Extremely niche twitter content: though he talks about lots of cases, I'm always struck by how heavily Horowitz's "Ethnic Groups in Conflict" is driven by ethnic politics in Sri Lanka & Malaysia.

The way he conceptualizes ethnicity and ethnic competition has a very strong sons-of-the-soil vibe, and doesn't map all that well onto, for instance, a lot of identity-related politics in India and Pakistan (note: exceptions and caveats here)

But that's OK! My read of much of the 1990s/2000s ethnic politics turn in Political Science (LiCEP etc) was people reading Horowitz and thinking "Hmm OK there is something here but it only seems to apply to particular types of cases and contexts," triggering new work.

It's a classic example of how being (somewhat) wrong can be very intellectually productive. "Argument X seems to apply to some contexts, but not to a lot of others so how can we figure this out" is, to me at least, really valuable.

Random additional side note - Horowitz's first book related to ethnicity (though not first article, or overall 1st book) was on the 1962 attempted coup in Sri Lanka. It's a solid work but nothing close to the impact of his later work (129 GS cites; Ethnic Groups has . . . 12k).

I worry a lot that we judge scholars too early in their career - grad school and then the first few years of a TT job (if they are able to find one), whereas there are definitely cases of people whose work improves over time rather than being seen as a rising star from the jump.

Anyways everyone should read this book even if it's wrong about plenty of things: https://www.amazon.com/Ethnic-Groups-Conflict-Updated-Preface/dp/0520227069

And for some explicit discussion of Malaysia and Sri Lanka check out:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3992328#metadata_info_tab_contents