Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel, by James Ron. Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press, 2003. xxiv +262 pages.  Maps.  n.p. paper.

States use violence to defend borders, enforce laws, and defend their internal social order.  But actual patterns of state violence change dramatically over time and space.   Why do states use some methods of violence (say mass expulsion or torture or bombs) in one place and at one time and change at other times? 

To answer this question, James Ron, a sociologist from McGill University, examines changing patterns of violence in Serbia and Israel.  He is not concerned with the legitimacy of these state projects or the causes of the violence.  He asks rather what accounts for variations in the kind of violence these states used.  Why did Israel use different methods of repression in Palestine and Lebanon in the same period? Or what explains historical variations in Israel’s treatment of Palestinians?  And likewise what explains variations in Serbian nationalist violence within Serbia as opposed to its Bosnian frontier?  

Ron argues that states will prefer to police harshly rather than expel unwanted groups in areas of concentrated state power, whereas on the peripheries of the state, nationalist violence is likely to be most intense.   Moreover wherever human rights monitoring is most intense, violence itself will be craftier – links to paramilitaries will be disavowed and torturers will try to leave few marks.  In the late 20th century, even states with strong national projects such as Serbia and Israel know the cost of appearing to violate international human rights norms as they exercise violence.

Ron’s argument turns on the spatial metaphor of “frontier” (where violence is likely to be most vicious) and ghetto (dense populations near the core of the state).  Ghetto populations are more likely to be harshly policed than forcefully deported. If patterns of state violence vary with geographic zone, then borders matter.  But borders are not real, but perceived.  Changes in how borders are perceived, also change the kind of violence.  For example, Ron argues, in the 1990s, the West Bank gradually changed its status from an internal ghetto of Israel to its frontier with Palestinian autonomous zones, and with this came a change in violent repertoire.  Palestinians were accustomed to Israelis depending on harsh police style methods; now they were facing missiles, armored vehicles and shoot to kill ambushes.

Political scientists often focus on why violence is done rather than how it is done.  How violence is done is something for the military historians.   But Ron argues persuasively that understanding how violence is done has major theoretical payoffs. By paying attention to how violence is done, Ron shows that international norms are far more robust than political scientists normally imagine.  Violence workers are keenly aware of institutional norms and environmental settings as they go about doing their work.  They exercise considerable creativity within those limits. Ron served in an Israeli infantry unit from January 1985-1988, serving in southern Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.  He then worked as a member of Human Rights Watch in eastern Turkey, following the Turkish war against Kurdish insurgents.   He understood first hand that methods that were allowed in frontiers were unacceptable in ghettoes and vice versa.

Ron’s study also allows him to reject typical answers political scientists give for why violence is done.  By focusing on how violence is done, Ron shows these answers are too feeble to withstand empirical scrutiny. Israeli or Serbian violence did not vary with the level of objective threat these states faced.  Likewise, the kind of regime (“democracy,” “dictatorship”) did not matter.  Both kinds of states drew on the same repertoire of violence and the way they did so changed dramatically over time.  Regime type is too static to explain these changes.  Likewise changes in political culture or nationalist ideology do not adequately account for changing patters of violence. 

Ron’s comparative approach may be unfamiliar to those who believe that the only valid comparative method is to compare countries that are identical (“don’t compare apples and oranges”).  Social scientists know that there are several methods of comparison, one of which is the method of concomitant variation.   In this approach, two cases may be entirely different, except both have variables A and B, and these two change in the same way.  For example, if paper is scarce, the price will go up – whether the country is China or the United States.  The relationship holds regardless of whether it’s an apple or an orange. Likewise, Ron argues there is a distinct relationship between the kind of geographic zone and the specific pattern of state violence – whether the country is Serbia or Israel.  You can learn a lot from comparing apples and oranges.

Darius Rejali, Associate Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Reed College, is the author of Torture and Modernity (Westview 1994), Torture and Democracy (forthcoming Princeton, 1995) and Approaches to Violence (forthcoming Princeton, 1996).