Mass Violence

Many Western European countries have seen increasing tension between local communities and immigrant groups, especially Muslims, with mutual grievances. These tensions have been more apparent and stronger since 9/11/2001. Intensified by further terrorist attacks, the war on terror, and the fear of terrorism, negative attitudes toward Muslim populations have been increasing. While relevant to many European countries, this article focuses on the conditions and relationships between groups in the Netherlands, particularly in Amsterdam. Drawing on past work on the roots and prevention of violence and reconciliation between groups and on field experience, the article offers proposals to prevent violence and support for terrorism and foster positive group relations, such as humanizing other groups, dialogue and other practices to promote inclusive in the place of destructive ideologies, psychological healing from past woundedness, promoting pluralism, contact between groups, and the exploration of shared history. School practices and relations between children is an aspect of these proposals. It is hoped that the proposals and the analyses they are based on can give rise to actions that will prevent violence and foster positive relations between groups in the Netherlands, and will be applied to other settings as well.

This study is grounded in extensive online ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with 22 people who expressed a deep interest in school shootings. Such people form a global online subculture; they share common interests and find the same cultural objects important. Media accounts of school shootings have fueled this subculture; its members participate in the recreation and circulation of online media content and give new meanings to that content. We found that people deeply interested in school shootings do not form a homogenous group, and they are divided into four subgroups within the subculture based on members' focus and interest: researchers, fan girls, Columbiners, and copycats. Out of these, copycats are the only subgroup explicitly interested in replicating the acts, although subgroup membership can overlap, and members can move from one subgroup to another. Beyond copycats, other subgroups also participate in giving perpetrators fame and circulate reasons for the shootings. These accounts may influence future perpetrators.

Highlights • Research explicitly applying a leisure science approach to mass murder has yet to occur. • Some cases of mass violence may be planned and carried out as an ultimate subjective leisure experience. • An addition of leisure science to forensic behavioral science may offer new insights into mass violence attacks.

This study tested social cognitive theory of posttraumatic adaptation in the context of mass violence, hypothesizing that pre-event protective factors (general self-efficacy and perceived social support) would reduce posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) and depression severity through boosting post-event coping self-efficacy appraisals (mediator). We qualified hypotheses by predicting that post-event social support barriers would disrupt (moderate) the health-promoting indirect effects of pre-event protective factors. With a prospective longitudinal sample, we employed path models with bootstrapping resampling to test hypotheses. Participants included 70 university students (71.4% female; 40.0% White; 34.3% Asian; 14.3% Hispanic) enrolled during a mass violence event who completed surveys one year pre-event and 5–6 months post-event. Results revealed significant large effects in predicting coping self-efficacy (mastery model, R 2 = .34; enabling model, R 2 = .36), PTSS (mastery model, R 2 = .35; enabling model, R 2 = .41), and depression severity (mastery model, R 2 = .43; enabling model, R 2 = .46). Overall findings supported study hypotheses, showing that at low levels of post-event social support barriers, pre-event protective factors reduced distress severity through boosting coping self-efficacy. However, as post-event social support barriers increased, the indirect, distress-reducing effects of pre-event protective factors were reduced to nonsignificance. Study implications focus on preventative and responsive intervention.

This article evaluates reparation by the state after four of the worst episodes of violence against religious minorities in independent India.
Examining official records obtained through India’s law on the right to information, I analyse government aid to victims after identity-based massacres over a twenty-year period. 
I argue that there is a well-established repertoire of reparations measures after sectarian violence, but despite the resources available within a politically stable state, Indian reparation programmes are unimaginative and meagre. I argue further that the political opportunity structure for reparations is limited by the fact that sectarian mobilisation is embedded within electoral politics in India. Just as sectarian politics led governments to tolerate mass violence, it constricts the checks and balances that might lead to adequate reparation after violence subsides. I then suggest that opportunities to negotiate better reparation for victims expand over time, and propose that a law on reparations would constrain state bias and strengthen opportunities for victims to demand the support that they need.

