From Arts & Letters Daily: The article Delving Into Democracy’s Shadow explores the books of Michael Mann, a sociology professor at UCLA. He’s the author of The Sources of Social Power, a yet-unfinished set of books that “chart the emergence of four distinct forms of power (ideological, military, economic, and political)”.

In his forthcoming book The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, he speculates that democracy can harbor the seeds of genocide (sadly, there is an entire field of study called “comparative genocide”). As Chronicle restates it:

The problem, says Mr. Mann, comes from a fateful ambiguity at the heart of democracy — “rule by the people,” as the Greek source of the term has it. But within a nation-state, “the people” tends not to mean simply “the ordinary citizens,” but those sharing a distinct culture — an “ethnos.” In a nation-state that is authoritarian but stable, ethnic violence may be routine, but it tends not to involve struggle for control of political power.

With democratization, however, the stakes increase. Ethnic nationalism proves strongest, and most deadly, when one group feels economically exploited or threatened by another. (In Rwanda, for example, Tutsis tended to be more prosperous than the Hutus.) Mr. Mann lists a series of steps through which the tensions may reach a brink — at which point, in the name of democracy, ordinary people seek to purify the nation-state of any ethnic “contamination.”

Oh, go and read the rest of the article!