Editing Ethnic conflict (section)

==Theories of causes==
It is argued that rebel movements are more likely to organize around ethnicity because ethnic groups are more apt to be aggrieved, better able to mobilize, and more likely to face difficult bargaining challenges compared to other groups.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Denny |first1=Elaine K |last2=Walter |first2=Barbara F |title=Ethnicity and civil war |journal=Journal of Peace Research |date=March 2014 |volume=51 |issue=2 |pages=199–212 |doi=10.1177/0022343313512853|s2cid=110666158 }}</ref> The causes of ethnic conflict are debated by [[political scientists]] and [[sociologists]]. Official academic explanations generally fall into one of three schools of thought: primordialist, instrumentalist, and constructivist. More recent scholarship draws on all three schools.

===Primordialist accounts===
Proponents of primordialist accounts argue that "[e]thnic groups and nationalities exist because there are traditions of belief and action towards primordial objects such as biological features and especially territorial location".<ref>{{cite journal |first=Steven|last=Grosby|year=1994|title=The verdict of history: The inexpungeable tie of primordiality&nbsp;– a response to Eller and Coughlan|journal=[[Ethnic and Racial Studies]]|volume=17|issue=1|pages=164–171 [p. 168]|doi=10.1080/01419870.1994.9993817}}</ref> Primordialist accounts rely on strong ties of [[kinship]] among members of ethnic groups. [[Donald L. Horowitz]] argues that this kinship "makes it possible for ethnic groups to think in terms of family resemblances".<ref>{{cite book|first=Donald L.|last=Horowitz|year=1985|title=Ethnic Groups in Conflict|location=Berkeley, CA|publisher=University of California Press|page=[https://archive.org/details/ethnicgroupsinco00horo/page/57 57]|isbn=0520053850|url=https://archive.org/details/ethnicgroupsinco00horo/page/57}}</ref>

[[Clifford Geertz]], a founding scholar of primordialism, asserts that each person has a natural connection to perceived kinsmen. In time and through repeated conflict, essential ties to one's ethnicity will coalesce and will interfere with ties to civil society. Ethnic groups will consequently always threaten the survival of civil governments but not the existence of nations formed by one ethnic group.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Old societies and new States; the quest for modernity in Asia and Africa.|last=Geertz|first=Clifford|publisher=Free Press of Glencoe|year=1963|location=London}}</ref> Thus, when considered through a primordial lens, ethnic conflict in multi-ethnic society is inevitable.

A number of political scientists argue that the root causes of ethnic conflict do not involve ethnicity ''per se'' but rather institutional, political, and economic factors.  These scholars argue that the concept of ethnic war is misleading because it leads to an [[essentialism|essentialist]] conclusion that certain groups are doomed to fight each other when in fact the wars between them that occur are often the result of political decisions.<ref name="RefError"/><ref name=":20">{{Cite book|title=Constructing Grievance: Ethnic Nationalism in Russia's Republics|last=Giuliano|first=Elise|publisher=Cornell University Press|year=2011}}</ref>

Moreover, primordial accounts  do not account for the spatial and temporal variations in ethnic violence. If these "ancient hatreds" are always simmering under the surface and are at the forefront of people's consciousness, then ethnic groups should constantly be ensnared in violence. However, ethnic violence occurs in sporadic outbursts. For example, Varshney points out that although Yugoslavia broke up due to ethnic violence in the 1990s, it had enjoyed a long peace of decades before the USSR collapsed. Therefore, some scholars claim that it is unlikely that primordial ethnic differences alone caused the outbreak of violence in the 1990s.<ref name="RefError"/>

Primordialists have reformulated the "ancient hatreds" hypothesis and have focused more on the role of human nature. Petersen argues that the existence of hatred and animosity does not have to be rooted in history for it to play a role in shaping human behavior and action: "If 'ancient hatred' means a hatred consuming the daily thoughts of great masses of people, then the 'ancient hatreds' argument deserves to be readily dismissed. However, if hatred is conceived as a historically formed 'schema' that guides action in some situations, then the conception should be taken more seriously."<ref name="Varshney2007">{{Cite web|url=http://ashutoshvarshney.net/wp-content/files_mf/varshneyethnicityandethnicconflict.pdf|title=Ethnicity and Ethnic Conflict|last=Varshney|first=Ashutosh|date=2007|publisher=Oxford handbook of comparative politics|access-date=2016-02-07|archive-date=2018-03-29|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180329002015/http://ashutoshvarshney.net/wp-content/files_mf/varshneyethnicityandethnicconflict.pdf|url-status=dead}}</ref>

===Instrumentalist accounts===
[[Anthony D. Smith|Anthony Smith]] notes that the instrumentalist account "came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, in the debate about (white) ethnic persistence in what was supposed to have been an effective melting pot".<ref name="Smith">{{cite book|first=Anthony|last=Smith|year=2001|title=Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History|location=Cambridge|publisher=Polity|pages=[https://archive.org/details/nationalismtheor0000smit/page/54 54–55]|isbn=0745626580|url=https://archive.org/details/nationalismtheor0000smit/page/54}}</ref> This new theory sought explained persistence as the result of the actions of community leaders, "who used their cultural groups as sites of mass mobilization and as constituencies in their competition for power and resources, because they found them more effective than social classes".<ref name="Smith"/> In this account of ethnic identification, ethnicity and race are viewed as instrumental means to achieve particular ends.<ref>{{cite book |first1=Stephen|last1=Cornell|first2=Douglas|last2=Hartmann|year=1998|title=Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World|location=Thousand Oaks, CA|publisher=Pine Forge|page=59|isbn=0761985018}}</ref>

