Civil about Intergroup Violence? Five Inadequacies of Communal and Ethnic Constructs of Urban Riots

The term ‘communal violence’ is commonly used in the South Asian context to refer to intergroup or ethnic violence. I contend that understanding intergroup violence purely within an inter-community or inter-ethnic framework is inadequate, in that it does not fully capture the processes of perpetration, impacts or mitigation of such violence. I suggests five areas where the categories of ‘communal’ and ‘ethnic’ fall short: in their historical precision, in their scale, in their partial conceptualization of agency, in their ability to engage with the gendered modalities of violence, and in their ability to explain individuals’ motivations for physically perpetrating intergroup violence. The arguments are based on primary data gathered through indepth interviews with victims, perpetrators and witnesses of incidents of intergroup violence in India, as well as a review of relevant studies of intergroup violence from across the world. The terminology of ‘civil violence’, which expressly accommodates a micro-perspective and awards agency to individuals, is highlighted as a more accurate and appropriate framework to understand violence categorized as ‘communal’ in contemporary India. These arguments also have implications on how we conceptualize the ‘ethnic riot’, and how state and society formulate responses to intergroup violence, elsewhere in the developing world.