Playing with Fire

Aditi Malik is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at The College of the Holy Cross. She studies political and gender-based violence, political parties, social movements and contentious politics, and ethnic and gender politics with regional specializations in Africa and South Asia. Malik has conducted fieldwork on these topics in Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Cambodia, India, and Nepal.

List of Figures; List of Tables; List of Abbreviations; Acknowledgements; 1. Parties and political violence; 2. A theory of party instability and political violence; 3. The development of divergent parties and party systems in Kenya and India; 4. Party instability and political violence in Kenya; 5. Party fragility and subnational patterns of violence in Kenya's rift valley and coast regions; 6. Party stabilization, declining riot violence, and new modalities of political conflict in India; 7. Party politics and subnational trajectories of riot violence in India's Hyderabad and Meerut cities; 8. Party instability and political violence: comparative insights from Ghana and Turkey; 9. Conclusion; Appendix A. National and subnational correlations between replacement volatility and alternative measures of party instability; Appendix B. Elite interviews; Appendix C. The development of civil society in Kenya and India; References; Datasets.