Against the concept of ethnic conflict

Abstract

Despite a boom in studies of ethnic conflict, the empirical and conceptual justification for this field remains weak. Not only are claims of surging ethnic conflict unsubstantiated, but the concept itself is problematic. The concept tends to homogenise quite distinct political phenomena. Making valid causal inferences about ‘ethnic conflict’ is nearly impossible as a result, a shortcoming reflected in the un‐robust nature of the literature on the subject. For both practical and normative reasons there is a good argument for abandoning the field of ethnic conflict studies.

Notes

Bruce Gilley is the Department of Politics, Princeton University, Corwin Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. Email: [email protected]

Examples include Nations and Nationalism (founded 1995), Ethnicities (2001), Nationalism and Ethnic Politics (1995) and Ethnic Conflict Research Digest (1995). One older journal on the subject is Ethnic and Racial Studies (1978).

Examples in the USA and UK include those at the University of Notre Dame (www.nd.edu/∼krocinst/research/rirec.html), Queens University Belfast (www.qub.ac.uk/csec), the University of Washington (http://depts.washington.edu/ethpeace), the University of Pennsylvania (www.psych.upenn.edu/sacsec/about) and the multi‐university Laboratory in Comparative Ethnic Processes (licep) (www.duke.edu/web/licep)

Library of Congress online catalogue, accessed 8 April 2004. This of course does not come close to covering the full range of books on the subject.

ebsco Host Research Database, accessed 8 April 2004.

B Crawford & R Lipschutz, The Myth of ‘Ethnic Conflict’: Politics, Economics, and ‘Cultural’ Violence, University of California International and Area Studies Digital Collection, Research Series, Vol 98, 1998; J Mueller, ‘The banality of “ethnic war”, International Security, 25 (1), 2000, pp 43–72; N Sambanis, ‘Do ethnic and nonethnic civil wars have the same causes? A theoretical and empirical inquiry’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 45 (3), 2001, pp 259–283; VT LeVine, ‘Conceptualizing “ethnicity” and “ethnic conflict”: a controversy revisited’, Studies in Comparative International Development, 32 (2), 1997, pp 45–76; and C King, ‘The myth of ethnic warfare’, Foreign Affairs, 80 (6), 2001, pp 165–171.

Easterly provides a useful survey of the literature on this point. See ‘Can institutions resolve ethnic conflict?’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 49 (4), 2001, pp 687–706.

After World War II modernisation theory, dependency theory and then state‐centred theory came into vogue, even as contemporary conditions of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and then the 1980s and 1990s were at odds with their foundational assumptions. On this see A Kohli & V Shue, ‘State power and social forces: on political contention and accomodation in the Third World’, in J Migdal, A Kohli & V Shue (eds), State Power and Social Forces: Domination and Transformation in the Third World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp 293–326.

Crawford & Lipschutz, The Myth of ‘Ethnic Conflict’, p 8.

J Fox, ‘Ethnic minorities and the clash of civilizations: a quantitative analysis of Huntington’s thesis’, British Journal of Political Science, 32 (3), 2002, pp 415–435; and J Fox, Ethnoreligious Conflict in the Late Twentieth Century, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002.

MR Sarkees, F Wayman & JD Singer, ‘Inter‐state, intra‐state, and extra‐state wars: a comprehensive look at their distribution over time, 1816–1997’, International Studies Quarterly, 47, 2003, pp 49–70.

TR Gurr, ‘Ethnic warfare on the wane’, Foreign Affairs, 79 (3), 2000, pp 52–65; TR Gurr, MG Marshall & D Khosla, Peace and Conflict 2001: A Global Survey of Armed Conflicts, Self‐Determination Movements, and Democracy, Center for International Development and Conflict Management, University of Maryland, 2001; and J Fox, ‘State failure and the clash of civilisations: an examination of the magnitude and extent of domestic civilisational conflict from 1950 to 1996’, Australian Journal of Political Science, 38 (2), 2003, pp 195–214.

D Laitin & J Fearon, ‘Explaining interethnic cooperation’, American Political Science Review, 90 (4), 1996, pp 715–735. Fearon shows that across 160 countries there is a 48% probability that two randomly selected people in a given country will be ethnically different and a 29% probability that they will be culturally different. J Fearon, ‘Ethnic structure and cultural diversity around the world: a cross‐national data set on ethnic groups’, paper presented to the American Political Science Association Annual Conference, 2002.

S VanEvera, ‘Hypotheses on nationalism and war’, International Security, 18 (4), 1994, pp 5–39.

J Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict, New York: WW Norton, 2000, p 17.

