, sustained form is known as ethnic conflict or warfare (race war), in contrast to class conflict, where the dividing line is social class rather than ethnic background.

Care must be taken to distinguish ethnic violence, which is violence motivated by an ethnic division, from violence that just happens to break out between groups of different ethnicity motivated by other factors (political or ideological).

Violent ethnic rivalry is the subject matter of Jewish sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz's Der Rassenkampf ("Struggle of the Races", 1909); and more recently of Amy Chua's notable study, World On Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability. Some academics would place all "nationalist-based violence" under ethnic violence, which would include the World Wars and all major conflicts between industrialised nations during the 19th century.

There are a variety of potential causes for ethnic violence. Research by the New England Complex Systems Institute has shown that violence results when ethnic groups are partially mixed: neither clearly separated enough to reduce contact nor thoroughly mixed enough to build common bonds. According to Dr. May Lim, a researcher affiliated with NECSI, "Violence normally occurs when a group is large enough to impose cultural norms on public spaces, but not large enough to prevent those norms from being broken. Usually this occurs in places where boundaries between ethnic or cultural groups are unclear."

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