Ethnic Conflicts

Question 1

Types of state-based armed conflicts

Answer 1

1) Intra-state conflict
2) Internationalized intra-state conflict
3) Inter-state conflicts
4) Extra state conflicts

Question 2

Methodological issues regarding ethnic conflict

Answer 2

• We need to explain why in some cases violence breaks out, and in others it is avoided.
• Timing of violence.
• Trap of tautology: “Violence is assumed to follow ethnic tension as night follows day, due to a biased selection of cases. Scholars select on the dependent variable.” (Fearon and Laitin, 1996)

Question 3

Which components do scholars include when defining identity?

Answer 3

1) Social category: a set of people designated by a label (or labels) commonly given to or used by a set of people.
2) Contingency: one’s identity is dependent on the context.
3) Relationality: identities are relational - one needs the ‘other’ to understand oneself (Hegel)
4) Cognition: your category (relational to ‘social category’) affects your perception of the world - refers to how members of an ethnic group perceive, remember, and understand their world.
5) Contestation: all the meanings of identity are always contested.

Question 4

Competing approaches on ‘ethnic identity’.

Answer 4

1) Primordialism
- Focus on the idea of ancestry.
- Ethnic identity is a) singular, b) fixed; c) exogenous.
- 3 primordialist approaches: a) Biological; b) Perennialist; c) Cultural.
- Primordialist scholars: Kaplan
2) Constructivist
- Ethnic identity is a process of construction.
- Ethnic identity is fluid and multiple.
- Ethnicity is endogenous (e.g. Gellner: industrialisation makes nations).
- Scholars: Chandra (2012)

Question 5

Chandra’s (2012) on defining ethnic identity

Answer 5

-Definitions before were ‘umbrella definitions’
- She reduces the definition by making a distinction between category and attributes:
1) Ethnic identity categories ‘are a subset of identity categories in which eligibility for membership is determined by descent-based attributes.
2) Descent-based attricutes: Acquired genetically and acquired through cultural and historical inheritance.
= emties the definition from characteristics that are not defining (common culture, common history, common territory, common language etc.).

Question 6

Chandra’s argument in ‘How Ethnic Identities Change’ (2012)?

Answer 6

Argument: Ethnic identities can change in the long and in the short term through 5 mechanisms by which attributes and activated categories change. These categories refer to change in the defining features of an ethnic identity, not to is supplemental features such as name, membership and content.

Question 7

Constructivist position on conflict.

Answer 7

• Constructivists believe that identity is constructed through conflict and is not the deciding factor of conflict.

Chandra (2013): ‘Contrary to many theories which indicate that violence is the product of prefabricated identities, this argument suggest that it is the means by which these identities are fabricated’.

Question 8

Scholars who believe that ethnic identities are a cause of conflict.

Answer 8

1) Posen (1993) - realist perspective on the ‘security dilemma’
2) Kaufmann - symbolist model of ethnic war (ethnicity as a myth complex).
3) Petersen (2002) - conflicts and emotions; specific emotions (anger, contempt, resentment) generate distinctive actions.

Question 9

Scholars who believe that ethnic identities are irrelevant to conflict.

Answer 9

1) Mueller (The Banality of ‘Ethnic War’, 2000) - War does not occur because of ancient hatred or historic passion, violence is opportunistic, often substantially non-ideological.
2) Kaldor (2012) - combines identity politics, war economy, violence and globalisation = identity used instrumentally.

Question 10

Posen - The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict (1993)

Answer 10

Applies the concept ‘security dilemma’ to the special condition that arise when proximate groups of pople suddenly find themselves responsible for their own security.
- Security dilemma: What one does to enhance one’s own security causes reactions that, in the end, makes one less secure.

As the new group enter the condition of ‘anarchy’ after loosing a hegemonis sovereign, groups must prioritize security concerns without the advantage of a state structure. In this vulnerable context, another group’s sense of identity (and thus their solidarity) is seen as a threat. Groups feel the need to increase their military capabilities, especially as they watch surrounding groups doing the same. Here they encounter two problems: 1) They cannot effectively signal the defensive intent of a military build-up; but 2) pre-emptive offensive operations may actually be more effective than defensive actions in terms of group survival.

Cases: Serbia and Croatia after the dissolution of Yugoslavia.

= Posen would say that ethnic conflict is not a myth!

