Topic summary
Racial violence
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Ethnic conflict.
Constructivist accounts
Some argue that constructivist narratives of historical master cleavages are unable to account for local and regional variations in ethnic violence. For example, Varshney highlights that in the 1960s "racial violence in the USA was heavily concentrated in northern cities; southern cities though intensely politically engaged, did not have riots". A constructivist master narrative is often a country level variable whereas studies of incidences of ethnic violence are often done at the regional and local level.