Afrobarometer, Briefing Paper #1, April 2002, available at www.afrobarometer.org/papers/AfrobriefNo1.pdf.

United Nations Development Programme, Socio‐Economic Survey of Somalia 2002, Table 7.12, at www.so.undp.org/SoconRpt.htm. This is no surprise: before the outbreak of conflict in 1991, most Somalis saw ethnic diversity as a source of national unity. See A Hashim, ‘Conflicting identities in Somalia’, Peace Review, 9 (4), 1997, pp 527–532.

W Case, ‘Malaysia: aspects and audiences of legitimacy’, in M Alagappa (ed), Political Legitimacy in Southeast Asia: The Quest for Moral Authority, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995, p 91.

H Singh, ‘Ethnic conflict in Malaysia revisited’, Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 39 (1), 2001, pp 42–43.

By my own calculations, the number killed in communal strife (mostly Hindu–Muslim) per 10 million people for the worst years of 1964, 1969, 1983 and 1992, respectively are 41, 13, 16 and 12. The figure for 2002 is just eight. This is based on official figures compiled by the Bureau of Police Research and Development (bprd) of the Ministry of Home Affairs. Although considered conservative, the bprd data would not affect the comparison if the bias has remained constant over the period. Varshney notes that the trends in his own data, compiled from reports in the Times of India, closely match the bprd figures. A Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civil Life: Hindus and Muslims in India, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002 pp 94–95.

White, however, has argued that emotive moral revulsion is a poor substitute for sober structural analysis, if one aims to avoid a repeat of catastrophic political events. See LT White, Policies of Chaos: The Organizational Causes of Violence in China's Cultural Revolution, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.

PC Schmitter, ‘Still the century of corporatism?’, in FB Pike & T Stritch (eds), The New Corporatism, Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame, 1974, p 91.

TD Hall & C Bartalos, ‘Varieties of ethnic conflict in global perspective: a review essay’, Social Science Quarterly, 77 (2), 1996, p 445.

G Singh, Ethnic Conflict in India, New York: St Martin's Press, 2000, p 22.

SM Saideman et al, ‘Democratization, political institutions, and ethnic conflict: a pooled, cross‐sectional time series analysis from 1985–1998’, Comparative Political Studies, 35 (1), 2002, pp 103–129; PF Trumbore, ‘Victims or aggressors? Ethno‐political rebellion and use of force in militarized interstate disputes’, International Studies Quarterly, 47 (2), 2003, pp 183–202; S Lobell & P Mauceri, Ethnic Conflict and International Politics: Explaining Diffusion and Escalation, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004; D Carment, ‘The international dimensions of ethnic conflict: concepts, indicators and theory’, Journal of Peace Research, 30 (2), 1993, pp 137–151; D Byman, ‘Forever enemies? The manipulation of ethnic identities to end ethnic wars’, Security Studies, 9 (3) 2000, pp 149–190; and DL Byman, Keeping the Peace: Lasting Solutions to Ethnic Conflicts, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

P Evans, 'The role of theory in comparative politics: a symposium', World Politics, 48 (1), 1995, pp 1–9.

B Anderson, Imagined Communities, London: Verso, 1983; and K Chandra & D Laitin, A Constructivist Model of Identity Change, LICEP, 2002.

W Connor, Ethnonationalism: A Quest for Understanding, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press .

There is a close parallel here to the constructed nature of moral doctrines and the conclusion by Rawls, most famously, that the result of this is that theories of justice cannot rely on fixed assumptions about the nature of those doctrines. See J Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971, Sec 68.

DP Green & RL Seher, ‘What role does prejudice play in ethnic conflict?’ , Annual Review of Political Science, 6, 2003, pp 509–531.

Byman, ‘Forever enemies?’.

R Bates, ‘Modernization, ethnic competition, and the rationality of politics in contemporary Africa’, in D Rothchild & VA Olorunsola (eds), The State Versus Ethnic Claims, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1983; SJ Kaufman, Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War, New York: Cornell University Press, 2001; and Mueller, ‘The banality of “ethnic war”’.

For example, poverty and political instability are the main culprits cited in Laitin & Fearon, ‘Explaining interethnic cooperation’. Of course, by rejecting the idea that conflicts that use ethnicity as a tool are ‘ethnic conflicts’, we need not fall into the trap of calling them ‘criminal’, even if they appear to the contemporary observer as anarchic and individualistic. In rightly questioning ethnicity, Mueller wrongly does this in ‘The banality of “ethnic war” ’ and ‘Policing the remnants of war’, Journal of Peace Research, 40 (5), 2003, pp 507–518. This point has been made by S Kalyvas, ‘“New” and “old” civil wars: a valid distinction?’, World Politics, 54 (3), 2001, pp 99–118, and of course earlier by E Hobsbawn, Primitive Rebels, New York: WW Norton, 1959 and J Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985.

