Pathways from Ethnic Conflict

Institutional Redesign in Divided Societies

John Coakley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317988465
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The book begins with an agenda-setting introduction which will provide an overview of the central question being addressed, such as the circumstances associated with the move towards a political settlement, the parameters of this settlement and the factors that have assisted in bringing it about. The remaining contributions will focus on a range of cases selected for their diversity and their capacity to highlight the full gamut of political approaches to conflict resolution. The cases vary in:

• the intensity of the conflict (from Belgium, where it is potential rather than actual, to Sri Lanka, where it has come to a recent violent conclusion);
• in the geopolitical relationship between the competing groups (from Cyprus, where they are sharply segregated geographically, to Northern Ireland, where they are intermingled);
• in the extent to which a stable constitutional accommodation has been reached (ranging from the Basque Country, with a large range of unresolved problems, to South Africa, which has achieved a significant level of institutional stability).

This book ranges over the world's major geopolitical zones, including Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe and will be of interest to practitioners in the field of international security.

This book was published as a special issue of Nationalism and Ethnic Politics.

1

Comparing Ethnic Conflicts: Common Patterns, Shared Challenges

John Coakley

University College Dublin

Notwithstanding predictions over the past century and a half that minorities defined in ethnic, linguistic, or cultural terms would gradually reconcile themselves to coexistence in states dominated by metropolitan cultures, difficulties arising from the mobilization of minority communities continue to be pronounced at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This article provides an overview of the extent of ethnic division in modern states, describes characteristic patterns of ethnic mobilization and focuses on a smaller set of illustrative cases that reveal many of these patterns. In this, it defines the context for a set of case studies that follow: Belgium, Spain, Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, Lebanon, South Africa, and Sri Lanka.

Introduction

The failure of minorities defined in ethnic, linguistic, or cultural terms to conform to the predictions of observers and to fade quietly away in an increasingly cosmopolitan world is one of the better-known illustrations of the capacity of social analysts to “get it wrong” in their expectations about human development. Whatever the language used or the paradigm in which it is embedded, the list of failures is impressive, ranging from left-wing political activism in the nineteenth century to conservative social theory in the twentieth. Thus it was that early Marxist predictions that “ethnic trash” (to use Engels’s term) would be consigned to the dustbin of history with the advent of advanced capitalism collapsed in the face of ethnonational rebellion that blew the Habsburg and Ottoman empires apart and that helped transform the Russian Empire into a multinational Soviet Union.¹ But the predictions of the “politics of development” school in the mid-twentieth century that ethnic particularism would inevitably fall victim to the progressive forces of “nation-building” in the course of the modernization process also fell victim to historical realities, with widespread ethnonational resurgence in the 1970s and 1980s not just challenging existing state structures but in some cases leading to their collapse.²

We know now that these expectations were unjustified, though we know less about why they were unjustified. This introductory chapter seeks not to explore the reasons for the continued vitality of ethnic protest but rather to provide an introduction to the kinds of issues that arise when ethnonational consciousness is mobilized politically—in particular those issues that have implications for the organization of the state. The falls into three parts. The first seeks to describe the broad parameters of the problem by highlighting the global character of ethnic diversity. The second generalizes about patterns of mobilization and the goals of ethnic protest movements. The third narrows the focus to a range of illustrative cases, introducing the more detailed analyses that feature later in this volume.

Ethnic Divisions

The volume of material that deals with ethnonational division within the countries of the world is huge and of well-established vintage. In its initial phase, it focused on the “old world” or, more specifically, on Europe.³ More recently, it has been global in reach and has been based on accumulated research deriving from a range of approaches. Broadly speaking, our basic data in this area now derive from three types of source. First, a considerable number of handbooks of various kinds seek to cover the globe comprehensively, systematically presenting a wide range of political and nonpolitical material, including data on ethnonational divisions.⁴ Second, a great deal of scholarly activity has been directed specifically at the issue of ethnonational minorities and has generated several important cross-national surveys.⁵ Third, certain activist groups have a vested interest in describing the ethnonational breakdown of the countries of the world and have also been wide-ranging in coverage.⁶

This wealth of data, qualitative and quantitative, places researchers under some pressure to reduce the complex global picture to a more concise summary of the position. Although this is of obvious interest to political scientists, efforts to measure ethnic fractionalization have been a particular focus of attention within economics, because of its perceived implications for economic development. As regards measurement, there seems to have been a high degree of convergence in this area, with remaining differences between specialists attributable to variations in data sources and in the definition of ethnonational division. The generally accepted index, which we may identify with the long-established Simpson index in ecology (or the Herfindahl index in economics), defines ethnonational fractionalization as one minus the sum of the squared proportionate shares of each ethnonational group. This ranges from a value close to one (maximum fractionalization) to zero (no fractionalization).

Already in the 1950s, this index was being applied in sociolinguistics: Joseph Greenberg devised a set of indices of linguistic diversity, the first and simplest of which was identical to the Simpson index (the others included weightings to take account of such factors as interlanguage distance and personal bi- or multilingualism).⁷ This was applied by other scholars to provide a hard estimate of mother-tongue diversity over time in 35 countries, and to illustrate the wider applicability of such indices.⁸ This approach was also proposed as a way of measuring political fractionalization, and it has been used to summarize a wide range of data in major cross-national data collections, such as that of Taylor and Hudson, where the fractionalization index has been applied to electoral, linguistic, and ethnic data.⁹

