Ethnic violence is one of the bloodiest and most virulent kinds of conflict. Pinpointing areas where it’s likely to erupt and sussing out why some areas have avoided it are intensely interesting issues to geographers, and Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complex Systems Institute made headlines four years ago with a model indicating that how messy the borders are between ethnic groups may be a good predictor of violence. Now, after using it to predict where violence was likely to occur in India and the former Yugoslavia, both areas known for their ethnic turbulence, he’s posted a paper on the ArXiv that applies his analysis to Switzerland, a enviably peaceful country that nevertheless has four national languages and large, devout populations of both Protestants and Catholics. How do the Swiss do it, he asks? His team’s answer, basically, is geographic and administrative isolation. Switzerland is divided up into cantons—states that each run almost autonomously—that are fairly homogenous in terms of language and religion, and the country’s mountains and lakes provide geographic barriers between regions that might clash. Full story here