Essays on categorical violence

Why do armed actors commit atrocities against identity groups? In this dissertation, I address this question by investigating categorical violence, which I define as political violence against a social identity group (e.g. ethnic or sexual minorities). While a long literature on genocide exists, there is very little research that examines collective killings against non-ethnic identity groups and that attempts to uncover relationships that obtain across forms of categorical violence. Through a series of essays on categorical violence against ethnic and sexual minorities by both state and non-state actors, this dissertation strives to move the literature closer to a unified understanding of the factors that contribute to identity-based atrocities.

In the four empirical chapters of this dissertation, I examine the causes of state and non-state actor violence against sexual minorities and non-state actor violence against ethnic minorities using several original datasets. I choose these atrocities because genocide—state violence against ethnic minorities—is already a well-researched form of categorical violence. These analyses demonstrate that strategic and ideological factors both contribute to the decision for armed actors to perpetrate categorical violence. Namely, categorical violence is used by actors with revolutionary ambitions and is generally associated with strategic needs to control territory during armed conflict. In the concluding chapter, I use these findings to build a tentative theoretical framework that can help explain categorical violence as a general phenomenon. I outline several ways that this framework might resolve theoretical and empirical puzzles in the literature and potential avenues for future research.