Politics or prejudice? Explaining individual-level hostilities in India’s Hindu-Muslim conflict

Understanding the micro-motives for political violence remains an important challenge to contemporary peace research. This paper contributes to this goal in two ways. First and most importantly, it addresses the following research question: what explains hostile sentiments between Hindus and Muslims in cities all across India? To this end, three high- profile theories are reviewed below: elite manipulation, security dilemmas, and prejudice.