The Deadly Ethnic Riot

A few weeks ago I bought Donald L. Horowitz's The Deadly Ethnic Riot on Amazon. It still hasn't been reviewed yet, and I'm determined to read a reasonable chunk in enough time to write a seat-of-the-pants review just so I can be the first. It was some magazine review that tipped me off to this book, but unfortunately I can't remember which mag it was or I'd post a link.

Humour trivium: Horowitz's homepage mentions "hot Malaysian curries" as an interest. Oh, and he's a visiting prof at UKM.

I'm not usually inclined to read this sort of big heavy sociological tome, but two things caught my attention - first, the subject is something that I'm interested in as a citizen of a multicultural developing country who's trying to figure out how it's going to go forward. Second, the review mentioned the May 1969 riots as a particular case. So I had it on my Amazon wishlist for a while and then just felt antsy and bought it.

It's a hefty 588 pages, which I didn't notice before buying, and the writing definitely has a textbooky flavour, which means that reading is going to go slowly (Horowitz is a prof at Duke University). Have also discovered that unlike novels, I can't read this kind of thing while eating, which means that it's going to go slowly (since starting to earn a real salary, I've been giving in to the munchies a lot and am amazed that my jeans have actually gotten looser. It must be the 3.7-mile bike commute).

On bipolar patterns of political competition (that's bipolar as in two parties, not manic-depressive, and that's the phrase he used, so stop laughing)):

In many societies, this competition takes the form of aggregating group and subgroups felt to have the requisite affinities to form a majority vis-a-vis other aggregates, with contrasting attributes, that attempt to form a majority of their own. This development is recognizable as an ascriptive variant of the effort to produce a minimum winning coalition, one in which a bit more than half the state can claim much more than half of the rewards that political victory provides.

How come this sounds familiar ah...oh yeah! BN!

Next paragraph:

But even where electoral politics does not prevail,if ethnicity is salient, there is a struggle to produce aggregates of sufficient strength to take control of the state by nonelectoral means.

Translation: we all should be glad UMNO and PAS are so busy fighting each other that a) UMNO needs the support of the ethnic minority parties and b) they don't realize how similar they really are and form a government that's [totally] composed of power-mad Islamists.