The Routledge Handbook of Ethnic Conflict

Karl Cordell, Stefan Wolff, Karl Cordell, Stefan Wolff, Karl Cordell, Stefan Wolff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317518914
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A definitive global survey of the interaction of ethnicity, nationalism and politics, this handbook blends rigorous theoretically grounded analysis with empirically rich illustrations to provide a state-of-the-art overview of the contemporary debates on one of the most pervasive international security challenges today. Fully updated for the second edition, the book includes a new section which offers detailed analyses of contemporary cases of conflict such as in Ukraine, Kosovo, the African Great Lakes region and in the Kurdish areas across the Middle East, thus providing accessible examples that bridge the gap between theory and practice.

The contributors offer a 360-degree perspective on ethnic conflict: from the theoretical foundations of nationalism and ethnicity to the causes and consequences of ethnic conflict, and to the various strategies adopted in response to it. Without privileging any specific explanation of why ethnic conflict happens at a particular place and time or why attempts at preventing or settling it might fail or succeed, The Routledge Handbook of Ethnic Conflict enables readers to gain a better insight into such defining moments in post-Cold War international history as the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and their respective consequences, the genocide in Rwanda, and the relative success of conflict settlement efforts in Northern Ireland.

By contributing to understanding the varied and multiple causes of ethnic conflicts and to learning from the successes and failures of their prevention and settlement, the Handbook makes a powerful case that ethnic conflicts are neither unavoidable nor unresolvable, but rather that they require careful analysis and thoughtful and measured responses.

The study of ethnic conflict 1 An introduction

Karl Cordell and Stefan Wolff

DOI: 10.4324/9781315720425-1

In the first edition of this volume our opening sentence stated that: ‘Ethnic conflict remains one of the prevailing challenges to international security in our time’. Sadly, not much has changed since we wrote these words. Conflicts that in some way involve an ethnic dimension can be found across each of the world’s continents. What drives such conflict is at base, rarely, if ever, some kind of genetically or culturally determined marker that results in two different peoples being unable to co-exist alongside one another. Rather, conflicts are caused by competition for (increasingly) scarce resources, the agendas of political activists and more especially political elites and through the manipulation and essentialisation of identity markers of which ethnicity is but one. Left unchecked, or managed poorly, such conflict threatens the very fabric of the societies in which it occurs, endangers the territorial integrity of existing states, wreaks havoc on their economic development, destabilises entire regions as conflict spills over from one country into another, creates the conditions in which transnational organised crime can flourish, and offers safe havens to terrorist organisations with an agenda far beyond, and often unconnected to, the conflict in question. To be sure, not every conflict has all of these consequences and not all of them occur in equal scale everywhere. Yet, one feature that most ethnic conflicts above all share is the sheer human misery that they create: people get killed, tortured, maimed, raped; they suffer from displacement, starvation, and disease. If for no other reason, social scientists need to study ethnic conflict in order to understand better what its causes are, how it can be prevented, managed, and resolved. While we may never be able to stop ethnic conflicts from happening, understanding them better will improve our abilities to respond more quickly and more effectively, thus reducing the scale of human suffering.

Ethnic conflicts have been a subject of social scientific inquiry for a long time now, and the subject has become firmly established as a field of study across a range of disciplines from political science and international relations to sociology, anthropology, and psychology. It is taught widely at universities across the world, at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and numerous doctoral dissertations are written every year on a wide range of aspects of ethnic conflict. As with the original edition of the Handbook we do not propose a new theory of ethnic conflict or conflict resolution, but rather a comprehensive introduction to the study of this subject, reflecting the state of the art in this field. Motivated to explore a wide range of different dimensions of ethnic conflict, we have been very fortunate to be able to assemble a team of scholars, all of whom are expert in their area and can shed light on specific aspects of ethnic conflict, offering well-argued insights, and complementing each other’s views so that what emerges is an overview of the way in which ethnic conflict is being studied today.

The purpose of this introductory chapter is three-fold. First, we offer some empirical backing to our assertion that ethnic conflict is today one of the prevailing challenges to international security. Second, proceeding from this background, we discuss what the questions are that need to be asked about ethnic conflict, how we and our contributors go about answering them with the help of concepts, theories, and methods, and how this has translated into the structure of our Handbook. Third, we explore whether we can draw any more general conclusions about ethnic conflict from the contributions to this Handbook – not in the sense of a new theory of ethnic conflict, but rather in the sense of what we know and understand today of this particular phenomenon and where this knowledge and understanding might lead us in the future, both in terms of research agendas and in terms of practically dealing with ethnic conflicts and their aftermath.

