Ethnic Conflict, Tribal Politics

A Global Perspective

Kenneth Christie

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000143980
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Sous-sujet: Política comparada

There is an urgent need for a book which combines the approaches of political science/sociology and history and particularly comparative politics with ethnic studies. There are currently many rapid and significant changes taking place in the world political map in terms of ethnic conflict. How do we explain these changes? How do we analyse them? How can we compare them? How do we make sense of the different ethnic conflicts that have taken place since the end of the Cold War, in what some observers have dubbed 'the New World Order'? Few books on the market combine the diverse approaches of political science, sociology and history at any level of analysis. This work will remedy at least some of the deficiencies in the existing literature and be truly interdisciplinary in nature.

Chapter One
Introduction: The Problem with Ethnicity and ‘Tribal’ Politics

Kenneth Christie

It was the former French President, Francois Mitterand who drew some of our attention to the ethnic, tribal threat to a ‘civilised’ Western Europe in a conference in 1992 entitled ‘L’Europe et les tribus’. He saw a picture of a problematic post-Maastricht vision of Europe, a Community surrounded by barbaric sentiments occupying the peripheral space of European frontiers.¹ The imagery was startling; hostile tribes driven by ancient feudal ties and primitive allegiances were threatening the integrity of the European integration project. While one region of Europe appeared to be descending into the primeval sludge, another was paradoxically ascending the heights of supra-nationalism.

Previously and in other contexts, experts in various fields had located tribal and ethnic conflict in less developed regions of the globe; Africa, Asia, perhaps Latin America. Suddenly, and with great alacrity, the post cold war period had erupted into unprecedented ethnic violence in central and eastern Europe, prompting connotations of tribalism in previously communist states. It also appeared most vociferously in a federal state known most notably for its relaxed and democratic attitudes and policies of non-alignment; Yugoslavia. The world will not soon forget the horrific process of ‘ethnic cleansing’ entailing the creation of homogeneous populations by means of mass exile; here more than two million people were removed from areas in which for most of the time they classified as minorities.

Despite the end of the cold war and the promise of a ‘New World Order’ which would produce peace, stability and harmony on a global basis, liberal democrats have been severely disappointed. An end to history vis-avis a Fukuyamanian type analysis has not materialised; rather a return to history in the form of often genocidal ethnic conflict from Burundi to Burma has proved to be one of the most salient and disturbing agendas of the 1990’s.

Ethnic unrest and communal strife proved fairly resilient in the Third World but also in developed societies during the 20th century. Why are such conflicts so important? One reason is that this type of conflict has produced more abject misery and loss of life than any other in the post second world war period. As Freeman has argued ‘Tribes, states and empires are all agents of war’ (Freeman, 1993: p. 27).

In a speech on the 9th of November 1993, Boutros Boutros Ghali, the Secretary-General of the United nations warned that global security was under threat because of the spread of ethnic conflicts in the post cold war period. He noted that since World War II there had been 127 wars most of them for ethnic reasons and made the point that borders and oceans could no longer insulate societies from the implications of this type of violence. And this is particularly so as ethnic groups do not necessarily align themselves with state borders.

New concepts concerning ‘security’ in the post-cold war period also started to focus less and less on the idea of an ‘enemy’ and the idea that there is a military threat (particularly in Europe for instance), and more and more on the intangible, ‘soft’ threats to security. These include areas such as the changing boundaries, race and ethnicity, mass migration, the question of national minorities, the question of Islam, Aids, and religion amongst others. And these threatening problems exist not only at certain national levels but on a global scale.

They are difficult to deal with because many politicians see them as unsolvable; they don’t fit neatly into the political structure. And they represent dark underlying forces and currents threatening to disrupt and perhaps dismember the status quo. They are questions apparently without answers because they are seen as complicated and irrational. In short they are highly problematic. Boundaries are constantly in a state of flux in the wake of the Cold War. Yugoslavia, all of Eastern Europe, Russia and the CIS are just a few of the areas on the European continent that have been affected by the traumatic events following the end of the Cold war.

The changes to the world political map are greater now than at any other period in the 20th century with the exceptions of the two world wars and their immediate aftermath. The collapse of Communism as a system of rule in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe has had enormous consequences for those areas and the rest of the world as well. In the former communist ruled systems, pre-communist attitudes, values, fears and hatreds have resurfaced with a vengeance. Chief amongst these factors is the resurgence of ethnic violence and extreme nationalistic tendencies. The increasingly fragmented societies of the Eurasian continent in turn have added another dimension to the ethnic animosities and strife already evident in the Middle east, parts of Asia (e.g. Indonesia and East Timor), Somalia, much of Sub-Saharan Africa and Cyprus.

Serious analysis of this phenomenon, its causes and consequences, is important and much needed in the new global ‘disorder.’ Analysts and commentators alike are concerned with the need to explain the sources of ethnic conflict, as well as its policy consequences. Even in established political systems, based in long-standing industrial democracies, separatism and regionalism are becoming more pronounced; examples are the United Kingdom, France and Spain. In these countries, important elements of the population now focus on their immediate localities and regions as political benchmarks, and they emphasize their local heritage in history, music, the arts and other cultural expressions. This is not a new phenomenon, but it appears to be more urgently expressed as the 20th century draws to a close. The drive for nation-building and the construction of regional entities, a dominant theme in much of the world for many decades (in the West, several centuries) is being overshadowed by a quest for smaller, more manageable, political and cultural units.

