PO377 Ethnic Conflict and Political Violence

1. PO377 Ethnic Conflict and Political Violence Week 10 Seminar: Explaining Ethnic Conflict

2. Seminar Questions • Debate competing ideas about the causes of ethnic conflict. What do you find most compelling? • What impact did the end of the Cold War have on patterns of ethnic nationalism and conflict? • Do you find economic explanations for ethnic conflict convincing?

3. Underlying and Proximate Causes Underlying causes • Necessary but not sufficient conditions for conflict: • structural; • political; • economic and social; • cultural and perceptual. Proximate causes • Factors increasing likelihood of conflict where there are underlying conditions: • Internal elite-level: ‘bad leaders’. • External elite-level: ‘bad neighbours’. • Internal mass-level: ‘serious domestic problems.’ • External mass-level: ‘bad neighbourhoods’ (see Wolff 2006, chpt. 3)

4. Ethnic Security Dilemma • Security of one group at expense of insecurity of another; incentive for group to use force pre-emptively. • How elites and masses respond to ethnic security dilemma determines the outcome (ethnic activists and political entrepreneurs are significant here). • Physical security, political security, economic and social security, cultural security, and environmental security. • For leaders to mobilise followers to violence there must be ‘credible evidence’ of other groups’ hostile intentions. (Wolff (2006, chpt. 3), gives an overview of the ethnic security dilemma; Barry Posen (1993) was the first to introduce this. See Lake and Rothchild (1996) for wider strategic dilemmas argument.)

5. Group Entitlement: Worth & Legitimacy Relative group worth • Collective self-esteem as a significant socio-psychological element of ethnic conflict. • Negative stereotypes and group comparisons lead to group anxiety and humiliation (can be related to anxiety about survival). Relative group legitimacy • Legitimacy is often linked to numbers and to ownership of territory. Claims re. territory on grounds of: • Prior Occupation; • Special Mission; • Traditional Rule; • Right to Succeed the Colonial Power (Horowitz 2000, chpt. 5).

6. Ethnic Conflict & the End of the Cold War • Presumption that ethnic conflicts sprang up after the Cold War because the ‘lid’ on ‘ancient rivalries’ was taken off (Brown 1993). • ‘Pressure-cooker’ theory of ethnic conflict has primordialist underpinnings and is rejected by many (see Brown 1993; Harff and Gurr 2004; Bowen 1996). • However, is it possible to look at this a more instrumentalist way: that the loss of the previous global organising structure (Cold War ideological framework) has allowed for ethnicity to become more salient as an organising structure in particular places, with the assistance of ethnic activists and political entrepreneurs?

7. The Economic Debate: Greed vs. Grievance • Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler (1998 and 2000): war happens if the incentive for rebellion is sufficiently large relative to its costs; contemporary civil wars are largely motivated by economic greed rather than by political grievances. • Challengers: the importance of political and socio-economic grievances and insecurity in escalating situations towards armed conflict (Ballentine and Sherman eds, 2003 and Arnson and Zartman eds, 2005). • Wolff (2006, p. 87): ‘it remains unclear whether economic agendas are primary causes of conflict – that is, whether people rebel to satisfy greed – or whether they are instrumental in order to help realize political agendas of grievance’.

8. Rationalism vs. Symbolism • Consider also the Kaufman (2006) vs. Grigorian (2007) dispute over ‘symbolic politics’ versus rationalist approaches. • Socio-psychological approaches (intangibles, status and emotional motives): • ‘symbolic politics’ (Kaufman on ethnic myths and hate narratives); • politics of group entitlement (Horowitz on worth and legitimacy). • Rationalist approaches: • strategic dilemmas: security dilemma, information failures and problems of credible commitment (Lake and Rothchild); • predatory elites (Bowen and other instrumentalists; Wolff re. proximate factors; Collier re. economic gain); • This dispute feeds into much of our previous areas of contention: ‘greed’; wider discussions about elites; security dilemmas; how/if grievances motivate violence; the role of emotion versus calculation.

9. Questions for discussion • How would you use these theoretical approaches to explain ethnic conflict and violence in our case study conflicts? • Are there any elements you find more useful/convincing, and any you think are categorically wrong-headed? • Do some approaches seem more convincing for some cases but not for others, or do you think one ‘camp’ is right overall in terms of understanding ethnic conflict universally?