Enforced Unity: Wartime Tightness and In-Group Policing in a Divided City

War is often associated with social cohesion and collective unity. This paper argues that such unity is also enforced through everyday forms of violence within the national majority, and that this process unfolds primarily at the urban level. Drawing on tightness–looseness theory and research on in-group policing, the paper examines how wartime conditions reshape exposure to violence in a divided city. The analysis is based on repeated cross-sectional surveys of Jerusalem residents conducted in 2023 and 2025 (N = 2,635), before and during the current war. Focusing on reported exposure to violence from one’s own Jewish group, from other Jewish groups, and from the Arab population, the study traces changes in everyday violence under wartime conditions. Across all sources, reported exposure to violence rises substantially in 2025. Importantly, this escalation is not confined to inter-group conflict. Exposure to violence originating within the Jewish majority, both from one’s own group and from other Jewish groups, also increases broadly during the wartime period. These intra-Jewish increases appear across religious sectors (secular, religious, and ultra-Orthodox) and across political orientations (right, center, and left), although levels vary between groups. In parallel, rising reported exposure to violence coincides with a documented decline in police-recorded crime in Jerusalem, particularly in categories associated with public order, bodily harm, and property offenses. We argue that this divergence is consistent with a process of wartime tightness, in which heightened threat intensifies informal, horizontal forms of in-group policing enacted through everyday urban interactions that often remain unreported. By centering the city as the key arena in which national wartime pressures are translated into social enforcement, the paper highlights the internal social costs of wartime cohesion and contributes to political violence by showing how war reshapes social order not only between groups, but also within them.