Browse

This book explores why humans ruthlessly attack and kill people from other ethnic communities. Drawing on an array of cases from around the world and insight from a variety of disciplines, the book provides a simple yet powerful explanation that pinpoints the influential role of modernity in the growing global prevalence of ethnic violence over the past 200 years. It offers evidence that a modern ethnic mind-set is the ultimate and most influential cause of ethnic violence. Throughout most of human history, people perceived and valued small sets of known acquaintances and did not identify with ethnicities. Through education, state policy, and other means, modernity ultimately created broad ethnic consciousnesses that led to emotional prejudice, whereby people focus negative emotions on entire ethnic categories, and ethnic obligation, which pushes people to attack Others for the sake of their ethnicity. Modern social transformations also provided a variety of organizational resources that put these motives into action, thereby allowing ethnic violence to emerge as a modern menace. Yet modernity takes many forms and is not constant, and past trends in ethnic violence are presently transforming. Over the past seventy years, the earliest modernizers have transformed from champions of ethnic violence into leaders of intercommunal peace, and this book offers evidence that the emergence of robust rights-based democracy—in combination with effective states and economic development—weakened the motives and resources that commonly promote ethnic violence.

This book unveils the causes, processes, and implications of the 2014 seventy-nine-day occupation movement in Hong Kong known as the Umbrella Movement. The chapters ask, how and why had a world financial center known for its free-wheeling capitalism transformed into a hotbed of mass defiance and civic disobedience? The book argues that the Umbrella Movement was a response to China's internal colonization strategies—political disenfranchisement, economic subsumption, and identity reengineering—in post-handover Hong Kong. The chapters outline how this historic and transformative movement formulated new cultural categories and narratives, fueled the formation and expansion of civil society organizations and networks both for and against the regime, and spurred the regime's turn to repression and structural closure of dissent. Although the Umbrella Movement was fraught with internal tensions, the book demonstrates that the movement politicized a whole generation of people who had no prior experience in politics, fashioned new subjects and identities, and awakened popular consciousness.