Ethnicity is increasingly central to analysis of war. Whether conceived in essentialist or constructivist terms, ethnicity is often accorded explanatory primacy in accounting for the organization and use of violence in wartime settings, in part due to the utility of processes of othering for group mobilization. Both the political and ideological context of hostilities as well as the motivations of combatants in the actual making of wartime violence are frequently conceptualized in ethnic and racialized terms. In a word, wartime violence is domesticated; it is seen as arising from the identities of, and commitments to, homelands.