Ethnic conflict as an international security challenge

In the original volume of the Handbook we paid attention to the international ramifications of conflicts that at first sight are not overtly international in their dimensions and are not necessarily ethnic in terms of their drivers and content. One such conflict was and remains that which blights Yemen. The various strands of the Yemeni conflict are somewhat difficult to disentangle, but they involve Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP): partisans of former President Ali Abdullah Saleh; supporters of rival current president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, Shia Houthi rebels led by Mohammed Ali al-Houthi and the separatist Southern Movement. Conflicts such as those occurring in Yemen are highly complex in their causes and consequences, and it would be simplistic to explain them purely in terms of ethnic difference, even if conceived of as predominantly tribal or religious. Yet, neither can we ignore that such differences have mattered greatly and fuelled today’s conflicts over time, hardening divisions between combatant factions and increasing mistrust and grievances as both sides committed atrocities against civilian populations, be it by killing civilians in suicide attacks or by razing entire villages to the ground. This is further complicated by external ‘meddling’ in these conflicts – Saudi Arabia, a one-time supporter of tribal uprisings in the 1990s, aimed at weakening the Yemeni government during its border dispute with Riyadh, has subsequently sided with Sana’a when the threat from al-Qaeda extended to the Saudi monarchy, while Iran has allegedly indirectly supported the Houthi rebels, who hail from the north of Yemen, but whose area of operation now encompasses much of the centre of the country. In sum what we have here is a local conflict that also reflects the regional power struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Ongoing domestic conflicts, some with clear ethnic dimensions, thus have very obvious implications beyond the locality in which they occur, shaping and being shaped by broader regional and international developments. Indeed, the Yemeni conflict can be seen as but one element of a series of interlinked conflicts that is currently convulsing the Middle East and North Africa, which although pitting partisans of Islam against one another, with regards to the Kurds has an obvious ethnic dimension, and as such has facilitated a growing sense of cross-border intra-Kurdish solidarity that has been increasingly evident ever since they first came into conflict with Islamic State in 2013.

Switching between continents, another conflict that is currently in the international limelight is that between Ukraine and Russian-backed rebels in the Donbas region of south-eastern Ukraine. In March 2014 Russia annexed Crimea ostensibly to protect this ‘historically Russian’ territory from attacks by the partisans of ‘Ukrainian fascism’, who in February 2014 had overthrown the regime of President Viktor Yanukovych. At one level, whether or not the apparent concern that ‘fascists’ had come to power in Kiev is genuine is irrelevant. In justifying his government’s annexation of the territory, President Putin referred to the (primordial) Russian nature of Crimea thereby implying that it was not and never had been the sovereign territory of others whether they be Ukrainians or Tatars. Moreover, since then Putin has unleashed a torrent of hyper-nationalist propaganda in Russia which seeks to justify support of separatists in the Donbas by reference not only to the threat posed by ‘Ukrainian fascists’, but also the close cultural ties between the people of the Donbas and the Russian Motherland. The potential international ramifications of this conflict are obvious, given the substantial Russian minorities in Latvia and Estonia and the pro-Russian stance of the political leadership in the diplomatically and geographically isolated breakaway state of Transnistria, which is in part at least dependent upon Moscow for its very survival. These aforementioned conflicts add to a series of other conflicts that we identified as being significant in the first edition of the Handbook. In 2010, we noted how during the 1990s in southeast Asia, another local al-Qaeda offshoot – Jemaah Islamiyah – grafted itself onto pre-existing ethnic conflicts in southern Thailand, the Aceh province of Indonesia, and Mindanao in the Philippines. Whereas the conflict in Aceh has been peacefully resolved, the conflict in southern Thailand rumbles on and despite the signing of multiple peace agreements, the latest being in March 2014, the best that can be said of Mindanao is that fighting has subsided. Such conflicts persist not only because of the inability of the warring parties either to achieve a decisive military victory, as in Sri Lanka in May 2009, or to reach any political accommodation, as in Northern Ireland in 1998, but also because for some of the combatants, wars are extremely profitable and a return to peace may injure the economic interests of those who profit from conflict. As is evident from among others the conflicts in Liberia, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Sierra Leone, one of the ways in which various rebel groups have gained notoriety in recent years, is less than for their struggle on behalf of aggrieved victims of oppression but more for criminal activities such as kidnappings, resource exploitation and extraction and extortion rackets that have, over time, turned rebel movements into organised crime operations, whatever the notional political goals of the perpetrators. In addition to the aforementioned examples, similar links, differing in scale and intensity, between ethnic conflict, organised crime, and/or international terrorism can be observed in Iraq and Afghanistan, Somalia and Nigeria, in Myanmar, Bangladesh and northeast India, and in the separatist regions of Chechnya, Ingushetia, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Transnistria. The important point here is this: ethnic conflicts, if left to fester, over time have the potential to transmorph into an even more deadly mix of overlapping and converging agendas of different interest groups that are difficult to disentangle and even more difficult to resolve. Understanding these dynamics is important: it should motivate the international community to preventive rather than reactive action, and it should foster a comprehensive approach to conflict analysis and a context-sensitive approach to conflict settlements.

