Resentment tells one story of how individuals come to participate in ethnic conflict. It is a story that seems especially suited to Eastern Europe. In that region, a coherent narrative can be told of how the status concerns of modernizing rural majorities compelled them to commit violence and support discriminatory policies in order to clearly establish a dominant position within the nation-state. But a coherent and compelling narrative does not necessarily mean that things actually happened that way. This chapter develops three alternative narratives of social processes capable of producing ethnic conflict. As was the case with Resentment, each narrative distills an account of individual motivation from well-known theories. In combination, these four paths to ethnic conflict cover the thrust, if not the nuances, of a wide range of the social science literature on ethnic strife. As with Resentment, each narrative describes a process predicting the timing and target of ethnic violence. The strength and coherence of these competing narratives is compared and tested in the empirical chapters.

Hatred: “Ancient Hatreds”

Hatred: Structural changes such as the collapse of the center eliminate constraints and produce an opportunity to commit aggression against other groups. The target of ethnic violence will be the group that has frequently been attacked with similar justification over a lengthy time period. If the target has not been a long hated or frequently attacked ethnic group, or if the target is attacked with a completely new justification, then the logic is not supported.