[English] This article outlines a methodology of processual explanation. Amenable to a wide range of research objects as well as social theories, this methodology allows for generalized conclusions on a higher level of abstraction. We argue that a processual explanation of empirical cases requires two modes of temporal reconstruction, basic and complex. Whereas basic reconstruction provides a detailed description of sequences of events, complex reconstruction captures interlacing and interfering sequences. Taken together, these sequences and their interlacements as well as interferences constitute the needed explanation of the phenomenon focused on. The methodology is based on two empirical case studies: (a) mass shootings and (b) the rise of the field of empirical educational research. In both cases, the temporal concept of the turning-point is central to their processual explanation. The research agenda that follows from this article is the integration of further temporal concepts into this methodology.
[German] Der Artikel zielt darauf ab, Grundzüge einer Methodologie prozessualen Erklärens (MpE) zu erörtern, die erstens gegenstandsoffen ist, sich zweitens in Bezug auf sozialtheoretische Prämissen möglichst wenig einschränkt und drittens generalisierende Aussagen erlaubt, die vom jeweils untersuchten Gegenstand abstrahieren. Der Begriff des Timings fungiert als explanatorisches Schlüsselkonzept. Die Erklärung setzt voraus, das interessierende Geschehen zunächst möglichst detailliert zu rekonstruieren. Während die basale Rekonstruktion dazu dient, die Sequenzialität der Ereignisse zu beschreiben, hat die komplexe Rekonstruktion zum Ziel, Verschachtelungen und Interferenzen der Sequenzen zu eruieren, die zusammengenommen das erklärungsbedürftige Phänomen bilden. Maßgeblich inspiriert ist die MpE durch zwei sehr unterschiedliche Untersuchungsfälle: (a) Massenerschießungen und (b) Empirische Bildungsforschung. Die Studien haben jedoch gemeinsam, dass die Verlaufsform des Wendepunkts zur prozessualen Erklärung der Ereignisse dient. Die Forschungsperspektive ist, weitere Verlaufsformen sozialen Geschehens in den hier vorgeschlagenen Ansatz einzubeziehen.

The expression of an Islamic political radicalism in Britain has been one of the most dramatic developments in recent decades. Islamic Radicalism and Multicultural Politics explores the nature of this phenomenon by analysing the origins of Islam and its historical contact with Western Europe and Britain, and the emergence of Islamic political radicalism in the Muslim world and in the West.

Tahir Abbas draws on historical analysis and contemporary case studies to explore the post-war immigration and integration of Muslim groups, the complex relations that exist between a secular liberal Britain and a diverse but multifaceted Islam, and the extent of social and economic inequalities that affect Muslims as individual citizens and in local area communities. He shows how violent extremism among British Muslims is in reality influenced by a range of issues, including the factors of globalisation and contemporary politics, media and culture. Analysing and dissecting public policy, Abbas offers suggestions for tackling the major social, political and economic questions facing British Muslims in the post-7/7 era.

An important contribution to the study of religion, ‘race’ and ethnicity in modern Britain, this accessible work will be of interest to anyone working in the field of Islamic studies, sociology and political radicalism.

Reviews

‘Much of the commentary on Islam today is shrill and one-dimensional which further widens the gap between Muslims and non-Muslims. Because Tahir Abbas’ Islamic Radicalism and Multicultural Politics is reasoned, scholarly and aims to provide historical context it is a powerful corrective. Being both British and Muslim allows him to present us with a truly insider’s account.’ - Professor Akbar Ahmed, Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies, American University

‘In the face of so many superficial denunciations of radical Islam in Britain, Tahir Abbas provides an account that is both broad in its historical coverage and profound in its social analysis. In his sweep of several centuries of South Asian Islamic thinking, Abbas includes the conflicts engendered by British colonialism, and the complex processes of immigration and settlement in Britain. He is especially good in his own speciality, the patterns of inequality in education and in the labour market, through which he shows how the global growth in radical thinking can articulate with domestic social disparities. Here is a distinctive voice entering the debate.’ - John R. Bowen, Washington University in St. Louis.

‘Terrorist incidents have created controversy about Islam and Muslims, and British Muslims have been part of this debate. Media and lay people take a very superficial view and blame Islam and Muslims for radicalisation. This book is an in-depth study of the causes of radicalisation of a section of British Muslims. It is a very useful study indeed and all those who want to understand this complex phenomenon should read the book: Dr Abbas has done a good job!’ - Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer, Centre for Study of Society and Secularism, India

‘A remarkable book, well researched, comprehensive in its coverage and highly relevant to contemporary British political concerns.’ - John Rex, Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology, Warwick University"

Theory highlights forgiveness as a dynamic process that unfolds over time,
as well as a potential target for posttrauma therapy. Longitudinal research,
however, is nonexistent in the trauma literature. Further, the adaptation of
forgiveness for understanding mass violent events has yet to be tested. The
current study examined a theory-based hypothesis posing forgiveness as a
mediator between posttraumatic stress (PTS) symptoms and posttraumatic
growth (PTG) in the context of a mass university campus shooting. Results
showed that forgiveness was a significant mediator of the indirect, positive
relationship between Time 1 PTS and Time 1 and Time 2 PTG.
Implications include considering mechanisms (e.g., forgiveness) that link
PTS and PTG for application in future research and practice.

