Facing Ethnic Conflicts

O the past decades, ethnonationalist conflict has become the dominant form of mass political violence. The overwhelming majority of civil wars in the postwar era were fought in the name of ethnonational autonomy or independence (Scherrer 1994:74)—as was the case during earlier waves of civil wars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as during the Balkan wars or following the dissolution of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires. Since the 1950s, the number of ethnic conflicts continued to increase. The trend reached a peak 1993–1994, as figure I.1 illustrates. Recent examples abound: The intransigence of ethnonationalist politics had led to catastrophe in Bosnia; the dissolution of the Soviet empire ignited a bushfire of separatist battles at its southern borders; Burundi finds no more respite than does Myanmar’s hinterland or southern Sudan. Parallel to this trend, the desire to understand and to contain these conflicts has grown over the past decades and especially after the end of the Cold War, when governments and international organizations came to regard them as a security problem of global proportions—only recently overshadowed by the U.S. preoccupation to fight terrorist groups and their supporters. Ethnic conflicts became a testing ground for a new morality of promoting peace, stability, and human rights across the globe. Ethnic chauvinism and hatred were perceived by public intellectuals such as Ignatieff (1997) as the major obstacle for globalizing the Western model of a liberal society based on equality and the respect for cultural differences. This book offers some of the best research on how to understand ethnic conflicts and on how to prevent such conflicts, settle them by outside Introduction: Facing Ethnic Conflicts