Not every ethnic conflict, of course, has similar regional and global ramifications. Neither are there, in fact, that many conflicts generated solely on the grounds of ethnic difference. According to data compiled by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO 2009; Harbom and Wallensteen 2009), between 1946 and 2008 there were 174 internal and internationalised internal conflicts. Of these, in line with the definition we develop below, 90 would fall into the category of ethnic conflicts, of which 65 were struggles specifically over territorial control. Likewise, Quinn’s analysis of violent self-determination conflicts – the ‘quest of national and indigenous peoples for self-governance’ (Quinn 2008: 33) – has found that, since the 1950s, ‘79 territorially concentrated ethnic groups have waged armed conflicts for autonomy or independence’ (ibid.). While this figure excludes ethnic conflicts in which the overall aim of the combatants is to retain, or attain, control of the state as a whole (i.e., in PRIO terms, conflicts in which the incompatibility is government), the same general trend also applies: since the peak of such conflicts in the early 1990s, there have been fewer outbreaks of new conflicts (or re-escalations of previously settled or contained ones) than settlements, so that the total number of violent self-determination conflicts has declined (see also Hewitt 2010) significantly. Yet, what is also clear from these and other analyses is that it is unlikely that we will see a complete disappearance of ethnic conflicts in the near future.

Conceptualising the study of ethnic conflict

The fact that ethnic conflicts will remain with us as a significant international humanitarian and security challenge in itself justifies their in-depth study, because we cannot deal with them effectively unless we understand them. This means that we have to clarify the relevant concepts and theories which provide the foundation for any study of ethnic conflict and allow us to situate this subject within and across disciplinary boundaries, engage with key methodological issues, and identify the terms of the debate and the main underlying assumptions. Even more fundamentally, we need to clarify the actual subject of our inquiry. Ethnic conflict is a term loaded with often legitimate negative associations and entirely unnecessary confusions. The most important confusion is that ethnic conflicts are about ethnicity – it often forms an important part of the explanation, but rarely offers a comprehensive explanation on its own. Generally speaking, the term conflict describes a situation in which two or more actors pursue incompatible, yet from their individual perspectives entirely just goals. Ethnic conflicts are one particular form of such conflict: that in which the goals of at least one conflict party are defined in (exclusively) ethnic terms, and in which the primary fault line of confrontation is one of ethnic distinctions. Whatever the concrete issues over which conflict erupts, at least one of the conflict parties will explain its dissatisfaction in ethnic terms. That is, one party to the conflict will claim that its distinct ethnic identity is the reason why its members cannot realise their interests, why they do not have the same rights, or why their claims are not satisfied. Thus, ethnic conflicts are a form of group conflict in which at least one of the parties involved interprets the conflict, its causes, and potential remedies along an actually existing or perceived discriminating ethnic divide. In other words, the term ethnic conflict itself is a misnomer – or to put it differently, an ethnic conflict involves at least one conflict party that is organised around the ethnic identity of its members. Hence, few would dispute that conflicts that have occurred, or are occurring in Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Cyprus, Rwanda, the DRC, Kashmir, and Sri Lanka, to name but a few, are ethnic conflicts. That is so because in each of these cases organised ethnic groups confront each other and/or the institutions of the states in which they live. All of these conflicts have been violent, yet violence in each of them was of different degrees of intensity and duration. In contrast, relationships between Estonians and Russians in Estonia and the complex dynamics of interaction between the different linguistic groups in Canada, Belgium, and France are also predominantly based on distinct ethnic identities and (incompatible) interest structures, yet their manifestations are less violent and are better described in terms of tensions than conflict. Thus, the way in which we use the term ‘ethnic conflict’ in this Handbook is to describe situations in which combatants take recourse to the systematic use of violence for strategic purposes and in which at least one combatant defines itself primarily in relation to a distinctive ethnic identity.¹