The massacre of almost 50 Maidan protesters on February 20, 2014 was a turning point in Ukrainian politics and a tipping point in the conflict between the West and Russia over Ukraine. This mass killing of the protesters and the mass shooting of the police that preceded it led to the overthrow of the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych and gave a start to a civil war in Donbas in Eastern Ukraine, Russian military intervention in Crimea and Donbas, and an international conflict between the West and Russia over Ukraine. A conclusion promoted by the post-Yanukovych governments and the media in Ukraine that the massacre was perpetrated by government snipers and special police units on a Yanukovych order has been nearly universally accepted by the Western governments, the media, and many scholars. The Ukrainian government investigation identified members of the special company of Berkut as responsible for killings of the absolute majority of the protesters, but did not release any evidence in support, with the exception of videos of the massacre.
              The question is which side organized the “snipers’ massacre.” This paper is the first academic study of this crucial case of the mass killing. It uses a theory of rational choice and a Weberian theory of instrumental rationality to examine actions of major actors both from the Yanukovych government, specifically various police and security forces, and the Maidan opposition, specifically its far right and oligarchic elements, during the massacre.
          The paper analyzes a large amount of evidence from different publicly available sources concerning this massacre and killings of specifics protesters. Qualitative content analysis includes the following data: about 1,500 videos and recordings of live internet and TV broadcasts from mass media and social media in different countries(some 150 gigabytes), news reports and social media posts by more than 100 journalists covering the massacre from Kyiv, some 5,000 photos, and nearly 30 gigabytes of publicly available radio intercepts of snipers and commanders from the special Alfa unit of the Security Service of Ukraine and Internal Troops, and Maidan massacre trial recordings. This study also employs field research on site of the massacre, eyewitness reports by both Maidan protesters and government special units commanders, statements by both former and current government officials, estimates of approximate ballistic trajectories, bullets and weapons used, and types of wounds among both protesters and the police. This study establishes a precise timeline for various events of the massacre, the locations of both the shooters and the government snipers, and the specific timeline and locations of nearly 50 protesters’ deaths. It also briefly analyzes other major cases of violence during and after the “Euromaidan.” This study includes two video appendixes.
            This academic investigation concludes that the massacre was a false flag operation, which was rationally planned and carried out with a goal of the overthrow of the government and seizure of power. It found various evidence of the involvement of an alliance of the far right organizations, specifically the Right Sector and Svoboda, and oligarchic parties, such as Fatherland. Concealed shooters and spotters were located in at least 20 Maidan-controlled buildings or areas. The various evidence that the protesters were killed from these locations include some 70 testimonies, primarily by Maidan protesters, several videos of “snipers” targeting protesters from these buildings, comparisons of positions of the specific protesters at the time of their killing and their entry wounds, and bullet impact signs. The study uncovered various videos and photos of armed Maidan “snipers” and spotters in many of these buildings. The paper presents implications of these findings for understanding the nature of the change of the government in Ukraine, the civil war in Donbas, Russian military intervention in Crimea and Donbas, and an international conflict between the West and Russia over Ukraine.

Mass violence is empirically rare. Studying mass violence presents numerous meth-odological challenges. The complex nature of mass violence events, which may have germinated in years prior, make attempts to use conventional research methods problematic. Complexity science and the interdisciplinary field of computational social science offer new scientific paradigms and computational tools well suited to the study of complex and dynamic phenomena like mass violence. We review aspects of mass violence that can hamper research efforts, introduce complexity science, computational social science and computational modeling, and highlight three types of computational models that will likely be of particular interest and value to the threat assessment and management community. Public Significance Statement This theoretical review article discusses methodological challenges for mass violence research and proposes computational modeling and simulation as a valuable tool for use by threat assessment and management researchers and professionals. We discuss basic principles of complexity science, modeling, and simulation, and suggest three types of computational models-spatial/tactical, population, and organizational-of particular appeal for threat assessment and management. We conclude by presenting an example spatial/tactical agent-based model used to conduct computational research on the possibility of unarmed resistance in an active shooter scenario.

