Peoples, Homelands, and Wars? Ethnicity, the Military, and Battle among British Imperial Forces in the War against Japan

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Ethnicity is increasingly central to analysis of war.Michael Brown et al., eds., Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997); Samuel Huntington, Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); David Lake and Donald Rothchild, eds., The International Spread of Ethnic Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). Cf. John Mueller, “The Banality of ‘Ethnic War,'” International Security 25, 1 (Summer 2000), pp. 42–70. Whether conceived in essentialist or constructivist terms, ethnicity is often accorded explanatory primacy in accounting for the organization and use of violence in wartime settings, in part due to the utility of processes of othering for group mobilization. Both the political and ideological context of hostilities as well as the motivations of combatants in the actual making of wartime violence are frequently conceptualized in ethnic and racialized terms.Omer Bartov, Hitler's Army (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); John Dower, War Without Mercy (London: Faber and Faber, 1986). In a word, wartime violence is domesticated; it is seen as arising from the identities of, and commitments to, homelands.