The motivation for this book comes from a simple intuition: Emotion is an essential part of human nature and has something to do with ethnic violence and conflict. When I began this project, many of my fellow political scientists greeted this intuition with indifference. Some were even hostile. This reaction convinced me that a book on emotions and ethnic violence was worth doing. I believe that most political scientists share an understanding that emotions must have something to do with ethnic violence. I also believe that they neglect the role of emotion because it seems too amorphous and lies outside the dominant paradigms of the field. This book is an effort to show that the essential role of emotion in ethnic violence can be captured systematically and that emotion and rationality are not always irreconcilable forces that require completely separate modes of analysis. In fact, as I point out in the text, assumptions about the importance of emotion already exist implicitly in many of the most widely known theories of social science.

This book was also driven by a substantive question: What micromechanisms were involved in producing the homogenization of Eastern Europe during the twentieth century? While the actions of the Germans and Soviets were clearly critical in producing this overall outcome, there were many events in which neighbor attacked neighbor without much direction by outside forces. These events have been crucial in polarizing populations and destroying the conditions for ethnic heterogeneity.