THE IMPORTANCE OF INSTITUTIONAL SETTING
Conventional wisdom suggests that when faced with a threat, states use the most efficient methods to get the job done. This book has suggested an alternative approach, emphasizing the role of institutional settings, legality, and norms. Ethnic cleansing in Bosnia was feasible in 1992–93 because of the region's frontier-like qualities. Ethnic policing was a more viable approach for Palestine in 1988, conversely, because of its ghetto-like status. Rather than closely analyzing day-to-day politics in Belgrade and Jerusalem, I have focused on actual methods used in distinct territorial regions, believing that only detailed examinations of concrete instances of violence can explain broader macro-level trends.
As we have seen, institutional settings interacted with nationalist ideologies in important ways. Conventional wisdom as well as some scholarly analysis begins with the content of nationalist ideology, examining public or elite support for this or that policy, and then using those findings to explain state behavior.[1] This book, by contrasts, argues for an interaction effect between ideology and institutional setting. As the empirical record demonstrates, both Serbia and Israel were capable, contextual conditions permitting, of embarking on either radical or more moderate violent strategies. Both were Janus-faced entities, containing the potential for both ethnic cleansing and more subtle methods of domination.
Frontiers and ghettos are specific types of institutional settings, representing different points on continuums of state violence and power. Frontiers are outlying territories where central political authority is thin, formal rules don't apply, and states maintain their power through despotic methods. Ghettos, by contrast, are ethnic or national enclaves securely trapped within the dominant state. While ghetto populations are oppressed and disadvantaged, they enjoy some basic protections, enduring in a strange netherworld in which they are neither fully in, nor fully out of, the dominant polity. Shielded from utter destruction, they are exposed to more subtle and infrastructural methods of control.