Understanding Ethnic Conflict

Raymond Taras

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317342823
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Understanding Ethnic Conflict provides all the key concepts needed to understand conflict among ethnic groups. Including approaches from both comparative politics and international relations, this text offers a model of ethnic conflict's internationalization by showing how domestic and international actors influence a country's ethnic and sectarian divisions. Illustrating this model in five original case studies, the unique combination of theory and application in Understanding Ethnic Conflict facilitates more critical analysis of contemporary ethnic conflicts and the world's response to them.

CHAPTER 1

Ethnic Conflict on the World Stage

INTRODUCTION

Ethnic conflict is not a new phenomenon. From the very beginning of human history, “communities organized on putative common descent, culture, and destiny have coexisted, competed, and clashed.”¹ Yet the novelty of ethnic conflict in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries lies not in the existence of conflict among ethnic groups but in the intensity and global manifestation of that conflict. The adverse effects of such conflicts are felt in equal measure in the developed and developing worlds. Even as globalization theorists insist on the primacy of economic factors in shaping a new twenty-first-century global order, cultural divisions seem to have a greater impact on the state of world politics.

DEFINITIONS

An ethnic group, or ethnic community, can be defined as a large or small group of people, in either traditional or advanced societies, who are united by a common inherited culture (including language, music, food, dress, and customs and practices), racial similarity, common religion, and belief in a common history and ancestry and who exhibit a strong psychological sentiment of belonging to the group. Ethnic groups can be of two distinct types: homelands societies and diaspora communities. Homelands societies include longtime residents of a given territory and thereby claim exclusive legal and moral rights of ownership over that land; such claims are usually backed up by historical (factual and mythical) and archaeological evidence. Ethnic diaspora communities are found in foreign countries and are mainly caused by population migrations, induced either by oppression in their home state or by the attraction of better economic prospects and opportunities. Ethnic diasporas do not normally seek territorial rights in a foreign state but usually demand “nondiscriminatory participation as individuals in public affairs—voting, office holding, access to justice—plus nondiscriminatory access to education, employment, housing, business opportunities, and public services; and official recognition of their right to maintain institutions that perpetuate elements of their inherited culture.”²

An ethnic group’s transformation into an ethnic nation occurs when, as Ernest Barker has noted, political and statist ideas develop within the group:

A nation is a body of [people], inhabiting a definite territory, who normally are drawn from different races, but possess a common stock of thoughts and feelings acquired and transmitted during the course of a common history; who on the whole and in the main, though more in the past than in the present, include in that common stock a common religious belief; who generally and as a rule use a common language as the vehicle of their thoughts and feelings; and who, besides common thoughts and feelings, also cherish a common will, and accordingly form, or tend to form, a separate state for the expression and realization of that will.³

As long as an ethnic nation is coterminous with a state,⁴ it can be termed a nation-state. However, out of the approximately 192 states in the world roughly, 90 percent are multiethnic or multinational because they incorporate two or more ethnic groups or nations. Theoretically, Barker’s definition of the nation implies that the state is the natural outgrowth of national self-determination—a nation’s desire and ambition to maintain and govern itself independently of other nations. Hence, it would be logical to assume that the formation of nations preceded the formation of states. As far as Europe and North America is concerned, the formation of nations seems to have occurred first, which then provided the incentive and momentum for the formation of modern states. In the developing world, however, the process mostly occurred the other way round. In Latin America, Africa, and Asia, Western conquest and colonization led to the creation of multiethnic and multiracial administrative entities. These administrative entities were converted, by and large, to sovereign states during decolonization (mostly in the first half of the nineteenth century in Latin America and in the second half of the twentieth century in Asia and Africa) without first ascertaining, in most cases, the political aspirations of the constituent ethnic and racial groups, thereby creating artificial multiethnic and multiracial states. Hence, state building, usually occurred first in the postcolonial states, to be followed by the more difficult task of building a national identity (that is, nation building) that would supersede hundreds of ethnic identities within their borders.

