6 M. SCHISSLER The sociologist Brubaker has been one of the most influential among many who have argued against the assumption that ethnic or other groups can be protagonists or viable units of social analysis.25 “Inter-ethnic violence is conditioned and fostered by intra-group processes,” he wrote in an article with the political scientist Laitin.26 Ingroup policing is one of the intra-group processes that they identified as central to fostering violence.27 Many others from a variety of disciplines have focused on similar processes, though with different terminology.28 They elaborate on the examples Brubaker and Laitin used to illustrate “in-group policing,” including the murder of rivals, dissidents, or suspected traitors among the ranks of insurgent organ­ izations in South Africa, Ireland, Palestine, and Sri Lanka, though, again, without necessarily using the term. The anthropologist Thiranagama, for example, provided a brilliant ethnography of the last case as well as a broader argument for the signifi­ cance of such phenomenon.29 “[T]he identification and prosecution of treason are con­ stant, essential, and ‘normal’ parts of … reproduc[ing] social and political order,” she wrote in a collaboration with another anthropologist, Kelly, “placing treason at the heart of our attempts to understand the ways in which political regimes are made and unmade.”30 Research on the 1994 genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda has provided particularly robust evidence for the significance of processes like in-group policing. Scholars studying Hutu perpetrators have consistently found that their involvement was explained less by beliefs about Tutsis than by local relationships, particularly to individuals and institutions that mobilized for the genocide, and group dynamics that shaped recruitment into killing groups.31 McDoom, meanwhile, argued that, of all the baseline conditions and contingent circumstances necessary for the genocide, ultimately the decisive factor was the superior coercive capabilities of a faction of Hutu “hardliners” that sought genocide. The tipping point, he concluded, came when these forces began attacks on other more moderate Hutus in the country’s capital, after which similar in-group policing among Hutus in suc­ cessive regions drove anti-Tutsi violence across the country.32 Benesch’s influential model of “dangerous speech,” meanwhile, was recently updated to reflect evidence from Rwanda. Among the five “hallmarks” of dangerous speech, it now includes four forms of speech that characterize the out-group victims and a fifth that involves characterizing 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups. Brubaker and Laitin, “Ethnic and Nationalist Violence,” 433 (emphases original). Ibid., 433. For example, in arguing that ethnic mobilization is the key process leading to ethnic war, the international relations scholar Tang identifies four “intragroup tactics” through which this mobilization may be accomplished; all could be adequately termed in-group policing (272). In the schematic of Tang’s theory, moreover, the success of these tactics determines the range of outcomes (265, Figure 1 at level 4). Tang also concludes that this is the most important area for actions aimed at preventing ethnic war (273). Shiping Tang, “The Onset of Ethnic War: A General Theory,” Socio­ logical Theory 33, no. 3 (1 September 2015): 256–79. For theories from other fields that also hinge on processes that could be described in terms of in-group policing, see Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy, 20–1; Jacques Sémelin, Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 30–44. Sharika Thiranagama, In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Thiranagama and Tobias Kelly, “Introduction: Specters of Treason,” in Traitors: Suspicion, Intimacy, and the Ethics of State-Building, ed. Thiranagama and Kelly (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 2. Fujii, Killing Neighbors; Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). Omar McDoom, The Path to Genocide in Rwanda: Security, Opportunity, and Authority in an Ethnocratic State (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 34, Chap. 5 passim, 371.