The dominant position occupied by the Simpson index is illustrated in a number of recent applications. We may consider four of these, each sharing three characteristics: agreement on the centrality of the Simpson index as the obvious measure of fractionalization, on the sensitivity of this measure to matters of definition and classification, and on the difficulty of obtaining consistent empirical data. In the first of these, Anthony Annett computed three indices: of ethnolinguistic fractionalization, based on data listing the maximum number of groups; of religious fractionalization, based on major religions, but with Christianity broken into its several denominations; and a combined index of ethnolinguistic and religious fractionalization produced by merging these two.¹⁰ Second, Philip Roeder calculated an index of ethnolinguistic fractionalization in three different ways: a first measure based on maximum differentiation, defining cultural and racial subgroups within linguistic groups as separate; a second one centered on an intermediate level of differentiation, defining cultural but not racial subgroups as separate; and a third one, based on minimum differentiation, where cultural and racial subgroups within ethnic groups defined by language are ignored.¹¹ James Fearon adopted a similar approach but distinguished between an index of ethnic fractionalization (based on a mixture of criteria) and an index of cultural fractionalization (which adjusts for linguistic adjacency, thus reducing the number of discrete groups in countries where some people speak closely related languages).¹² Alberto Alesina and his colleagues, rather than seeing one index as a modification of another, distinguished between three quite separate approaches: an index of linguistic fractionalization, an index of religious fractionalization (each of these with obvious defining criteria), and an index of ethnic fractionalization (which defines groups by reference to linguistic and racial criteria).¹³

The four approaches also differ in the data sources on which they are based, and on the period to which they refer. Annett relied on the source in which the World Christian Database originated, a major encyclopedia of religion that also reports a huge amount of ethnolinguistic data.¹⁴ Roeder used several comparative Soviet sources and the Europa World Yearbook and calculated his measures separately for two years, 1961 and 1985. Fearon used the CIA World Factbook, Encyclopedia Brittanica, the Library of Congress Country Studies, and the Ethnologue and Minorities at Risk (MAR) databases (described below), among other works, and his data referred to the 1990s. Alesina and his colleagues relied on Encyclopedia Britannica, but for their index of ethnic fractionalization they also used the CIA World Factbook, publications of the Minority Rights Group and other sources including national population censuses; their data referred to the period around 2000.

For some analysts of conflict, there are problems with any index like the parent of those just discussed, generally described as the ethnolinguistic fractionalization (ELF) index—in particular, it does not consider the relative power of the competing groups. In an effort to rectify this, specifically in the case of Africa, an alternative index of politically relevant ethnic groups (PREG) has been devised. This excludes all groups in respect of which there is no evidence of an autonomous political presence and bases the value of the index only on the remaining groups.¹⁵ In a variant, other African specialists have tried to expand the range of politically relevant groups by considering the impact of crosscutting cleavages and other divisions, resulting in a more inclusive approach; they labelled the result the index of ethnopolitical group fragmentation.¹⁶ The logic of this approach has been taken further in one important study of the impact of ethnic divisions on nationalist insurgencies: it has suggested a new index, N^∗, which takes account not just of the diversity of groups but also of the question of which groups are in power and which are excluded.¹⁷

Since it is proposed in this chapter to use a concentration or diversity index not as an explanatory variable but rather as a simple descriptive and comparative measure, a straightforward approach will suffice for further illustrative purposes. We may examine more closely the index of ethnolinguistic fractionalization elaborated by Roeder; this is based on data referring to the mid-1980s covering a very wide range of cases using mainly data from specialists in the area (Soviet ethnographers).¹⁸ This approach to measurement of course allows us to score countries and to rank them in respect of their degree of ethnonational fractionalization. We may, however, also need to recognise cut-off points that are of potential political significance. One way of doing this would be to use a basic arithmetical procedure to convert the fractionalization index into a measure of the “effective number of ethnic groups,” analogous to the well-known index in the literature on party systems, the “effective number of parties.”¹⁹ The outcome of such a conversion is reported in Table 1.

Table 1 Approximate Distribution of States by Level of Ethnolinguistic Fractionalization, c. 1985

Level of fractionalization	Range of ELF index	“Effective number of ethnic groups”	No. of countries
None (homogeneous society)	less than 0.10	1	22
Low	0.10–0.50	1–2	69
Medium	0.50–0.67	2–3	30
High	0.67–0.75	3–4	16
Very high	more than 0.75	4+	32
All countries			169

Note. “ELF” refers to the index of ethnolinguistic fractionalization, measuring the extent of diversity (D, as defined in note 19). Microstates (with populations less than 100,000 in 2005) and dependencies are excluded.

Source: Based on Philip G. Roeder, Ethnolinguistic Fractionalization (ELF) Indices, 1961 and 1985 (2001); available weber.ucsd.edu/~proeder/elf.htm.

It should be noted that the label “effective number” is as misleading in respect of ethnic groups as it is in relation to parties: it does not in any Since it is proposed in this chapter to use a concentration or diversity way approximate the number of groups (or parties), or even the number of relevant ones: it is simply an index, and the unfortunate labeling has been retained here only to preserve the useful analogy with party systems, where this terminology is so widely accepted. It does, however, assist in giving us an intuitive impression of what the implications of a particular level of diversity actually are: the number of competitors in interethnic relations can be at least as important as the number of competing units in a party system. It must co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Foreword
• 1. Comparing Ethnic Conflicts: Common Patterns, Shared Challenges
• 2. Belgium: Towards the Breakdown of a Nation-State in the Heart of Europe?
• 3. Spain: Identity Boundaries and Political Reconstruction
• 4. Northern Ireland: From Multiphased Conflict to Multilevelled Settlement
• 5. Bosnia: Dayton is Dead! Long Live Dayton!
• 6. Cyprus: Domestic Ethnopolitical Conflict and International Politics
• 7. Lebanon: From Consociationalism to Conciliation
• 8. South Africa: The Long View on Political Transition
• 9. Sri Lanka: The Challenge of Postwar Peace Building, State Building, and Nation Building
• 10. Ethnic Conflict Resolution: Routes Towards Settlement
• Index