Ethnic Cleavages And Conflict

To understand ethnic conflict is an ambitious task, but by focusing on the logic and structure of conflict and discussing measures to abate it, Horowitz brings important insight into an urgent issues that affects all strata of society everywhere. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

First published in 1997, this volume explores ethnic conflict alongside the creation and disintegration of the short-lived Yugoslav state, 17 years after the death of Tito. Processes of democratization tend to elicit differences within the population along deep-seated ethnic, religious and cultural differences. Dr. Gojko Vuekovic argues that the situation is no different in post-Cold War Yugoslavia. By setting out Yugoslavia’s worst-case scenario of ethnic tensions, Dr. Vuekovic hopes to inform responses to ethnic conflict in the wider modern world.

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.

This work focuses on how, why and when ethnic conflicts either diffuse by precipitating similar conflicts elsewhere or escalate by bringing in outside parties and how such transnational ethnic conflicts can be managed. It focuses specifically on the conflicts in Eastern Europe and Africa.

Why is it that Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland have been in perpetual conflict for thirty years when they can live and prosper together elsewhere? Why was there a bloody civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina when Croats, Serbs, and Muslims had lived peacefully side-by-side fordecades? Why did nobody see and act upon the early warning signs of genocide in Rwanda that eventually killed close to a million people in a matter of weeks? What is it that makes Kashmir potentially worth a nuclear war between India and Pakistan?In recent years hardly a day has gone by when ethnic conflict in some part of the world has not made headline news. The violence involved in these conflicts continues to destabilize entire regions, hamper social and economic development, and cause unimaginable human suffering. And the extensivemedia coverage of these conflicts all too often raises important questions that it signally fails to answer.This book aims to fill this gap. Drawing on the author's long experience of studying such conflicts around the world and his involvment in attempts to resolve them, it provides an illuminating and accessible introduction to the origins, dynamics, and management of ethnic conflict. In doing so, ithelps explain the fundamental question underlying all these conflicts: why do nationalism and ethnicity still have such terrible power to turn neighbour against neighbour?

Potentially destabilizing ethnic conflicts continue to challenge nation-states worldwide: The countries of Southeast Asia are no exception. Globalization, population movements and historical and political fault-lines in a tremendously ethnically diverse region, coupled with continuing uneven access to economic development, have seen the resurgence of old conflicts or the flaring up of new ones. Along with violence and the loss of life and livelihood there are also longer-term cross-border impacts to consider in the form of refugees or displaced persons, illegal migrant labour, as well as drug and arms smuggling. Written by country experts, this volume examines ethnic configurations as well as conflict avoidance and resolution in five Southeast Asian countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines and Thailand. Ethnic Conflicts in Southeast Asia is a resource for scholars, policy-makers, NGO personnel, analysts and others who wish to deepen their understanding of the region, or develop strategies to prevent, modulate and resolve such conflicts.

This book makes a comparative study of ethno-national mobilization and territory and corresponding government policies through a series of selected case studies. It examines the role of ethnic groups in dissolving and reconfiguring the state and the institutional options available for dealing with ethnic claims. It does this through a systematic, qualitative analysis from a range of countries in which, in varying degrees, territorial solutions to ethnic conflict have been contemplated. Sound policies aimed at mitigating ethnic tensions, whether partition, territorial or cultural autonomy or limited home rule must be tailored to its ethnic reality. The contributors to this volume begin each case study with an overview of the ethnic problem relevant to the country, analyze its historical roots, examine the range of strategies on which the state authorities responded, and assess the importance of the issue of territory. Each case study is accompanied by a map that shows the distribution of selected groups in terms of standard bands of intensity.

The author traces the changes that have taken place in international politics since 1989 and the impact these have had on the global awareness that ethnic conflicts are a major problem for international society. Coverage includes the Kurdish, Bosnian, and Sudanese conflicts.