Why are there different forms of ethnic violence? Why do violent actors choose to persecute ethnic others in different ways? Although the literature on ethnic violence is vast, there is precious little attention given to the question of why particular acts of ethnic violence take the forms they do. This paper proposes the "disaggregation" of the concept "ethnic violence" into 4 discrete kinds- Symbolic Violence, Lynching, Pogrom, and Massacre. Having established these four kinds, the question becomes what causes them, and I choose the case of contemporary skinhead violence in the Russian Federation as a place to test them.
In the Literature Review, I then substantiate the claim that this question has attracted little attention but still draw testable implications from current works. Of particular note is Horowitz (2004) work on the deadly ethnic riot, which provides the foundation for my theory. Chapter 3 then recounts my ethnographic fieldwork with skinhead gangs in Moscow and develops what I term the "Theory of Ethnic Criminality." With this theory, I argue that skinheads use different forms of ethnic violence against different minorities because they hold them responsible for different crimes. Just as the law punishes acts proportionately, then, so too do skinhead vigilantes.
Chapter four tests this theory and its competitors against the data of recorded skinhead attacks. The test reveals a characteristic association of particular forms of violence with certain ethnic groups. Jews are characteristically attacked using Symbolic Violence, Africans using Lynching, Caucasians using Pogrom, and Gypsies using Massacre. To be sure, the relationships are not determinative but the characteristic nature of skinhead attacks is developed through the qualitative analysis of particular cases of violence. The question thus becomes why skinheads use particular forms of violence against these particular ethnic groups.
Chapter 5 then tests the theory and other possible explanations that link ethnicity and particular forms of violence with a content analysis of literature taken from skinhead and neo-Nazi websites and bookstores. I follow this by testing the theory and its competitors against interviews with skinhead perpetrators of ethnic violence conducted in 2006 and 2008 both in-person and through the internet. Both tests demonstrate that the Theory of Ethnic Criminality out-performs its rivals. The final test in the chapter is a content analysis of the Russian mass media to see how widespread the rightist worldview is.
Chapter 6 then tests the generalizability of the theory with two case studies. The first is of the Meshketian Turks in Krasnodar Krai, where Cossacks have been "policing" a migrant community since the fall of the Soviet Union. The other is the Anti-Georgian campaign of 2006 undertaken by the Russian government against ethnic Georgians in Russia as retaliation for the arrest of Russian diplomats in Tblisi in 2006. In this case the state undertook purges of ethnic Georgians similar to the anti-Semitic campaign of 1951-52. Once again, the theory performs well promising wider application to other circumstances.
Chapter 7 concludes.