Nationalism and Violence: A Mechanismic Explanation With Special Reference to the Theories of Charles Tilly and Michael Mann

“Sovereignty is the issue, and political and geopolitical instability is the process in which things can get really nasty. Without their combination, riot cycles ensue, not truly murderous ethnic cleansing. ” (Mann 2005, 501) Nationalism is implicated in a whole range of direct and indirect, mass and small scale manifestations of violence – from genocide to individual acts of Auslanderhass.1 Though this is an undisputable fact, the question is, how exactly is nationalism related to violence, in particular collective violence? What are the social mechanisms –political, economic, psychological – that account for the relationship? And what is the nature of this relationship – causal, necessary, historical, contingent? Drawing on Charles Tilly’s work on collective violence and Michael Mann’s work on ethnic cleansing, this paper attempts to identify the crucial mechanisms turning nationalism violent. Some of the usual suspects involved in nationalism and violence are familiar from the nationalism literature. The problem with conventional approaches to nationalism – perennialism, primordialism, various structuralisms, ethno-symbolism – is that they explain both violent and non-violent forms of nationalism, but do not supply us wit