This article explores how and why deportation and elimination of the Armenians of Antep were carried out during World War One (WWI). In particular, it scrutinizes the political and social context in which local authorities, provincial elites, and ordinary Muslims radicalized their views and policies against Armenians. It highlights the crucial role played by local elites and actors who prospered through acquisition of Armenian property and wealth. In this respect, the article argues that the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP)’s genocide and deportation decision enjoyed a certain level of social support through the practice of effective power and control mechanism(s) at the local level.

Historians have overwhelmingly relied on official sources and foreign witnesses’ (diplomats, missionaries) accounts in reconstructing the history of the Armenian genocide. They have tended to distrust and neglect victims’ testimonies, even though some of them had been publicised in the midst of the First World War. This article provides an account of the three main corpuses of survivor testimony which were gathered during the immediate post-war years in Transcaucasia, Constantinople, as well as in Aleppo and Paris. Various Armenian organisations created such archival collections as a means of lending support to national political claims and interests in the context of the ensuing peace negotiations and anticipated trials. This article also examines the longstanding reluctance of historians to integrate victims’ testimonies into their analyses. Focusing on the collection of testimonies compiled by Aram Andonian, the authors call attention to the important contribution of these sources to the history of the Armenian genocide.

The alt-right is an online subculture marked by its devotion to the execution of a racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic politics through trolling, pranking, meme-making, and mass murder. It is this devotion to far-right politics through the discordant conjunction of humor and suicidal violence this article seeks to explain by situating the movement for the first time within its constitutive online relationships. This article adds to the existing literature by viewing the online relationships of the alt-right through the genealogy of propaganda. Through situating the alt-right alongside the genealogy of propaganda, the article offers new insights into the social isolation, increasingly extreme social and political positions, nihilism, and violence that have emerged within the alt-right. The article concludes by applying the lessons of the alt-right for online organizing across the political spectrum and argues that a class-based politics of the left is an important part of countering the rise of the alt-right.

Psychoanalyst Dori Laub asserts that for camp inmates the Holocaust extinguished
the possibility of “I-thou” interaction. Address and response, the
basis of human subjectivity, became impossible for the prisoner to imagine.
The author of this article uses victims’ descriptions of perpetrators to
investigate this assertion. Do survivors at times conceive of a wartime
assailant as “you”—as an addressable human agent? Comparing two clusters
of testimony by Lithuanian Jews, the author finds that contemporary
language and social context shape the victims’ stance toward Holocaust
perpetration—that is, how they weigh human versus structural wrong. She
also points out various ethical traps inherent in each of the two methods
of remembering wartime aggressors.

Prevalence rates of multiple homicide are statistically rare and vary across nations, yet such cases create substantial suffering for victims and can generate widespread fear among the general population. Despite extreme rarity, it remains important for forensic experts and professionals to be prepared when extremely violent events occur. This review summarizes contemporary behavioral science of serial and mass murder, then highlights the application of recent leisure research to add new motivational and behavioral insights. Research on the application of leisure science to homicide research is in its infancy, yet in conjunction with other related behavioral science disciplines, appears to hold promise in understanding, and perhaps helping to prevent, future violence.

The 1990s saw major developments within the Kurdish movement in Turkey, both politically and militarily. The Turkish state responded with a new repertoire of violence, characterized by irregular warfare methods. This article situates the phenomenon of enforced disappearance, employed by the state as part of its asymmetric strategy, within the broader context of memory space and everyday experience. For this, I follow the trajectory of the sittings of Saturday Mothers as performances, focusing on the case of Cizre. First, the phenomenon of enforced disappearance is situated within the historical background of the Kurdish conflict in the 1990s. Then, the Cizre and Istanbul Saturday Mothers’ sittings are compared in terms of memory making and the politico-symbolic sites they produce scrutinized as memory knots (nœuds de mémoire), tying the past to present and personal to political. Finally, I endorse the introduction of a novel term, cultural aphasia, to broaden and deepen the memory debate. Thus, through a focus on human and social relations, emotions and experiences, forms of state violence are revealed as continuously reproducing specific political subjectivities and struggles in everyday life.

