Posted on 28-7-2002

To Keep the Peace, Study Peace
By MAHVISH KHAN

When Ashutosh Varshney, a political scientist at the University of
Michigan, decided to study ethnic violence, he ended up looking at
something that most experts in the field don't: peaceful cities. Mr.
Varshney, who is from New Delhi, wanted to find out why some cities in
India managed to avoid bloody Hindu-Muslim clashes while others erupted in
horrifying violence. "For far too long scholars and policy makers have
focused on the state for conflict prevention. My main research finding is
that we should instead focus on civil society," Mr. Varshney said. "An
integrated society is the best bet for ethnic peace."

With the increase in ethnic conflicts in recent years, the results of his
nine-year project have generated enormous excitement. Scholars have hailed
his book, "Ethnic Conflict & Civic Life: Hindus & Muslims in India" (Yale
University Press), as a major breakthrough, while the United Nations has
already adopted his method to study Muslim-Christian violence in Indonesia.
The Open Society Institute, part of the Soros Foundations Network, which
promotes democratic principles and human rights issues, has distributed 170
copies of the book to staff members around the world. And it has been
talking, along with other foundations, with Mr. Varshney about extending
his research to other ethnic and religious flashpoints, from Eastern Europe
to Nigeria. "By carefully studying riot-prone and peaceful cities, this new
model has a persuasive analysis and explanation of why violence occurs,"
said Samuel P. Huntington, chairman of the Harvard Academy for
International and Area Studies. Most researchers tend to avoid studying
regions where no violence exists, Mr. Huntington said, so they have no
place to compare their findings to, and their conclusions are based on
incomplete evidence. Mr. Varshney avoided this research flaw by leading a
team of researchers from Harvard, where he taught for nine years, to
explore why some Indian cities were violence-prone, while others with the
exact same Hindu-Muslim ratios lived in peace.

What Mr. Varshney found was that ethnically integrated organizations —
including business associations, trade unions, professional groups,
political parties, sports clubs — stand out as the most effective ways of
controlling conflict. These mixed associations proved far more effective
than routine but uncoordinated social interactions, like simply allowing
children to play together in the neighborhood. While both kinds of
activities were important for ethnic harmony, formal organizations become
much more important in times of strife, Mr. Varshney said.

Mr. Varshney's team collected information on Hindu-Muslim rioting from 1950
to 1995 and identified eight riot-prone cities, where there had been
repeated clashes. The team then picked three riot-prone cities — Ahmedabad,
Hyderabad, Aligarh — and compared them with peaceful cities with equal
Hindu-Muslim population ratios: Surat, Lucknow and Calicut. After analyzing
the data, Mr. Varshney found a clear pattern: cities with developed social,
political and economic integration were far less vulnerable to conflict.
Calicut's network of associations and peace committees, for example, helped
defuse tension during the widespread rioting that broke out after Hindu
militants destroyed the Babri mosque in Ayodhya in December 1992. While
unfounded rumors that Hindus were desecrating mosques by throwing pigs into
them were spurring violence in other cities, Calicut's organizations helped
city officials quash the specious reports.

The riots that whipped across the western Gujarat State in March and April
of this year and claimed more than 1,000 lives seemed to provide further
evidence for Mr. Varshney's conclusions. The three riot-prone cities he
identified were the sources of some of the worst violence, while Surat,
which is also in Gujarat, remained peaceful. "It was with considerable
scholarly satisfaction, but also with great emotional and political dismay
that I observed the patterns of violence and peace during the recent
Gujarat riots," Mr. Varshney said. "As copies of my book were coming into
circulation, its predictions and analysis were coming true."

Whether it is India, Indonesia or Palestine, "this is an important
breakthrough in understanding the problem of ethnic conflict globally,"
said Robert Putnam, a Harvard professor whose work on civic participation
in American life, detailed in his book "Bowling Alone," has been cited by
both President Bill Clinton and President Bush. "Varshney's findings show
the crucial mechanism by which societies can manage diversity," he said.
"This is not a handbook to pass out in Bosnia, and his book does not tell
governments what to do, yet it frames the problem."

United Nations officials began to talk to Mr. Varshney about his ideas last
summer, before his book was published. "We thought his method could also
apply to the dynamics of Indonesia," where strained Muslim-Christian
relations often break out into violence, said Satish Mishra, head of the
United Nations Support Facility for Indonesian Recovery. "Varshney's
findings raise the possibilities of future peace." In April the United
Nations office in Jakarta hired Mr. Varshney to oversee the creation of a
database that would track incidents of ethnic violence. Mr. Mishra said
this would give Indonesian policymakers a map of violent locations, a sense
of their duration, intensity and reported causes. This should lead to
better ideas of how to combat these conflicts, he said. "If policymakers
formulate their responses only on the basis of guesses and intuitions, they
can go horribly wrong," Mr. Varshney said from his home in Ann Arbor. "A
reliable database on violence is critical for policymaking."

Not everyone is sold on Mr. Varshney's theory, however. Some critics argue
the problem is perhaps more complex then simply creating integrated
associations. David Laitin, a professor of political science at Stanford
University, said Mr. Varshney lacked the evidence to show that association
members are doing what his theory says they do. Mr. Laitin argued that Mr.
Varshney placed too much emphasis on trust among organization members. It
may just be that in the cities where there is economic interdependence,
both sides have an interest in refraining from riots. Levels of trust would
then be unnecessary, Mr. Laitin said. Mr. Varshney counters that trust is
not central to his work. Pitting trust against self-interest is too narrow,
he said. There is evidence, he says, of many motivations, which cannot be
reduced to mere trust or self-interest.

Aryeh Neier, the president of the Open Society Institute who distributed
Mr. Varshney's book to his overseas staff, said: "I am not certain that the
same pattern will prevail. However, his model intuitively makes enough
sense that it is worth thinking of implementing elsewhere." That is
precisely what Mr. Varshney would like to do and says he plans to seek
$750,000 in funds from the Soros Foundations, the Ford Foundation and
others in order to test his model in Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Malaysia,
Indonesia and possibly Eastern Europe within the next three years.

Mr. Varshney is already working with Rajmohan Gandhi, a leading activist of
Indian civic engagement and the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, to reduce
violence in his birthplace. Their project, primarily financed at this time
by the Foundation for Human and Economic Development, a nonprofit
organization based in Orlando, Fla., will try to create Hindu-Muslim ties
in the eight riot-prone cities that Mr. Varshney identified, by forming a
range of nongovernmental organizations and business partnerships.
"Intuitively, his model makes sense — it is fresh, it is different and it
is promising," Mr. Gandhi said in a telephone interview from his home in
New Delhi. "Varshney's research shows that work of integration and
partnership does help to safeguard against violence. Once people read his
book and comprehend the model, it will trigger a lot of constructive
thought and action."