Identifying Potential Ethnic Conflict

Intrastate communitarian strife, often dubbed ethnic conflict, has gained much attention in the aftermath of the Cold War. Certainly, intrastate conflict has been by far the dominant form of strife in the world in the 1990s. This report outlines a model for anticipating the occurrence of communitarian and ethnic conflict. The model is not a mechanistic tool, but a process-based heuristic device with a threefold purpose: (1) to order the analyst's thinking about the logic and dynamics of potential ethnically based violence and to aid in defining the information-collection requirements of such an analysis; (2) to provide a general conceptual framework about how ethnic grievances form and group mobilization occurs and how these could lead to violence under certain conditions; and (3) to assist the intelligence community with the long-range assessment of possible ethnic strife. The theoretical model explains how the potential for strife should be understood; how the potential for strife is transformed, through mobilization, into a likelihood of strife; and how extant state capacities interact through a process of strategic bargaining with mobilized groups to produce, under certain conditions, varying degrees of strife. Use of the model is demonstrated through its application to four case studies, two retrospective (Yugoslavia and South Africa) and two prospective (Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia).

This report provides a practical tool--a guidebook and a methodology to follow--to help intelligence analysts determine the long-term potential for communitarian and ethnic conflict. It is based on a conceptual model of group conflict. The three-stage model traces the development of ethnic and communitarian strife, beginning with the conditions that may lead to the formation of an ethnic group, then the group's mobilization for political action, and ultimately its competition with the state. The main body of the handbook is formatted as a series of questions and guidelines for the analyst to consider while preparing an assessment. An appendix provides a full theoretical explanation of the model. As its goal is to provide a tool to help intelligence analysts predict whether a competition between an ethnic group and the state will end in violence, the model supplies a series of matrices to help identify the conditions that may lead to ethnic and communitarian strife.

Ethnic conflict is an elemental force in international politics and a major threat to regional security and stability. Ethnicity as a source of conflict has deep historic roots. Many such conflicts lay dormant, suppressed by the Soviet empire or overshadowed by the ideological competition of the cold war. Both protagonists in the cold war demonstrated unwarranted optimism about their ability to defuse ethnicity and ethnic conflict. Marxists believed that ethnicity would give way to "proletarian internationalism." Social class and economic welfare would determine both self-identity and loyalty to political institutions that would transcend ethnic identification or religious affiliation. Western democracies assumed that "nation building" and economic development were not only vital components in the strategy to contain communist expansion, but that capitalism, economic prosperity, and liberal democratic values would also create free societies with a level of political development measured by loyalty to the state rather than to the narrower ethnic group. Instead, the goals of assimilation and integration within the larger context of economic and political development are being replaced by violent ethnic corrections to artificially imposed state boundaries. The Balkan and Transcaucasian conflicts, for example, are ancient in origin and have as their object the territorial displacement of entire ethnic groups. Such conflicts by their nature defy efforts at mediation from outside, since they are fed by passions that do not yield to "rational" political compromise. They are, as John Keegan describes in his most recent study of war, "apolitical" to a degree for which Western strategists have made little allowance.1 The demise of European communism and the Russian empire has unleashed this century's third wave of ethnic nationalism and conflict. The first came in the wake of the collapsing Ottoman, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian empires which came to a climax after World War I; the second followed the end of European colonialism after World War II.

Published in 1999, this text examines domestic wars, looking at inter-state relations only in as far as they are directly relevant to understand such wars. The book aims to indicate how intra-state war differs from the inter-state war, and focuses primarily on such domestic armed conflicts that at least have significant ethnonational components. The book assesses how heterogeneous a category "ethnic conflict" is in terms of causes and consequences, and gauges the complex interplay between class, regionalism and ethnicity. It is not limited to description and causal analysis, but also attempts to assess suggestions as to what types of actors may contribute in what ways to avoiding ethnonational mobilization/polarization, avoiding militarization of manifest conflicts, and de-escalating militarized conflicts by looking for tenable generalizations on what types of approaches are fruitful in bringing about de-escalation, ceasefires, political compromises, peaceful division or peaceful integration, reconciliation.

8. Ethnic conflict and refugees, by Kathleen Newland

The reigning consensus holds that the combination of free markets and democracy would transform the third world and sweep away the ethnic hatred and religious zealotry associated with underdevelopment. In this revelatory investigation of the true impact of globalization, Yale Law School professor Amy Chua explains why many developing countries are in fact consumed by ethnic violence after adopting free market democracy. Chua shows how in non-Western countries around the globe, free markets have concentrated starkly disproportionate wealth in the hands of a resented ethnic minority. These “market-dominant minorities” – Chinese in Southeast Asia, Croatians in the former Yugoslavia, whites in Latin America and South Africa, Indians in East Africa, Lebanese in West Africa, Jews in post-communist Russia – become objects of violent hatred. At the same time, democracy empowers the impoverished majority, unleashing ethnic demagoguery, confiscation, and sometimes genocidal revenge. She also argues that the United States has become the world’s most visible market-dominant minority, a fact that helps explain the rising tide of anti-Americanism around the world. Chua is a friend of globalization, but she urges us to find ways to spread its benefits and curb its most destructive aspects.

In the last years of their existence, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) found themselves facing a similar and very grim state of affairs. After their disintegration, the former Yugoslav republics spiralled into a set of ethnic conflicts that did not leave a single one of them unscathed, and in the ex-Soviet space, conflicts were far more limited. This book offers an in-depth analysis of the difference in state collapses and ensuing conflicts in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia by focusing on their asymmetric ethnofederal structure and the different dynamics of ethnic mobilization that the federal units experienced. Moreover, it explores the links between identity politics and international relations, as the latter has been a latecomer in research on ethnonationalism and ethnic conflict. Finally, it contributes to the literature on the democratization-conflict nexus by proposing that the sequencing of ethnic mobilization and political liberalization has significant effects on the likelihood of conflict. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of Post-Soviet politics, Balkan politics, ethnic conflict, peace and conflict studies, federalism, and more broadly to comparative politics and international relations.