The diffusion of racist violence in the Netherlands: Discourse and distance
| Date | 01 November 2011 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343311419238 |
| Published date | 01 November 2011 |
| Author | Robert Braun |
| Subject Matter | Research Articles |
The diffusion of racist violence in the
Netherlands: Discourse and distance
Robert Braun
Department of Government, Cornell University
Abstract
This article illuminates the unanticipated but intense waves of xenophobia that have swept through Western Europe
over the last decade. The author makes use of a unique dataset and diffusion models to simultaneously investigate the
geographical and temporal development of waves of racist violence in the Netherlands during the turbulent period
2001–03, when the country lost its reputation as a multicultural paradise. The results provide evidence for the fact
that previous riots enhance the legitimacy of violence elsewhere, especially if they are visible in the mass media, reso-
nate with public debates on immigration and take place in nearby regions. Opposing previous research on mobiliza-
tion, the analysis suggests that proxies for ethnic competition, deprivation and political opportunity structures are not
significantly related to the outbreak of violence;only population size adequately predicts where violence starts.
Together these findings suggest that waves of xenophobia develop in two steps:they start in large cities and subse-
quently spread to nearby places through geographically clustered networks and to more distant counties once they
become visible and resonate in the mass media, turning violence from local deviance into a supra-local phenomenon.
This process sheds light on how scales of protest shift and explains why seemingly tolerant regions can suddenly
become xenophobic hotbeds.
Keywords
collective violence, diffusion, ethnic conflict, far right, social movements, xenophobia
Introduction
Hostility between nationals and immigrants is arguably
one of the most significant political challenges facing
Western European countries at the beginning of this
century. Directly after 11 September 2001, a surprising
upsurge of xenophobic violence spread over Western
Europe like a wildfire. The Netherlands experienced a
series of attacks against foreigners that were unrivalled
in the rest of Europe (Allen & Nielsen, 2002). In the
weeks after Moroccan youngsters in the Dutch village
Ede publicly denounced US hegemony by celebrating
the attacks on the twin towers and burning US flags,
extremists besmeared mosques, burned foreign house-
holds and harassed individual Muslims in the streets (van
Donselaar & Rodrigues, 2002). Similar but smaller
waves of xenophobic violence swept through the country
in the aftermath of the killings of Pim Fortuyn, a
politician campaigning on an anti-immigrant platform,
and Theo van Gogh, a cineaste who critiqued the
oppressive nature of Islam (van Donselaar & Rodrigues,
2008).
It therefore hardly comes as a surprise that several
scholars have devoted much of their time and energy
in trying to understand the sudden outbursts of xeno-
phobic violence in Europe’s former multicultural para-
dise. Strikingly, while most scholars tend to focus on
national developments in form and intensity of violence
(van Donselaar & Rodrigues, 2008), almost no attention
is given to how the unprecedented waves of xenophobia
spread geographically and over time and how tolerant
regions suddenly turned xenophobic. In this article, I
Corresponding author:
rb529@cornell.edu
Journal of Peace Research
48(6) 753–766
ªThe Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343311419238
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