Identifying class and ‘classifying’ identity in Paris 2005 and Ahmedabad 2002

Abstract

Understanding violence is a major pre-occupation in social sciences and approaches to violence range from neoclassical perspectives, to regression models, to pure cultural analysis of difference. This paper attempts to understand violence by examining how class and identity positions are variously juxtaposed in different socio-spatial settings to produce contestations over the human condition. Through a comparative understanding of recent violence in two places—the riots of 2005 in Paris, France, and of 2002 in Ahmedabad, India—I indicate how class and identity overlap to produce fused realms of othering and violation. Through comparative analysis, I argue that in a globalizing world, class and identity will overlap in multifarious ways depending on the socio-spatial particularities of systemic exclusion. Therefore, studies of violence must move away from purely economistic and mathematical model building and instead move towards combining economic and cultural analysis.