Killing Your Neighbors: Friendship and Violence in Northern Kenya and Beyond

Neighboring communities who once lived together in peace have committed some of the most disturbing genocidal violence in recent decades: ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia; the slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda; or Sunni—versus—Shia violence in today’s Iraq. As these instances illustrate, lethal violence does not always come at the hands of outsiders or foreigners—it can come just as easily from someone who was once considered a friend.

Employing a multisited, multivocal approach to eth...