Economic foundations of religious killings and genocide with special reference to Pakistan, 1978-2012

In this chapter, I create a new set of economic models to understand what economists would call “equilibrium levels” for mass killings that one social group may have an incentive to unleash on another. (In economics, equilibrium just means that a social system has come to a position of rest. When the underlying forces that created the system in the first place no longer change, then the system is settled and at rest, even if the equilibrium is terrifying in its consequences.) I try to understand how ordinary members of a social group, hereafter called “citizens,” can become so involved in the mayhem as to carry out atrocities against other citizens.