Unpacking Ethnoracial Violence

Abstract This article offers three recommendations for researchers who study comparative race and human brutality, doing so in dialogue with Loïc Wacquant's recent “A Checkerboard of Ethnoracial Violence.” The first pertains to the importance in research on ethnoracial violence of distinguishing between categorization, classification, and valuation processes. The second pertains to the importance of testing how biologized and essentialized classification schemes influence violence, in comparison to those that are more fluid and malleable. The third pertains to the process of selecting cases for comparative analyses on race and violence. Each recommendation is intended to extend Wacquant's “checkerboard” by further exploring how macro-level dynamics of racialization and violence influence micro-level cognitive, relational, and situational dynamics on the ground. Each is therefore interconnected with the other two, with the second building on the first, and third building on the first and second.