Dr. Raheel Dhattiwala
Dr. Raheel Dhattiwala is an independent sociologist and, formerly, a senior journalist at the Times of India (2001-2007). She holds an M.Sc. and a D.Phil. in Sociology from Oxford University, where she has also worked as a research fellow and tutor. 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.
Dr Dhattiwala’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” (American Journal of Sociology; Studies in Indian Politics). She has also published in top peer-reviewed journals, including Sociology, Politics & Society, Contemporary South Asia, The British Journal of Criminology, among others.
