Is nation-building violence a criminal act, calling for prosecution and punishment? Or is it a political act, the answer to which must be a new, nonnationalist politics? Where societies choose the first option, criminalizing nation-building violence, progress toward eradicating the political sources of that violence will not come easily, if at all. This is because nation-building violence tends to be cyclical. Those excluded by new boundaries of nationhood turn to a new round of violence in order to establish a national political community in which they are included, necessarily excluding
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