Question 11

Critique of Posen (1993)

Answer 11

Although Posen critiques the ‘ancient hatred’ (primordialist) argument (he dismisses it because it fails to account for cosiderable variance in observable intergroup relations) and stresses the importance of structural conditions, he nonetheless views ethnic identities as fixed.

Question 12

Kaufmann - Symbolist Model of Ethnic War

Answer 12

Argument: Emotions, not rational calculations, motivate people to act –> Symbolically generated hatreds and fears are sufficient to explain the outcomes, structural features enabling, but not crucial.

Power of symbols:

• Frame conflict of interest as a struggle against hostile, evil or subhuman forces.
• Allow politicians to reinterpret a conflict of interest as a struggle for security, status, and the furture of the group.
• Evoke emotions such as resentment, fear, and hatred which motivates the supporters to act.

Identity as a ‘myth-symbol context’.

Question 13

Petersen - Conflict and Emotions (2002)

Answer 13

Argument: Emotional resources as opposed to structural ones have superior explanatory power; variations and complexity of conflict.

Specific emotions generate distinctive actions:

• Anger comes from the cognition that an individual or a group has committed a bad action against one’s self and one group, and the action tendency is to punish that group.
• Contempt follows from the cognition that a group or object is inherently inferior or defective; action tendency towards avoidance.
• Resentment follows from the cognition that one’s group is located in an unwarranted subordinate position on a status hierarchy; the action tendency is to take actions to reduce the status position of groups in a superior status position.

Question 14

Mueller - ‘The Banality of Ethnic War’ (2000)

Answer 14

Argument: Ethnic war conceived of in an Hobbesian sense as all against all, as neighbour against neighbour, does not exist. War does not occur because of ancient hatreds or historic passions - violence is opportunistic, often substantially non-ideological.

Ethnicity may be an ordering devise or principle, used to recruit and encourage violence and conflict.

Case: Yugoslavia.

Question 15

Kaldor - ‘New and old wars: organised violence in a global era’ (2012)

Answer 15

Kaldor combines identity politics, war economy, violence and globalisation = identity used instrumentally.

Process: Privatization of violence => the erosion of the tax base of a state unable to cope with the global economy => intergration in transnational criminal economy => identity as a label => type of violence (ethnic cleansing).

Question 16

Rationalist/instrumentalist perspective

Answer 16

1) Rejects the notion that wars are irrational, arising from ancient hatreds, misunderstandings and communication breakdown.
2) Identities are irrelevant for conflict outbreak, bit conflict meakes identities.
3) Beyond material gains; was as a social transformation.

= Ethnicity as a tool, a means to an end, and ethnicity as a label.

Question 17

Lecture conclusion

Answer 17

The term ethnic conflict is a misnomer = it is not the conflict that is ethnic, but at least one if its participants that is.

Question 18

Methodological issues regarding ‘ethnicity’

Answer 18

• Ethnicity and ethnic conflict do not offer avenues for political scientists to make good causal inference.
• Identity as a concept is so messy that it needs to be abandoned.

Scholar: Gilley (2004)

Question 19

Gilley - Against the concept of ethnicity (2004)

Answer 19

Def. of ethnicity: The part of a person’s identity which is drawn from one or more ‘markers’ like race, religion, shared history, region, social symbols and language - opposite from that part of a person’s identity that comes from personal moral doctrine, economic status, civic affiliation or personal history.

A range of criteria applies in making it a useful concept:

1) It must point to distinctive causal explanation for gven instances of political contention.
2) It must inform about what is happening beyond superficial appearances.
3) As it does this, we must be able to measure whether it is or is not apparent and this to reject it in some cases.

In the data of ‘ethnic wars’ it is ofen difficult to determine whether ethnicity is the dominant motivating factor for the conbatant, whether the importance given to ethnicity is a constant or varies over time, and whehter’ ethnic wars’ can be mutually exclusive categories as distinct from ‘other forms of pluralism’.

The concept of ‘ethnic conflict’ wrongly conflates ethnicity in identity and ethnicity in conflict.

Question 20

Theoretical and policy implications

Answer 20

Ypur position on the effect of ethnicity and ethnic conflict is critical for how you understand:
- The outbreak of violence,
- Conflict intensity and duration;
Conflict resolution (consociationalism (Horowitz), intervention (Posen) or cosmopolitanism (Kaldor)).