Regardless of the extent to which contributors to the first edition of the Handbook have revised their original contribution, they and the new contributors to this volume share one fundamental assumption, which is that although ethnic conflicts may well be complex political phenomena, they can be understood. From this conviction of our ability to understand the dynamics of ethnic conflict also flows our relative optimism that we can do something about ethnic conflicts in a broad sense: ideally prevent or settle them, but if this proves impossible at a certain period of time, at the very least manage them in a way that contains their consequences. In other words, studying ethnic conflicts means to study their causes and consequences, and the ways in which third parties respond to them. As we have demonstrated in greater detail elsewhere (Cordell and Wolff 2009; Wolff 2006), this involves engagement with theories of ethnic conflict and conflict resolution. These are obviously related to each other and inform each other, not least because they are built on a range of overlapping concepts and more general theories, including theories of ethnicity, of inter-ethnic relations, and of political science, especially comparative politics, and international relations. In order to give the Handbook a coherent structure that reflects this approach, the part immediately following this introductory chapter deals with the ‘Theoretical foundations for the study of ethnic conflict’ and deals with the conceptual and theoretical tools of the subject matter, thus establishing the parameters of the dimensions and nature of the debate in this regard. Thus, the Handbook commences with an analysis by Jennifer Jackson Preece of the nature and origin of that much contested term: the nation. Jackson Preece takes as her point of departure the fact that any discussion of this term is bound to be controversial, precisely because there is still no consensus, either within or without academia, as to how to define the nation. Nor is there any wider societal consensus of the relationship between modern nations and entities from which members of modern nations claim linear descent. Such claims, more often than not, shape not only people’s views of themselves, but also give rise to demands vis-à-vis people perceived to be non-members of a particular nation. This is the connection between Jackson Preece’s conceptual analysis of the nation and Daniele Conversi’s discussion of nationalism. As he points out, since 1789, nationalism has been a motivational force for millions of people and as such, and despite its allegedly inchoate structure, is an ideology, and that the key to our understanding of nationalism is appreciating how it operates as an ideology. Another connection between nation and nationalism is established by the question of who actually constitutes the nation, and this issue is considered by Colin Clark. He examines the traditional ‘civic’ versus ‘ethnic’ dichotomy and demonstrates the relationship between intellectual output, historical location and political process. Examining the work of such noted scholars as Hans Kohn, Liah Greenfield, and Michael Ignatieff, Clark pays particular attention to notions of choice and context, and illustrates the complexities of the situation through the judicious employment of case studies. In so doing, he brings home the point that what at first sight appears to be clear-cut, in fact is opaque. The very fact that there is this distinction, however debatable, between ethnic and civic nations, points to another paradox that students of ethnic conflict frequently encounter: the nation-state is in a sense a misnomer, in few if any states people equally identify (themselves and others) as members of the same nation and citizens of the same state. Rather, there are far more nations than states, even if not all self-declared nations necessarily make explicit claims to independent statehood. And thus, we confront the issue of ‘Stateless nations in a world (and a discipline) governed by nation-states’. Stéphanie Chouinard considers the question how in principle we reconcile the demands of stateless nations with a state system that effectively excludes the bulk of nations from ever achieving statehood, and introduces some key aspects of the examination of the causes and consequences of ethnic conflict and the responses to it that follow in Parts II and III of the Handbook.

Having thus conceptually framed the nation and its ‘derivatives’, we are left with the challenge of elaborating in more detail another core dimension in the study of ethnic conflict: the notion of ‘ethnicity’. Two contributions address this issue by exploring the relationship between ethnicity and religion and between ethnicity and race. First, Joseph Ruane and Jennifer Todd explore a variety of conceptual, analytical, and theoretical issues that embrace the relationship that sometimes exists between the desire for national self-determination and the longing for an end to the repression of religion. Ruane and Todd start from the premise that many apparently ethnically based conflicts involve a religious element, and argue that we cannot, however, conclude in reverse that commitment to a given religious belief system will automatically lead to adherence either to a particular ideology or to a given mode of political action. In other words, much in the same way in which the mere presence in the same state of different ethnic groups does not automatically lead to conflict between them, neither is it ...