Ethnic Conflict - Ethnic Conflict in The Post–Cold War World

Ethnic Conflict in The Post–Cold War World

Although the study of ethnic conflict has a long history, genuine interest in ethnic conflict beyond the comparative political science subfield dates from the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, both of which were followed by ethnic conflicts that escalated to violence and civil war. The end of the Cold War thus sparked interest in two important questions about ethnic conflict: was ethnic conflict on the rise; and given that some ethnic conflicts had escalated into serious violence, what, if anything, could scholars of large-scale violence (security studies, strategic studies, interstate politics) offer by way of explanation?

One of the most debated issues relating to ethnic conflict is whether it has become more or less prevalent in the post–Cold War period. At the end of the Cold War, academics including Samuel P. Huntington and Robert D. Kaplan predicted a proliferation of conflicts fuelled by civilisational clashes, tribalism, resource scarcity and overpopulation.

The post–Cold War period has witnessed a number of ethnically-informed secessionist movements, predominantly within the former communist states. Conflicts have involved secessionist movements in the former Yugoslavia, Transnistria in Moldova, Armenians in Azerbaijan, Abkhaz and Ossetians in Georgia.

However, some theorists contend that this does not represent a rise in the incidence of ethnic conflict, since many of the proxy wars fought during the Cold War were in fact ethnic conflicts masked as hot spots of the Cold War. Research shows that the fall of Communism and the increase in the number of capitalist states were accompanied by a decline in total warfare, interstate wars, ethnic wars, revolutionary wars, and the number of refugees and displaced persons. Indeed, some scholars have questioned whether the concept of ethnic conflict is useful at all. Others have attempted to test the clash of civilisations thesis, finding it to be difficult to operationalise and that civilisational conflicts have not risen in intensity in relation to other ethnic conflicts since the end of the Cold War.

On the question of whether scholars deeply invested in theories of interstate violence could adapt their theories to explain or predict large-scale ethnic violence, a key issue proved to be whether ethnic groups could be considered "rational" actors. Prior to the end of the Cold War, the consensus among students of large-scale violence was that ethnic groups should be considered irrational actors, or semi-rational at best. If true, general explanations of ethnic violence would be impossible. In the years since, however, scholarly consensus has shifted to consider that ethnic groups may in fact be counted as rational actors, and the puzzle of their apparently irrational actions (for example, fighting over territory of little or no intrinsic worth) must therefore be explained some other way. As a result, the possibility of a general explanation of ethnic violence has grown, and collaboration between comparativist and international relations subfields has resulted in increasingly useful theories of ethnic conflict.

The book World on Fire by Amy Chua argues that democratization may give political power to an ethnic majority that is poor compared to an ethnic minority that more economically successful. This which may cause conflict, persecution, and even genocide of the minority.

The war between the Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka is one of the prominent ethnic war that had happened after 1950's.