How is Communal Violence Produced? An Event-Structure Analysis of the Altınova Riots

How does seemingly spontaneous communal violence become politically organized, and how does state response shape this process as violence unfolds? This article uses event-structure analysis to examine the 2008 anti-Kurdish riots in Altınova, Turkey. Drawing on reports on the Altınova riots produced by human rights organizations and twenty news articles drawn from mainstream, nationalist, Islamist, and left-wing newspapers, the analysis reconstructs the temporal and causal relationships among mass mobilization, extreme-right political intervention, and state response across successive attack cycles. The findings distinguish between the conversion and re-production of collective violence. In initial attack cycles, extreme-right actors did not create mass mobilization from scratch but seized opportunities generated by triggering events and collective gatherings to convert already mobilized crowds into targeted violence. In subsequent cycles, as broader mass mobilization subsided, organized actors became more directly involved in gathering participants, directing mobilization, and reproducing violence. State response also changed across the sequence, combining non-intervention during larger crowd mobilizations with selective repression of organized actors. These findings show that spontaneity, political organization, and state response are not fixed characteristics of riots but become consequential in different combinations at different stages of communal violence.