Intercommunal Warfare and Ethnic Peacemaking

With increasing urban population density, conflicts in cities erupt more frequently and violently. Cities have become hotspots for armed combat, highlighting the urgency of understanding the impact of local communities and urban factors on the development of violent conflict. Joldon Kutmanaliev presents a novel approach to analyzing communal violence and armed conflicts in urban zones. Drawing from fieldwork in cities of southern Kyrgyzstan, he explains local-level variations in violence across neighbourhoods during the most intense and violent episode of urban communal violence in Central Asia – the clashes between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in June 2010. Kutmanaliev explains why armed violence affects some urban neighbourhoods but not others, why local communities react differently to the same existential threat, how they deal with a deteriorating security environment and interethnic fears, and how different types of urban planning and urban landscapes influence the spread of violence. Importantly, the book identifies key factors that help local communities and their leaders to negotiate non-aggression pacts and control local constituencies, and therefore successfully prevent violence. Intercommunal Warfare and Ethnic Peacemaking explains communal war and ethnic peacemaking on the level of neighbourhood communities – a perspective that is largely absent in previous studies.

Intercommunal Warfare and Ethnic Peacemaking offers an analysis of communal violence and armed conflict in urban Central Asia. Drawing from Joldon Kutmanaliev’s fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan, the book assesses local-level differences in communal violence across neighbourhoods and the role of local communities and urban landscapes in conflict prevention.

“This book is the first in-depth study of the 2010 violence in Kyrgyzstan. Kutmanaliev presents an important account of a significant violent event that has hitherto not been the focus of a full book. The author combines rich data with an innovative methodological approach grounded in rigorous theory. Importantly, the author recognizes the limitations of his data and avoids making causal claims where the evidence is lacking. For example, rather than framing pacts as causal determinants of peace, he focuses on how they reduce uncertainty and tensions. This allows him to come to a more convincing conclusion about the determinants of peace and violence that is simultaneously satisfying in its parsimony while accounting for the complexity of the social events being analysed. This book is a major contribution to our knowledge of political violence.” Edward Lemon, Texas A&M

”This book makes an important contribution to research in the microdynamics of urban intergroup violence and of the ‘spatial turn’ in peace and conflict research. In particular, its novelty lies applying and developing existing theoretical arguments to a new unit of analysis; considering the role of spatial dynamics in shaping these theoretical mechanisms; and in-depth structured exploration of a largely understudied case.” Emma Elfversson, Uppsala University

Joldon Kutmanaliev is researcher at the University of Tübingen.