Between Strategy and Utopianism: Ethnic Violence and Strategic War in Lika, 1941

Sammanfattning: This thesis proposes two separate intents lying behind the use of violence: namely, “nationalizing” (Gumz 2001) or utopian ideology, and the strategic desire to control territory. Three hypotheses are formulated on this basis, and applied to the case of Lika in 1941. The first predicts that violence exercised by actors motivated by the first type of intent will become increasingly indiscriminate, and is strongly corroborated in the case of the Ustaše. The second hypothesis, building on Kalyvas’ (2006) model, predicts that the selective or indiscriminate nature of violence executed by actors motivated by the second type of intent will correlate with the actor’s level of control: this is largely corroborated in the case of the Italians, but only partly so in the case of the Partisans. The final hypothesis, combining the arguments of Kalyvas (2006) and Dulić and Hall (2014), predicts a stark contrast in the geographical spread of violence executed by strategic and ideological actors, and is strongly corroborated. The thesis works from a micro-level approach.