Globalization and social conflict: A case study of Hindu-Muslim conflict in India

The contemporary persistence/resurgence of conflict in global society merits the question---why has violence not decreased as a result of secularization ushered by modernization, and their spread through globalization? Different explanations have been offered. (1) The international relations school essentializes local places as parochial, and hence resistant to the 'secularizing' impact of globalization. (2) The identity school argues that post-industrial society is characterized by decline in class and a rise in cultural conflicts on account of a general decline in Fordist-industrial production.;This thesis contests the above claims by demonstrating that (a) social conflicts at local scales are not a nostalgic 'outside' to the global---but are complexly connected to global processes; (b) suggesting that the contemporary rise of identity politics does not represent an un-complicated replacement of class politics by cultural politics, but they work together in doubly-dispossessing minorities. This project interrogates three major research questions: (1) How does the global and the local work together in deploying local strategies of neoliberal exclusion? (2) What is the role of space in actualizing conflict? (3) Is there any validity to the observation made in the identity literature that there has been a shift from the class conflict of the industrial era, to identity conflicts in the post-industrial era?;The three questions are investigated in the context of a case study of an urban, ethnic conflict that happened in 2002 between the majority Hindu and the minority Muslim community in a globalizing city, Ahmedabad, India.;I conclude that globalization is likely to contribute to the aggravation of conflicts in local spaces---contributing more directly to questions of socio-economic dispossessions than to cultural dispossessions. Questions of redistribution and recognition are almost always simultaneously co-present in local conflicts---a general theory of conflict that investigates questions of both redistribution and recognition is likely to be comprehensive. A general theory of Ahmedabad conflict concludes that socio-economic dispossession under neoliberalism is a case of class exclusion of the urban poor, which is further cleaved by the interplay of place-contingent aspects of identity exclusion to doubly dispossess the Muslim poor.