Ethnic Politics

Despite implicating ethnicity in everything from civil war to economic failure, researchers seldom consult psychological research when addressing the most basic question: What is ethnicity? The result is a radical scholarly divide generating contradictory recommendations for solving ethnic conflict. Research into how the human brain actually works demands a revision of existing schools of thought. Hale argues ethnic identity is a cognitive uncertainty-reduction device with special capacity to exacerbate, but not cause, collective action problems. This produces a new general theory of ethnic conflict that can improve both understanding and practice. A deep study of separatism in the USSR and CIS demonstrates the theory's potential, mobilizing evidence from elite interviews, three local languages, and mass surveys. The outcome significantly reinterprets nationalism's role in CIS relations and the USSR's breakup, which turns out to have been a far more contingent event than commonly recognized.

In this timely book Milton J. Esman surveys a recurrent and seemingly intractable factor in the politics of nations: ethnicity. As the author notes, virtually no contemporary nation-state is ethnically homogeneous. Most address the political effects of domestic ethnic difference, and many fail in the attempt--with devastatingly violent results.Esman focuses on ethnic mobilization and the management of conflict, on the ways ethnic groups prepare for political combat, and on measures that can moderate or control ethnic disputes, whether peaceful or violent.Opening with a broad synopsis of current understandings of ethnicity and its varying political salience, he illustrates his theories by analyzing experiences in South Africa, Israel-Palestine, Canada-Quebec, and Malaysia. He also outlines the political issues and dilemmas, transnational as well as domestic, caused by the vast labor migrations of Mexicans to the United States, North Africans to France, Turks to Germany, and Koreans to Japan.Can economic growth and prosperity ease ethnic conflicts? Esman addresses this question and draws conclusions based on the empirical chapters. In his view, ethnic pluralism and ethnic politics are not collective psychoses or aberrations, to be deplored and exorcised, but rather pervasive realities that observers can confront and politicians can manage.

This book models the trade-off that rulers of weak, ethnically-divided states face between coups and civil war. Drawing evidence from extensive field research in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo combined with statistical analysis of most African countries, it develops a framework to understand the causes of state failure.

Ethnicity is one of the most salient and enduring topics of social science, not least with regard to its potential link to political conflict/violence. Despite, or perhaps because of, the concept’s significant use, all too seldom has the field paused to consider the state of our knowledge. For example, how do we define and conceive of ethnicity within the context of political conflict? What do we really know about the causal determinants of ethnic conflict? What has been the most useful development within this literature, and why? This volume comprises reflections from an international range of prominent political scientists all engaged in the study of ethnicity and conflict/violence. They attempt to synthesize what the field does and does not know with regard to ethnic conflict, as well as draw out the research directions for the immediate future in unique and interesting ways. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Ethnopolitics.

In this timely book Milton J. Esman surveys a recurrent and seemingly intractable factor in the politics of nations: ethnicity. As the author notes, virtually no contemporary nation-state is ethnically homogeneous. Most address the political effects of domestic ethnic difference, and many fail in the attempt—with devastatingly violent results.Esman focuses on ethnic mobilization and the management of conflict, on the ways ethnic groups prepare for political combat, and on measures that can moderate or control ethnic disputes, whether peaceful or violent.Opening with a broad synopsis of current understandings of ethnicity and its varying political salience, he illustrates his theories by analyzing experiences in South Africa, Israel-Palestine, Canada-Quebec, and Malaysia. He also outlines the political issues and dilemmas, transnational as well as domestic, caused by the vast labor migrations of Mexicans to the United States, North Africans to France, Turks to Germany, and Koreans to Japan.Can economic growth and prosperity ease ethnic conflicts? Esman addresses this question and draws conclusions based on the empirical chapters. In his view, ethnic pluralism and ethnic politics are not collective psychoses or aberrations, to be deplored and exorcised, but rather pervasive realities that observers can confront and politicians can manage.

Ethiopia s unique system of ethnic-based federalism claims to minimise conflict by organising political power along ethnic lines. This empirical study shows that the system eases conflict at some levels but also sharpens inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic divides on the ground.

This detailed account of ethnic minority politics explains when and how European institutions successfully used norms and incentives to shape domestic policy toward ethnic minorities and why those measures sometimes failed. Going beyond traditional analyses, Kelley examines the pivotal engagement by the European Union, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the Council for Europe in the creation of such policies. Following language, education, and citizenship issues during the 1990s in Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia, and Romania, she shows how the combination of membership conditionality and norm-based diplomacy was surprisingly effective at overcoming even significant domestic opposition. However, she also finds that diplomacy alone, without the offer of membership, was ineffective unless domestic opposition to the proposed policies was quite limited. As one of the first systematic analyses of political rather than economic conditionality, the book illustrates under what conditions and through what mechanisms institutions influenced domestic policy in the decade, preparing the way for the historic enlargement of the European Union. This thoughtful and thorough discussion, based on case studies, quantitative analysis, and interviews with nearly one hundred policymakers and experts, tells an important story about how European organizations helped facilitate peaceful solutions to ethnic tensions--in sharp contrast to the ethnic bloodshed that occurred in the former Yugoslavia during this time. This book's simultaneous assessment of soft diplomacy and stricter conditionality advances a long overdue dialogue between proponents rational choice models and social constructivists. As political requirements increasingly become part of conditionality, it also provides keen policy insights for the strategic choices made by actors in international institutions.

This second edition of Ethnic Conflict in World Politics is an introduction to a new era in which civil society, states, and international actors attempt to channel ethnic challenges to world order and security into conventional politics. From Africa's post-colonial rebellions in the 1960s and 1970s to anti-immigrant violence in the 1990s the authors survey the historical, geographic, and cultural diversity of ethnopolitical conflict. Using an analytical model to elucidate four well-chosen case studies?the Kurds, the Miskitos, the Chinese in Malaysia, and the Turks in Germany?the authors give students tools for analyzing emerging conflicts based on the demands of nationalists, indigenous peoples, and immigrant minorities throughout the world. The international community has begun to respond more quickly and constructively to these conflicts than it did to civil wars in divided Yugoslavia and genocide in Rwanda by using the emerging doctrines of proactive peacemaking and peace enforcement that are detailed in this book. Concludes by identifying five principles of international doctrine for managing conflict in ethnically diverse societies. The text is illustrated with maps, tables, and figures.