Ashutosh Varshney is associate professor of political science and director of the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He spent the first 23 years of his life in India, and received a PhD in political science from MIT in 1990. His methodology in the study of ethnic conflict is already being used by the UN to study Muslim-Christian rioting in Indonesia, and Varshney is planning to test it in Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Nigeria.
How did you come to be studying violence?
In the 1980s I trained in political economy, the central tenet…