To what extent is this a result of historical development? For instance is this a natural consequence of the maturation of nation-building and the return to a different, pre-modern form of political organization? To what extent are these problems idiosyncratic and country specific? One of the aims of this volume is to show how ethnic conflict is a comparative phenomenon which shares similarities and exhibits differences and unique characteristics across the board. The expression of ethnicity may lead to strife within multi-ethnic societies for instance, but it also produces conflict between states.

With the break-up of the Soviet Union for instance at least 47 new international boundaries were created, out of which 22 are between the newly independent republics and the neighbouring countries in Eastern Europe and Central and Eastern Asia. Many of the disputes over territory and borders have of course already risen to the surface such as between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorny Karabakh or between Russia and the Ukraine over the Crimea. The entire region has in fact become a geopolitical fault zone complete with religious, ethnic and national rivalries. In many of these cases there is a complete breakdown in law and order, a lack of democracy and an almost anarchical condition or state of affairs. And as the text addresses this is not simply limited to this particular part of the world; it has become part of a global condition.

The break-up of states, the creation of new nation-states’, and the rise of ethno-nationalism and ultra-nationalist political forces in many parts of the world are posing many new security problems and crises for the international community. There is also a conflict between two important principles of the inter-state system since World War II, those of territorial sovereignty for existing states and self-determination for peoples living within those state territories.

The UN for instance will and has become more and more involved in many of these old and new ethnic conflicts; since 1988 for instance they have ventured into more peacekeeping missions than they did in the entire period since World War II up to that date. Moreover, the nature of the new peacekeeping ventures is far more broad-ranging including many of the ethnic conflicts and involves more ambitious mandates than the missions mounted in the Cold War period.

Various analyses propound the idea that the end of superpower rivalry unleashed uncontrollable forces of ethno-nationalism and tribal sentiments, but overwhelming evidence shows that these problems have been around for a fairly long time, many of them in effect caused by processes of decolonization at the end of the second world war. The partition of India, and the Arabs and Jews in Palestine, just two examples of this phenomenon. Eric Hobsbawm has argued that nationalism belongs with the study of political theory and ethnicity with sociology and/or anthropology. I disagree. Just as war is too important to be left to the generals, so ethnicity is too important to be left to sociologists. Political scientists must reclaim this territory which is filled with the ‘political.’

Michael Freeman has a clear problem in viewing these conflicts in simple dichotomous terms as ‘struggles between primitive and irrational forces on the one hand and the civilised international legal order on the other.’ and as he further elaborates:

The atrocities in the post-Yugoslav war are indeed ‘barbaric’. Yet the primitive/civilised distinction is a barrier to understanding. It commonly rests upon a view of history, according to which once there was the primitive, the irrational and the violent, then there was progress towards the civilised, the rational and the orderly, a progress, however, that has been interrupted from time to time by reversions to primitive barbarism. This view of history is deeply embedded in our moral and political culture. It is, however, seriously misleading.²

In part the objective of this book is to examine the assumptions, controversy and views around such a framework of understanding in which this violent and disturbing social conflict is taking place.

How do we account for trends and the emergence of these apparently tribal passions and animosities in a comparative sense; what are some of the historical roots of such conflict? How and why is politics involved? The task of imposing a rigid structured framework on seven different academics is a nightmare that doesn’t bear contemplating. Rather than applying such a straitjacket (which few would adhere to anyway), I decided to offer them a loose structure looking at the problem of tribalism and ethnicity and relating it to the particular case studies in which they have expert knowledge.

DEFINING TRIBE

There is little doubt (and this is a theme running through all the chapters), that Tribalism is a difficult and often misplaced term. Nevertheless it is a term which is used widely, particularly to explain what often seems to be irrational, violent ethnic conflict. And we shall see that throughout the text it appears to work in different contexts and cannot be confined to one area.

The term ‘tribe’ derives from the Latin term ‘tribus’, and was initially used in a biblical connotation.³ Tribes were self contained groups; they were autonomous and based on kinship ties. Anthropologists and others define tribe as a groups with certain characteristics in common (self-sufficiency, a distinct language, culture and sense of identity including a shared set of mythologies, taboos, and heroes and villains, a defined set of relationships, including a clear hierarchy of power and definite rules of behaviour, and a loosely defined territory utilized for hunting and gathering). Relations between tribes are often marked by competition and outright animosity, but the low level of technology reduces casualties in the frequent inter-tribal skirmishes to a minimum. The main point here is the notion that tribes are an early form of human organization, preceding that of nation or state. Tribes, presumably, can be found hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years before the latter forms of human organization appear. If we accept these notions then we can argue that when we witness the breakdown of the nation-state into different components then we are seeing a return to a smaller tribal unit after the other forms of human organization have been experienced. We might call this a retribalization which denotes the breaking up of the nation-state into a set of smaller units. And the dismantling process is often perceived as nasty, brutish or in other words, tribalistic. The reason for current interest in this concept is the fact that this dismantling process now seems to be underway in certain parts of the world, while other parts are experiencing instability that may in the end lead to dismantling there, too. We look around for explanations and more often than not we find ‘tribalism’ as a convenient and appealing explanation. And again it should be stressed that this volume in part is an effort to illustrate the rich and varied complexity of such terms in the light of violent conflict.

