BINARY OPPOSITIONS OR A CONTINUUM OF VIOLENCE?
My analysis has implicitly relied on a series of binary oppositions: ghetto vs. frontier, ethnic cleansing vs. ethnic policing. I used these binaries because such stark contrasts are useful in helping us generate interesting theories and categories of social action. Binary oppositions underscore the characteristics of each case, helping us comprehend that which is most significant about different categories of social action. At the same time, however, these oppositions can also distort our perception of reality, forcing messy, complex events into inappropriately constraining boxes.[10]
Looking back on the cases discussed in this book, I would say that the binary comparisons of ghetto/frontier, ethnic cleansing/policing are relevant chiefly to the Bosnia/Palestine comparison. When we examine internal variations within the Serbian and Israeli cases, by contrast, the outlines of a more nuanced continuum of violence emerge. Israeli repertoires of violence in Lebanon, for example, are by no means identical to those used in Bosnia, although there is some interesting overlap. Importantly, I used the term "counterinsurgency frontier" to describe Lebanon's status. Israel had no intention of ethnically cleansing all of southern Lebanon and replacing its Arab population with Jews. Another intermediary set of sub-cases appeared in the discussion of Sandžak and Vojvodina, where Serbian repertoires of violence resembled in some aspects Israel's methods in Palestine, but also differed substantially. Serbia's measures were not nearly as harsh or as controlling as those of Israel, and thus I labeled them "ethnic harassment," rather than "ethnic policing."
Kosovo presents an interesting combination of the ethnic policing and cleansing models. Here, the same geographic area went from one binary category to another in a very short time as institutional conditions changed from ghetto to frontier. From 1989 to 1997, Serbian forces adopted a straightforward ethnic policing repertoire in Kosovo, much as Israel did in Palestine. The year 1998 was one of transition, and in 1999, Serbia resorted to full-scale ethnic cleansing, much as it had done in 1992 in Bosnia. Although Palestine, as we saw in Part II, went through a similar radical transformation, its metamorphosis took decades. If we were to rearrange the cases in this book along a continuum of state violence, the cases of ethnic harassment in Sandžak and Vojvodina would be situated