Includes bibliographical references (pages 171-188) and index.

"Even in the worst episodes of organized mass violence, some towns, villages, and neighbourhoods remain peaceful. What explains these spatial differences in violence? In Keeping the Peace, sociologist Raheel Dhattiwala argues that peace during collective violence can prevail even amid intergroup hostility and impassioned political motivations. Marshalling first-hand evidence from Hindu-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002, this book provides the link between the macro level of political ideologies leading to mass violence and the necessary micro conditions for violence to actually happen. Dhattiwala begins by systematically demonstrating the political logic of violence in Gujarat: the worst attacks on Muslims were orchestrated where the BJP faced the toughest electoral competition. Yet peace had prevailed in several places through a complex interplay of spatial layouts and the cognitive decisions of people caught in the middle of violence. Rarely did attackers and targets of the violence abandon reason even in the face of heightened emotions. Risk-averse attackers adopted spatial strategies to assess the vulnerability of the targets, and targets of violence used unorthodox means of sustaining peace, such as enforcement mechanisms, in order to fortify cooperation from co-ethnics. Dhattiwala further argues that despite intergroup hostility people can collectively work towards fulfilling common goals of the neighbourhood by forging positive alliances, even when superficial. Armed with fine-grained statistical analyses and interviews with victims and perpetrators over five years in Ahmedabad, the empirical data from the Gujarat violence makes a strong case for peacekeeping during collective violence, regardless of regional context"--