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Studies find a direct association of collective violence with relational distance: lower the relational distance, lower the violence. Where people live as neighbours, spatial proximity provides more opportunity for contact. However, perpetrators of mass violence are often neighbours who had previously coexisted with their victims in apparent harmony. Neighbour-on-neighbour violence is a social violation: it shakes our confidence in the collective values of 'neighbourliness' and the strength of prior relations. In two state-orchestrated pogroms in India – against Sikhs in 1984 and Muslims in 2002 – the nature of prior neighbour relationships is delineated to identify why some neighbours participated in attacks, others in rescues. A qualitative analysis of 50 survivor affidavits and 41 in-depth interviews enabled reconstructing the texture of these relationships. Neighbourliness and situational factors (timing of attacks; built environment) provided a more nuanced understanding of behaviour. For democratic polities that authorise pogroms, findings challenge existing knowledge on contact and violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prevalence of neighbour disputes among social housing tenants is often seen as the outcome of social residualisation and the physical characteristics of social housing. While such explanations have usefully drawn attention to the structural sources of problem neighbours in the social housing sector, rather than reduce them to the anti-sociality of tenants, this work has been disconnected from a consideration of the social and interactive contexts of neighbouring more broadly and its influence on how neighbour problems emerge and are managed in specific situations. In response, this paper examines the conditions that lead to the formation of a distinct style of neighbouring among social housing tenants, one that is prone to conflict and tension because of its intensively sociable, as opposed to anti-social, nature. Drawing on mediation data from Dispute Resolution Centres in Queensland, Australia, this paper illustrates how intensive modes of neighbouring combine with disadvantage and close physical proximity to create the conditions for neighbour problems to arise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the importance of everyday encounters in underpinning sociality, focusing especially on the located and material aspects of social relations. Bringing together debates about social relations, place attachment and population turnover (or ‘churn’), and using research carried out in the UK city of Leicester, in an inner city neighbourhood with high population turnover, the article investigates incidences of neighbourliness, probing what happens to social relations between neighbours in a place which could be considered to be unstable in terms of population, and where conviviality could be deemed to be under threat by wider structural economic forces. Three overlapping questions are addressed: how does neighbourliness manifest itself in such conditions, where is it practiced, and how do people relate to the material environment around them when the social landscape is apparently so unstable? Drawing on in-depth interviews with inner-city Leicester residents this article considers not only the narrated practice of social and neighbourly relations in a particular setting, but also how important place is to this practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how Turks returning from Germany to Turkey self-fashion as 'orderly neighbours'. By maintaining aesthetically pleasing homes and gardens, keeping public spaces clean, and obeying rules and laws in public, return migrants believe they act as modern 'European-Turks' and exemplify good neighbourliness. Many neighbours, however, feel these actions are unnecessary or even disruptive to Turkish communities. In conversation with the burgeoning anthropology of ethics, this research explores how local, national and transnational assemblages foster reflections and debates on neighbourly ethics. Further, this study highlights anxieties about individualism, reciprocity, 'modernity' and 'European-ness' in today's Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]