If many people were shocked by Donald Trump's 2016 election, many more were stunned when, months later, white supremacists took to the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting "Blood and Soil" and "Jews will not replace us!" Like Trump, the Charlottesville marchers were dismissed as aberrations-crazed extremists who did not represent the real US. It Can Happen Here demonstrates that, rather than being exceptional, such white power extremism and the violent atrocities linked to it are a part of American history. And, alarmingly, they remain a very real threat to the US today. Alexander Hinton explains how murky politics, structural racism, the promotion of American exceptionalism, and a belief that the US has have achieved a color-blind society have diverted attention from the deep roots of white supremacist violence in the US's brutal past. Drawing on his years of research and teaching on mass violence, Hinton details the warning signs of impending genocide and atrocity crimes, the tools used by ideologues to fan the flames of hate, and the shocking ways in which "us" versus "them" violence is supported by inherently racist institutions and policies. It Can Happen Here is an essential new assessment of the dangers of contemporary white power extremism in the United States. While revealing the threat of genocide and atrocity crimes that loom over the country, Hinton offers actions we can take to prevent it from happening, illuminating a hopeful path forward for a nation in crisis.

This article focuses on the main three limitations of the current studies on Hizbullah, an Islamist organisation in Turkey operative during the 1990s: the lack of historicisation of the trajectory of Hizbullah and its members, the lack of consideration of the spatial dimension of its spread and the absence of grounded studies about how it has functioned at the local level. Taking the case of Silvan, a small town in the province of Diyarbakir, the article investigates and analyses Hizbullah’s repertoire of action in the shadow of the state, the degree of coercion it achieved in different spaces, its targets, and its conception of the world. The paper argues that the extremism and intensity of the PKK-Hizbullah violence is said to have expressed a completely new type of intra-Kurdish conflict within the long intra-Kurdish conflict history.


Çelik, Adnan. 2021. “‘Keep Your Mouth Shut in the Day and Your Door Shut at night.’ : Intra-Kurdish Violence in the Shadow of the State: The Case of Hizbullah in Kurdistan of Turkey”. Kurdish Studies 9 (1). pp. 37-57. https://doi.org/10.33182/ks.v9i1.563.

This interview with Teesta Setalvad was conducted in the wake of the February 2020 anti-Muslim violence in North East Delhi. Drawing on her vast experience as a human rights activist, journalist, and peace educator, Setalvad's responses map the continuum-across years, anti-minority pogroms and ruling parties with divergent ideologies-of the cultures of hate, and the practices of state repression and impunity in a proto-fascist India. Setalvad offers an interrogation of the ideology of the Hindu right, delves into the historical trajectories of the rise of the Rashtriya Sway-amsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). She also charts the repeating patterns of police and media complicity in fomenting anti-minority hate and critically analyses the contradictory role of the criminal law and the Constitution of India in both enabling and resisting communal violence. In conclusion, she offers hopeful strategies for keeping alive the promise of secularism.

Hearman’s conversations with survivors of the Left in East Java has led to a meticulously detailed, informative and lively reconstruction of disastrous times. Her focus on human agency makes insightful the crucial relationship between the army and its civilian allies in planning and carrying out the mass killings, particularly the involvement of the NU (Nahdlatul Ulama). It enables the reader to follow the life stories of a small group of people, into prison, into hiding, or towards the creation of new lives under new names and identities.

This article explores a range of photographs taken in the aftermath of the Battle of Omdurman on 2 September 1898, the final and decisive battle of the Anglo-Egyptian Reconquest of the Sudan (1896-98). This campaign was particularly controversial for the methods that were used against the Mahdia, which included the massacring of the enemy wounded and those trying to surrender. The photographs under examination are relevant to considerations of the ensuing controversies of the campaign in which Kitchener was obliged to write directly to Queen Victoria to explain his actions, notably in relation to the bombing of the Mahdi' s tomb and the treatment of his remains. As historians have previously noted, the events in Omdurman constituted a massacre rather than a battle, and areas of dispute include whether Emirs were specifically targeted for destruction in the campaign. The photographs in question contribute to this debate. This article addresses the photographs in the wider context of violence throughout the British Empire and in the context of other images of British violence. That such photographs are not commonly viewed and discussed speaks to wider issues regarding popular perceptions of the ' benevolent' British Empire, particularly in comparison to its European counterparts.

