The literature on conflict claims that there has been a resurgence of ethnic conflict in the era of globalisation. This paper attempts to investigate how local conflict may be influenced by processes of globalisation. The paper argues that in order to understand how globalisation may be implicated in local violent events, it is essential to develop a nuanced understanding of the complexities of global–local interaction in places. This paper also hopes to contribute to the analytical potency of identity-oriented explanations of conflict by explicating how identity construction has an overt spatial dimension – it is simultaneously place based and global, and how this global–local identity construction simultaneously produces socioeconomic and socio-cultural strategies of ‘othering’ that define the complexion of contemporary conflicts. Using interviews from a case study of Hindu–Muslim conflict which happened in 2002 in Ahmedabad city, India, this paper explicates how locally embedded global narratives socioeconomically and socio-culturally produce the ‘other.’