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Ethnic war
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An ethnic conflict or ethnic war is a war between ethnic groups often as a result of ethnic nationalism. They are of interest because of the apparent prevalence since the Cold War and because they frequently result in war crimes such as genocide. Academic explanations of ethnic conflict generally fall into one of three schools of thought: primordialist, instrumentalist or constructivist. Intellectual debate has also focused around the issue of whether ethnic conflict has become more prevalent since the end of the Cold War, and on devising ways of managing conflicts, through instruments such as consociationalism and federalisation.
Theories of ethnic conflict
The causes of ethnic conflict are debated by political scientists and sociologists who generally fall into one of three schools of thought: primordialist, instrumentalist, and constructivist.
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Encyclopedia
An ethnic conflict or ethnic war is a war between ethnic groups often as a result of ethnic nationalism. They are of interest because of the apparent prevalence since the Cold War and because they frequently result in war crimes such as genocide. Academic explanations of ethnic conflict generally fall into one of three schools of thought: primordialist, instrumentalist or constructivist. Intellectual debate has also focused around the issue of whether ethnic conflict has become more prevalent since the end of the Cold War, and on devising ways of managing conflicts, through instruments such as consociationalism and federalisation.
Theories of ethnic conflict
The causes of ethnic conflict are debated by political scientists and sociologists who generally fall into one of three schools of thought: primordialist, instrumentalist, and constructivist. More recent scholarship draws on all three schools in order to increase our understanding of ethnic conflict.
Primordialist accounts
Proponents of primordialist accounts of ethnic conflict argue that “[e]thnic groups and nationalities exist because there are traditions of belief and action towards primordial objects such as biological features and especially territorial location”. The primordialist account relies on a concept of kinship between members of an ethnic group. Donald Horowitz argues that this kinship “makes it possible for ethnic groups to think in terms of family resemblances”.
There are a number of political scientists who refer to the concept of ethnic wars as a myth because they argue that the root causes of ethnic conflict do not involve ethnicity but rather institutional, political, and economic factors. These political scientists argue that the concept of ethnic war is misleading because it leads to an essentialist conclusion that certain groups are doomed to fight each other when in fact the wars between them are the result of political decisions. Opposing groups may substitute ethnicity for the underlying factors to simplify identification of friend and foe.
Instrumentalist accounts
Anthony Smith notes that the instrumentalist account “came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, in the debate about (white) ethnic persistence in what was supposed to have been an effective melting pot”. This new theory sought to explain such persistence as the result of the actions of community leaders, “who used their cultural groups as sites of mass mobilization and as constituencies in their competition for power and resources, because they found them more effective than social classes”. In this account of ethnic identification, “[e]thnicity and race are viewed as instrumental identities, organized as means to particular ends”.
Constructivist accounts
A third, constructivist, set of accounts stress the importance of the socially constructed nature of ethnic groups, drawing on Benedict Anderson's concept of the imagined community. Proponents of this account point to Rwanda as an example since the Tutsi/Hutu distinction was codified by the Belgian colonial power in the 1930s on the basis of cattle ownership, physical measurements and church records. Identity cards were issued on this basis, and these documents played a key role in the genocide of 1994.
More recently, scholars of ethnic conflict and civil wars have introduced theories that draw insights from all three traditional schools of thought. In The Geography of Ethnic Violence, for example, Monica Duffy Toft shows how ethnic group settlement patterns, socially constructed identities, charismatic leaders, issue indivisibility, and state concern with precedent setting can lead rational actors to escalate a dispute to violence, even when doing so is likely to leave contending groups much worse off. Such research addresses empirical puzzles that are difficult to explain using primordialist, instrumentalist, or constructivist approaches alone; such as why some ethnic disputes escalate to violence while others - even in the same geographic region - do not.
Ethnic conflict in the post-Cold War world
Although the study of ethnic conflict has a long history, genuine interest in ethnic conflict beyond the comparative political science subfield dates from the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, both of which were followed by ethnic conflicts that escalated to violence and civil war. The end of the Cold War thus sparked interest in two important questions about ethnic conflict: was ethnic conflict on the rise; and given that some ethnic conflicts had escalated into serious violence, what, if anything, could scholars of large-scale violence (security studies, strategic studies, interstate politics) offer by way of explanation?
One of the most debated issues relating to ethnic conflict is whether it has become more or less prevalent in the post-Cold War period. At the end of the Cold War, academics including Samuel P. Huntington and Robert D. Kaplan predicted a proliferation of conflicts fuelled by civilisational clashes, tribalism, resource scarcity and overpopulation.
The post-Cold War period has witnessed a number of ethnically-informed secessionist movements, predominantly within the former communist states. Conflicts have involved secessionist movements in the former Yugoslavia, Transnistria in Moldova, Armenians in Azerbaijan, Abkhaz in Georgia and Chechens in the Russian Federation.
However, some theorists contend that this does not represent a rise in the incidence of ethnic conflict, since many of the proxy wars fought during the Cold War were in fact ethnic conflicts masked as hot spots of the Cold War. Research shows that the fall of Communism and the increase in the number of democratic states were accompanied by a decline in total warfare, interstate wars, ethnic wars, revolutionary wars, and the number of refugees and displaced persons. Indeed, some scholars have questioned whether the concept of ethnic conflict is useful at all. Others have attempted to test the clash of civilisations thesis, finding it to be difficult to operationalise and that civilisational conflicts have not risen in intensity in relation to other ethnic conflicts since the end of the Cold War.
On the question of whether scholars deeply invested in theories of interstate violence could adapt their theories to explain or predict large-scale ethnic violence, a key issue proved to be whether ethnic groups could be considered "rational" actors. Prior to the end of the Cold War, the consensus among students of large-scale violence was that ethnic groups should be considered irrational actors, or semi-rational at best. If true, general explanations of ethnic violence would be impossible. In the years since, however, scholarly consensus has shifted to consider that ethnic groups may in fact be counted as rational actors, and the puzzle of their apparently irrational actions (for example, fighting over territory of little or no intrinsic worth) must therefore be explained some other way. As a result, the possibility of a general explanation of ethnic violence has grown, and collaboration between comparativist and international relations subfields has resulted in increasingly useful theories of ethnic conflict.
Ethnic conflict regulation
A number of scholars have attempted to synthesise the methods available for the resolution, management or transformation of ethnic conflict. John Coakley, for example, has developed a typology of the methods of conflict resolution that have been employed by states, which he lists as: indigenization, accommodation, assimilation, acculturation, population transfer, boundary alteration, genocide and ethnic suicide.
John McGarry and Brendan O'Leary have developed a taxonomy of eight macro-political ethnic conflict regulation methods, which they note are often employed by states in combination with each other. They include a number of methods that they note are clearly morally unacceptable.
- Methods for eliminating differences:
- Methods for managing differences:
See also
External links
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