City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Publications and Research Hunter College 2002 Anti-Minority Riots in Unified Germany: Cultural Conflicts and Mischanneled Political Participation Roger Karapin CUNY Hunter College How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_pubs/656 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact:
[email protected] Published as Roger Karapin, “Anti-Minority Riots in Unified Germany: Cultural Conflicts and Mischanneled Political Participation,” Comparative Politics 34 (January 2002), pp. 147-67. Anti-Minority Riots in Unified Germany: Cultural Conflicts and Mischanneled Political Participation1 Roger Karapin June 2001 Abstract Anti-foreigner riots in eastern Germany in the early 1990s have usually been explained by ethnonationalism or racism, ethnic competition for scarce resources, and opportunistic political elites. If anti-minority riots are analyzed as a distinct phenomenon with a cross-sectional approach, local political processes emerge as more important causes. Cultural conflicts, the channeling of mobilization from nonviolent into violent forms, local political opportunities for success, and mobilization by social movement organizations convert ethnic conflict and violence into riots. A comparison of riot and non-riot localities in eastern Germany supports this argument. Two large anti-foreigner riots in eastern Germany (at Hoyerswerda in September 1991 and at Rostock in August 1992) created a political sensation, attracting far more attention, outcry, and veiled approval from political leaders than two thousand smaller assaults on foreigners which took place across unified Germany during those two years.