Nation building is a complex task that could proceed along one of two tracks. First, a nation could be conceived in purely ethnic terms. If so conceived, the nation would define an individual’s membership in and loyalty to the nation in terms of lineage and vernacular culture⁵; in such a schema, minority ethnic group members could not hope to “become part of the [majority or dominant] national grouping.”⁶ Clearly, ethnic nation building in multiethnic states, by keeping out minority ethnic groups from the dominant or core national group, could hardly be expected to promote interethnic harmony and peace. By contrast, a nation could be conceived in political or civic terms. Thus conceived, an individual’s membership in and loyalty to the nation is defined in terms of citizenship, common laws, and political participation, regardless of ethnicity and lineage.⁷ In the complex multiethnic postcolonial states of the developing world, only civic nation building could foster an inclusive nationalism that would supersede hundreds of ethnic identities within their borders.

Whether it is conceived in ethnic or civic forms, a nation that expresses sentiments of loyalty toward the nation-state can be said to demonstrate the spirit of nationalism. Conceptual problems have bedeviled the term nationalism ever since it made its appearance after the French Revolution, yet most scholars concur that nationalism incorporates two important characteristics: first, nationalism is an emotion or a sentiment, and second, it is a political doctrine. Hans Kohn, for instance, stressed the emotional or sentimental nature of nationalism when he wrote that nationalism “is first and foremost a state of mind, an act of consciousness.”⁸ Boyd Shafer, too, viewed nationalism as a sentiment or emotion that binds a group of people with a real or imagined historical experience and common aspirations and prompts them to live as a separate and distinct community.⁹ Ernest Gellner, however, emphasized that nationalism is a political doctrine that requires the congruence of political and national units.¹⁰ Similarly, Anthony Smith argued that “[n]ations are distinguished by the fact that the objective of their social action can only be the ‘autonomous polity,’ a sovereign state of their own. . . .”¹¹

The transformation of an ethnic group into an ethnic political movement occurs when an ethnic community is converted “into a political competitor that seeks to combat ethnic antagonists or to impress ethnically defined interests on the agenda of the state.”¹² Theoretically, an ethnic political movement may try to represent “the collective consciousness and aspirations of the entire community,” but in practice, ethnic political movements often “split into several tendencies or concrete organizations, each competing for the allegiance of the community and for the right to be its exclusive representative.”¹³ But on the whole, the strength of an ethnic political movement depends on the strength of ethnic solidarity—the duties and responsibilities of members toward their ethnic group. Finally, an ethno-religious group can be defined as one where ethnic and religious identities are inseparable in the making of community. Because this seems to encompass so many groups, ranging from Irish Catholics to Serb Orthodox, to Arab Muslims, and to Indian Hindus, and because there are important exceptions to each case, the ethno-religious category seems analytically unhelpful, except, arguably, to explain ethno-religious conflict—a clash of cultures rooted in both objective and psychological factors that fuse lineage with a religious belief system.

HOW IS ETHNIC IDENTITY FORMED?

Ethnic identity can be defined as “the set of meanings that individuals impute to their membership in an ethnic community, including those attributes that bind them to that collectivity and that distinguish it from others in their relevant environment.”¹⁴ Generally, one may speak of three main schools of thought on the questions of how ethnic identity is formed and why it persists: the primordialist, the instrumentalist, and the constructivist.

Primordialists regard ethnic identity as essentially a biologically given or “natural phenomenon.”¹⁵ Understood in this sense, ethnic groups “constitute the network into which human individuals are born” and where “every human infant or young child finds itself a member of a kinship group and of a neighborhood,” and therefore comes to share with other group members certain common objective cultural attributes.¹⁶ Some of these common objective cultural attributes are language, religion, customs, tradition, food, dress, and music.¹⁷ Along with objective cultural markers, primordialists also stress the subjective or psychological aspects of self- and group-related feelings of identity distinctiveness and their recognition by others as a crucial determinant of ethnic identity formation and its persistence.¹⁸ The exact nature of these psychological feelings is not very clear, although three requirements seem important for group creation: emotional satisfaction or warmth that one receives from belonging to a group; a shared belief in the common origin and history of the group, however mythical or fictive, that helps to set up the boundaries of the group; and the feeling among group members that “the social relations, within which they live, [are] ‘sacred’ and [include] not merely the living but [also] the dead.”¹⁹

Ethnic identity from the primordialist perspective, therefore, is a “subjectively held sense of shared identity ba...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Brief Content
• Table of Content
• Preface
• Part I Ethnic Conflict and International Politics: A Conceptual Framework
• Part II Case Studies
• Part III Conclusion
• Selected Bibliography
• Glossary
• Index