Les sociétés qui ont fait face à des violences de masse et à l'annihilation d'êtres humains produisent d'une manière ou d'une autre des figures d’altérités (l'Autre). Le recours aux photos portraits de ces « Autres » peut constituer un moyen, parmi d’autres, de les « réintégrer » dans la société. Cet article aborde la question du pouvoir iconique des portraits photo, avant d'établir un parallèle entre l’utilisation qui en a été faite autour des desaparecidos d’Amérique Latine dans différents travaux artistiques qui ont pour cadre l’espace public et celle qui en a été faite en lien avec la vague d’exécutions de militants politiques qu’a connue l’Iran dans les années 1980.

This article analyses the relation between history and memory through the case of the massive violence of the Spanish context after the coup of 1936, the Spanish Civil War and the first years of Franco’s regime. It analyses the process of transformation of the sites of violence in sites of memory during Francoism, and in the current democracy that was born in the transition. The present article argues that in the Spanish case this transformation meant the creation of places of denial, like a previous step to its conversion in places of oblivion and impunity.

Das Buch bietet einen transdisziplinären Überblick über Genozide im 20. Jahrhundert. Dabei stehen die Genese, der Verlauf und die Folgen vernichtender politischer Gewalt im Mittelpunkt. Anhand unterschiedlicher Fallstudien zur Schoah, zu den Völkermorden in Armenien und Ruanda, im ehemaligen Jugoslawien, in Kambodscha und in den Subsahara-Staaten werden Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede beschrieben, kollektive Dynamiken und Radikalisierungen untersucht, Täterprofile in Augenschein genommen und internationale Reaktionen betrachtet. Zudem gehen die Autoren auf juristische Handlungsspielräume in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, aber auch auf Möglichkeiten zeithistorischer und pädagogischer Aufklärung ein. Ebenso wird die Frage aufgeworfen, welche literarischen und künstlerisch-darstellerischen Möglichkeiten bisher gefunden wurden, um der Erinnerung an das unvorstellbare Grauen und an die vielen Millionen Genozid-Opfer am Ende doch eine erkennbare Gestalt zu geben.

In this chapter I summarise what I am terming a 'neo-ideological approach' to thinking about the role of ideology in atrocity crimes. This approach seeks to incorporate and consolidate the most recent research on ideology's role in mass killing, terrorism, and violent conflict and move beyond both more sweeping assertions of ideology's importance, and more sceptical stances. I illustrate the neo-ideological approach with a short consideration of how it applies to the Stalinist Great Terror in the Soviet Union 1936-38.

Since India gained independence, it has experienced a number of episodes of targeted sectarian violence against religious minorities. The worst of these episodes have claimed hundreds of lives, injured hundreds, and displaced thousands from their homes. This article evaluates access to information about mass sectarian violence in India.

The article focuses on four occasions between 1983 and 2002 when religious minorities were attacked on a large scale. It discusses an attempt to secure official records related to these four episodes of mass violence using India’s Right to Information Act. The article considers why access to information about these grave atrocities is vital. It proposes that the state create public archives related to mass violence and suggests how it might do so.

On our way to Chamanpura, a working class locality in Ahmedabad, Farooq bhai suggested that we pick up Imtiaz. It was well past lunch time, but he insisted that we visit Gulbarg Society before heading to Teen Darwaja to eat kabab and halwa. Farooq had been driving me around the city since the morning. I'd got to know him a few days back when I arrived in Ahmedabad - having hired his auto-rickshaw at the railway station. On the way to the place where I was staying, I told him why I was in the city - to look for public remnants of the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom for a research project on collective memories of mass violence. I felt embarrassingly voyeuristic to say this even as I wanted to befriend Farooq, but his relaxed disposition had offered an invitation that allowed me to rest the inhibitions of a first meeting. He very forthcomingly agreed to show me around a few days later.

In the aftermath of anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat, India, in 2002, NGOs and activists encouraged survivors to testify against Hindu perpetrators in court. Through an ethnographic analysis of a criminal trial in the lower courts of Ahmedabad, I show how state officials and perpetrators used legal procedures to transform Muslim survivors into unreliable witnesses in the courtroom. These formal and informal techniques to destabilize Muslim witnesses are best understood not as byproducts of the law’s failure to address mass violence, but as a legal performance of Hindu supremacy. Procedural and positivistic approaches to the rule of law failed to address the law as a performance embedded in the context of Hindu nationalism in Gujarat. Not only do such trials discredit witnesses of mass violence, but they also give a legal form to the subordinate status of religious minorities within a majoritarian political regime.