Warm Bonds or Functional Transactions? Being Neighbours During Ethnic Pogroms in India
Stories of courage abound during mass violence. Of people saving their neighbours and giving them refuge at a cost to their own lives. However, perpetrators of mass violence are often neighbours, e.g. anti-Jewish pogroms, genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, and anti-minority violence in South Asia. Neighbour-on-neighbour violence effaces the norms and values that underpin neighbourliness as a social practice given that, during community emergencies, prior hostility does not preclude cooperation between neighbours.