More recent notions of the ‘tribal’ in tribe evoke images of savagery, barbarism and a primitive state. The concept is a controversial one to say the least; appeals to age old passions, myths and questionable histories are rarely uncontroversial. Tribalism may have emerged in the late twentieth century with pejorative associations, but tribes even in Africa share similarities in terms of historical formation, institutions, customs, traditions and belief systems. To some extent they are the product of contemporary political and economic forces; colonialism for administrative purposes actually invented certain tribes.

New symbols, forms of organization and interests were accorded to such groups including highly contested resources such as land. Competition for the latter reinforced and frequently elevated tribal consciousness. Classic colonial divide and rule strategies allowed for the exacerbation and enhancement of inter-group rivalries. The internecine conflict in Rwanda that erupted in the 1990’s for instance has its roots in the colonial period when a strategy of indirect rule transformed an ascribed Tutsi superiority into an inherited one. This merely served to reinforce and exacerbate the already increasing Hutu resentment. Following independence the question of which group would assume power was a contested and contentious one given the taste of indirect rule by one group.⁴ Despite the mythical quality of the tribe built on distinctive customs, traditions and cultural beliefs, its bases were clearly rooted in past and contemporary struggles for economic resources and political power.

Colson argues that the legitimacy and appeal of tribalism are by and large intellectual inventions by people who have had the opportunity to participate in the political and social world.⁵ In this light it might be regarded as a ideological mechanism, a topic that Nergis Canefe dwells on at some length in her chapter on Turkey.

The concept tribalism has other connotations as well - connotations that, presumably, help define their characteristics in a discrete way. For example, tribes are seen as operating at a high level of internal conformity, coupled with external conflict, with little tolerance for others (others being those who have set themselves outside the collectivity, or have been excluded from it by characteristics or conscious decisions by those who are in). In other words, there is no civility in the tribe in the sense usually attributed to modern, pluralistic societies, where individual and subgroup autonomy, willingness to allow others to exist and even to prosper in their otherness are major characteristics. Hence, the notion of retribalization carries with it the idea that society is regressing from a higher form (e.g. civil society) to the older, more primitive form of the tribe.

The problem with this kind of conceptualization is that it does not clearly distinguish tribalism from other forms of societal behaviour which is much discussed in the literature. For example, there are definitions of nationalism, ethnonationalism, ethnochauvinism, and primitive nationalism that operate with similar characteristics and behaviour patterns as those used to define tribalism here. To some extent we use tribalism because it appears as the most used (and abused) term in the literature and the media. In his chapter, Michael Freeman seeks to discuss and comprehend the various theories and concepts on offer, illuminating in large part their significance for political theory.

This still does not help bridge the gap between tribalism and nationalism as concepts, however; it merely establishes some connection between the tribe, the state, the nation, and current political trends. If one assumes that tribes naturally developed into nations which then produced their own states, current events can only be explained by the notion that the inherent inclusiveness and exclusiveness of the tribes involved made it impossible to keep the larger unit, the state, together once a unifying symbol (such as a founding father or an overwhelming external threat has disappeared (e.g. Yugoslavia); alternatively, it can be argued that a dominant tribe in a multi tribal setting has hijacked the state for the purposes of utilizing this structure to discriminate against others in ways that we normally attribute to tribes.

Occasionally, other uses of the concept tribe can be found; of particular relevance here is the use made of it to describe the rootless groups of marginalized people whose lives have been turned upside down by political or economic change, without any direct action undertaken by them, and with no real possibility of remedial undertakings which can once again make their existence meaningful. There are hundreds of thousands of people in this category in contemporary Eastern Europe, many of them in the Balkans. They are older industrial workers whose livelihood has been destroyed by the privatization of state enterprises; young people with few skills that are needed in todays societ...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: The Problem with Ethnicity and ‘Tribal’ Politics
• 2 Theories of Ethnicity, Tribalism and Nationalism
• 3 Minority Nationalism or Tribal Sentiments? The Cases of Scotland, Quebec and Catalonia
• 4 Ethnic Conflict in the Balkans: Comparing ex-Yugoslavia, Romania and Albania
• 5 Ethnic Conflict in China: The Case of Tibet
• 6 Tribalism and Elites in a Demotic State: the Case of Sri Lanka
• 7 Ethnic Conflict in Post Cold War Africa: Four Case Studies (Rwanda, Liberia, Somalia and Kwazulu-Natal)
• 8 Tribalism and Nationalism in Turkey: Reinventing Politics
• Index