JJ Linz & A Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post‐Communist Europe, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996; and E Giuliano, Democratization from the Bottom‐Up: Secessionism, Nationalism and Local Accountability in the Russian Transition, licep, 2003 .

This repression was of course a fundamental violation of democratic principles, so it is hard to endorse the claim by Snyder that the Tamil uprising resulted from democracy. J Snyder, From Voting to Violence, p 5. For a comparison of Tamils in the two places, see L Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation, 1999, p 156.

D Posner, The Political Salience of Cultural Difference: Why Chewas and Tumbukas are Allies in Zambia and Adversaries in Malawi, licep, 2003.

H Meadwell, ‘Transitions to independence and ethnic nationalist mobilization’, in WJ Booth, P James & H Meadwell (eds), Politics and Rationality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p 196.

C King, ‘The myth of ethnic warfare’, Foreign Affairs, 80 (6), 2001, p 167.

N Bermeo, ‘The import of institutions’, Journal of Democracy, 13 (2), 2002, pp 96–110; and Easterly, ‘Can institutions resolve ethnic conflict?’.

Sarkees et al, Inter‐State, Intra‐State, and Extra‐State Wars, p 55. Sambanis, N., Do Ethnic and Nonethnic Civil Wars Have the Same Causes? A Theoretical and Empirical Inquiry. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2001. 45 (3): p. 259‐283; Tilly, C., The Politics of Collective Violence. 2003, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Henderson, E.A. and J.D. Singer, Civil War in the Post‐Colonial World, 1946‐92. Journal of Peace Research, 2000. 37 (3): p. 275‐299.

Taken from the licep group's website, at www.duke.edu/web/licep/aboutLiCEP.pdf, p 5, emphasis added.

S Huntington, ‘The change to change: modernization, development, and politics’, Comparative Politics, 3 (3), 1971, p 304.

This is something like the definition of ‘ethnic violence’ given by Brubaker and Laitin: ‘Violence perpetrated across ethnic lines, in which at least one party is not a state (or representative of a state), and in which the putative ethnic difference is integral rather than incidental to that violence, that is in which the violence is meaningfully oriented in some way to the different ethnicity of the target’. R Brubaker & D Laitin, ‘Ethnic and nationalist violence’, Annual Review of Sociology, 24, 1998, p 428.

M Reynal‐Querol, ‘Ethnicity, political systems and civil wars’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 46 (1), 2002, p 29.

G Loury, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Snyder writes: ‘One does not have to hold primordialist theories of ancient hatreds to believe that, once popular identities are mobilized to fight along lines defined by cultural differences, it will be difficult to erase fears and hatreds rooted in the memory of those conflicts’. Snyder, From Voting to Violence, p 325.

N Subramanian, Ethnicity and Populist Mobilization, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.

C Young, The Politics of Cultural Pluralism, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976; and D Yashar, Contesting Citizenship: Indigenous Movements, the State, and the Postliberal Challenge in Latin America, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

S Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996, pp 165–168.

HD Forbes, ‘Toward a Science of Ethnic Conflict’, Journal of Democracy, 14 (4), 2003, p 172.

There are obvious parallels here with the well known argument of Elkins and Simeon in favour of structural factors over the resort to ‘political culture’ in explanations. D Elkins & R Simeon, ‘A cause in search of its effect, or what does political culture explain?’, Comparative Politics, 11 (2), 1979, pp 127–145.

D Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000, p 14.

Crawford & Lipschutz, The Myth of ‘Ethnic Conflict‘, pp 4–5.

Yashar, Contesting Citizenship; and A Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, New York: Doubleday, 2003.

M Ignatieff, The Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience, New York: Henry Holt, 1998; E Mansfield & J Snyder, ‘Incomplete democratization and the outbreak of military disputes’, International Studies Quarterly, 46 (4), 2002, pp 529–550; and A Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civil Life.

J Rawls, The Law of Peoples, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, pp 6–7.

Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, p xvii.

Snyder, From Voting to Violence; Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations; and B Russett, JR O’Neal & M Cox, ‘Clash of civilizations, or realism and liberalism déjà vu? Some evidence’, Journal of Peace Research, 37 (5), 2000, pp 583–608.

‘A bloody phenomenon cannot be explained by a bloodless theory.’ Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, p140.

A Hirschmann, ‘The search for paradigms as a hindrance to understanding’, World Politics, 22 (3), 1970, pp 329–343.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bruce Gilley

Bruce Gilley is the Department of Politics, Princeton University, Corwin Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. Email: [email protected]