Dr. Raheel Dhattiwala
Raheel Dhattiwala is an independent sociologist based in India. Trained at Oxford University (D.Phil in Sociology, 2014), she specializes in the study of collective violence with a focus on the spatial component of violence—how geographic space facilitates and hinders social relations and behaviour is integral to her research.
She is a former Baden-Württemberg Fellow at the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg (2023-24) and, prior to that, worked as a postdoctoral researcher and/or tutor in Sociology at Oxford University (UK); University of Amsterdam (Netherlands); IIIT-Hyderabad (India); and, the University of South Australia (Australia). She has given invited talks at Harvard University; Leiden University; the Centre for Contemporary Indian Studies in Japan; the Hyderabad Literary Festival, among others.
From 2001-2007, she worked as a senior journalist at the Times of India in Ahmedabad, India, where she covered the anti-Muslim pogrom of 2002 in Gujarat for the newspaper.
Raheel’s book, Keeping the Peace: Spatial Differences in Hindu-Muslim Violence in Gujarat in 2002 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), employs statistical and ethnographic data to explain the sustenance of peace in some heterogeneous (Hindu-Muslim) towns, villages, and neighbourhoods during one of modern India’s worst episodes of Hindu-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002. The book has been lauded for its analysis, “the best synthesis in the literature on mass violence anywhere” (Randall Collins, University of Pennsylvania); “an important contribution to the understanding of violent conflict and prospects for abating it” (Donald L. Horowitz, Duke University) and its methods, “an extraordinary dataset on killings and peace” (e.g. American Journal of Sociology).
Her current research on violence examines male aggression and female social control through the mechanism of veiling practices in Hindus and Muslims.
Peer-Reviewed Publications (Selected)
Book
- Raheel Dhattiwala, Keeping the peace: Spatial Differences in Hindu-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002 (2019), New Delhi/Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Journal Articles
- Raheel Dhattiwala and Michael Biggs, ‘The Political Logic of Ethnic Violence: The Anti-Muslim Pogrom in Gujarat, 2002,’ Politics & Society 40, no. 4 (2012): 483-516.
- Raheel Dhattiwala, ‘Neighbourliness and Situational Factors: Explaining Neighbour Behaviour in Attacks and Rescues of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 and Muslims in Ahmedabad in 2002’, Sociology, 57(5): 1137-55.
- Raheel Dhattiwala, ‘The Ecology of Ethnic Violence: Attacks on Muslims in Ahmedabad in 2002’, Qualitative Sociology 39, no. 1 (2016): 71-95.
- Weenink, Don, Raheel Dhattiwala, and David van der Duin, ‘Circles of Peace. A Video Analysis of Situational Group Formation and Collective Third-Party Intervention in Violent Incidents’, The British Journal of Criminology, 62, no. 1 (2022): 18-36.
- Raheel Dhattiwala (Special Issue, by invitation), ‘Mapping the Self: Challenges of Insider Research in a Riot-affected City and Strategies to Improve Data Quality’, Contemporary South Asia 25, no. 1 (2017): 7-22.
- Raphael Susewind and Raheel Dhattiwala, ‘Spatial Variation in the “Muslim Vote” in Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh, 2014’, Economic and Political Weekly 49, no. 39 (2014): 99-110.(Reprint) Internationales Asienforum/ International Quarterly for Asian Studies 45, no. 3-4 (2015).
Under review
- Jeroen Bruggeman and Raheel Dhattiwala, ‘Help Your Enemies and Betray Your Neighbors: Exceptional Relations in India’.