Whether [[Ethnic group|ethnicity]] is a fixed perception or not is not crucial in the instrumentalist accounts. Moreover, the scholars of this school generally do not oppose the view that ethnic difference plays a part in many conflicts. They simply claim that ethnic difference is not sufficient to explain conflicts.<ref>{{cite book |last=Schlichting|first=Ursel|chapter=Conflict Between Different Nationalities: Chances for and Limits to Their Settlement|editor1-first=Andreas|editor1-last=Klinke|editor2-first=Ortwin|editor2-last=Renn|editor3-link=Jean Paul Lehners|editor3-first=Jean Paul|editor3-last=Lehners|title=Ethnic Conflicts and Civil Society|location=Aldershot|publisher=Ashgate|year=1997|isbn=1840144556}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |chapter-url=http://image.berghof-foundation.org/fileadmin/redaktion/Publications/Handbook/Articles/smith_handbook.pdf|last=Smith|first=Dan|year=2003|chapter=Trends and Causes of Armed Conflicts|editor1-first=Alexander|editor1-last=Austin|editor2-first=Martina|editor2-last=Fischer|editor3-first=Norbert|editor3-last=Ropers|title=Berghof Handbook for Conflict Transformation|location=Berlin|publisher=Berghof Research Centre for Constructive Conflict Management/Berghof Foundation}}</ref>

Mass mobilization of ethnic groups can only be successful if there are latent ethnic differences to be exploited, otherwise politicians would not even attempt to make political appeals based on ethnicity and would focus instead on economic or ideological appeals. For these reasons, it is difficult to completely discount the role of inherent ethnic differences. Additionally, ethnic entrepreneurs, or elites, could be tempted to mobilize ethnic groups in order to gain their political support in democratizing states.<ref name=":19">{{Cite book|title=From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict|url=https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780393048810|url-access=registration|last=Snyder|first=Jack|publisher=W. W. Norton & Company|year=2000}}</ref> Instrumentalists theorists especially emphasize this interpretation in ethnic states in which one ethnic group is promoted at the expense of other ethnicities.<ref name=":4" /><ref>{{Cite book|title=Can Liberalism Be Exported?|last=Kymlicka|first=Wil|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=2001}}</ref>

Furthermore, ethnic mass mobilization is likely to be plagued by collective action problems, especially if ethnic protests are likely to lead to violence. Instrumentalist scholars have tried to respond to these shortcomings. For example, Russell Hardin argues that ethnic mobilization faces problems of coordination and not collective action. He points out that a charismatic leader acts as a focal point around which members of an ethnic group coalesce. The existence of such an actor helps to clarify beliefs about the behavior of others within an ethnic group.<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=bCcEJte1irEC&q=Peace+Studies:+Critical+Concepts+in+Political+Science,+Volume+3+By+Matthew+Evangelista&pg=PR7|title=Peace studies: Critical concepts in political science.|last=Evangelista|first=Matthew|date=2005|publisher=Taylor & Francis|isbn=9780415339254}}</ref>

===Constructivist accounts===
A third, constructivist, set of accounts stress the importance of the socially constructed nature of ethnic groups, drawing on [[Benedict Anderson]]'s concept of the [[imagined community]]. Proponents of this account point to [[Rwanda]] as an example because  the [[Tutsi]]/[[Hutu]] distinction was codified by the [[Belgian colonial empire|Belgian colonial power]] in the 1930s on the basis of cattle ownership, physical measurements and church records. Identity cards were issued on this basis, and these documents played a key role in the [[Rwandan genocide|genocide]] of 1994.<ref>{{cite book|first=Mahmood|last=Mamdani|year=2001|title=When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda|location=Princeton, NJ|publisher=Princeton University Press|isbn=0691058210|url=https://archive.org/details/whenvictimsbecom00mamd}}</ref>

Some argue that constructivist narratives of historical master cleavages are unable to account for local and regional variations in ethnic violence. For example, Varshney highlights that in the 1960s "racial violence in the USA was heavily concentrated in northern cities; southern cities though intensely politically engaged, did not have riots".<ref name="Varshney2007" /> A constructivist master narrative is often a country level variable whereas studies of incidences of ethnic violence are often done at the regional and local level.

Scholars of ethnic conflict and [[civil war]]s have introduced theories that draw insights from all three traditional schools of thought. In ''The Geography of Ethnic Violence'', Monica Duffy Toft shows how ethnic group settlement patterns, socially constructed identities, charismatic leaders, issue indivisibility, and state concern with precedent setting can lead rational actors to escalate a dispute to violence, even when doing so is likely to leave contending groups much worse off.<ref name="Toft">{{cite book |first=Monica Duffy|last=Toft|year=2003|title=The Geography of Ethnic Violence: Identity, Interests, and the Indivisibility of Territory|location=Princeton, NJ|publisher=Princeton University Press|isbn=0691113548}}</ref> Such research addresses empirical puzzles that are difficult to explain using primordialist, instrumentalist, or constructivist approaches alone. As Varshney notes, "pure essentialists and pure instrumentalists do not exist anymore".<ref name="Varshney2007" />