State Disintegration and Ethnic Conflict: A Framework for Analysis

Abstract

With the end of the Cold War, the growing challenges of regional conflict and instability are receiving significant international attention. Broadly, these regional clashes are taking place both between and within states. The former are concerned with regional competition and power distributions, while the latter are the result of animosities rooted in ethnic, religious, communal, secessionist, and irredentist contestations. This article proposes a framework for understanding and analyzing the dynamics and complexities of these post-Cold War internal conflicts taking place within an increasing number of states in various regions of the globe. To accomplish this, a review is undertaken of the causes and dimensions of this internal violence and the state disintegration it engenders, with particular attention to the impact of ethnicity, ethnonationalism, religion, and communalism. The framework developed for analyzing and understanding the complex developments that characterize these ethnic and religiously motivated internal conflicts and wars is employed to assess the strife in Somalia.

References

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2. Ibid., p. 98.

3. For example, Donald Horowitz, in his authoritative study, adopts the following inclusive definition of ethnicity and ethnic group: a societal unit based on language, color, religion, or some other distinguishing characteristic of common origin, such as geography or a common set of cultural traditions. Horowitz , Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), chap.1.

idem , eds., Accounting for Fundamentalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

Rupert Emerson , From Empire to Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960).

6. Liah Greenfeld , Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 10.

7. Ibid., p. 11.

8. Sugata Bose , “Factors Causing the Current and Future Proliferation of Ethnic/Religious Conflict” (Paper prepared for the symposium “The Impact of Ethnic and Religious Conflict on US Interests,” sponsored by the National Strategy Information Center, Washington, DC, 3 June 1993).

9. Gunnar P. Nielsson , “States and Nation-Groups: A Global Taxonomy,” in New Nationalism and the Developed West, ed. Edward Tiryakin and Ronald Rogowski (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1985), chap. 2.

10.

10. See Mark Juergensmeyer , The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

11.

11. According to Myron Weiner, “The breakup of the Soviet Union largely along ethnic lines is one critical factor” contributing to the rise in ethnic conflict. “The failure of communist regimes to subordinate ethnic to class identities has demonstrated the enduring pull of ethnic ties in the contemporary world.” Weiner , “Peoples and States in the New Ethnic Order?” Third World Quarterly, no. 2, p. 317 (1992).

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12. Samuel Huntington , The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

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Harold Nelson , ed., Somalia: A Country Study (Washington, DC: American University Press, 1982).

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15. Horowitz , Ethnic Groups in Conflict, chap. 12.

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16. Clark , Somalia: Background Information.

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17. Omaar , “Somalia: At War with Itself,” p. 233.