Ethnic conflict
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".
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.
"[9] 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".
[10] 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".
[17] 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 power in the 1930s on the basis of cattle ownership, physical measurements and church records.
[18] Some argue that constructivist narratives of historical master cleavages are unable to account for local and regional variations in ethnic violence.
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.
[20] At the end of the Cold War, academics including Samuel P. Huntington and Robert D. Kaplan predicted a proliferation of conflicts fueled by civilisational clashes, Tribalism, resource scarcity and overpopulation.
[21][22] The violent ethnic conflicts in Nigeria, Mali, Sudan and other countries in the Sahel region have been exacerbated by droughts, food shortages, land degradation, and population growth.
[32] 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.
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 in some other way.
To identify possible causal stories, Humphreys and Habyarimana ran a series of behavioral games in Kampala, Uganda, that involved several local participants completing joint tasks and allocating money amongst them.
The Hachalu Hundessa riots, in which mobs "lynched, beheaded, and dismembered their victims", took place with "almost-instant and widespread sharing of hate speech and incitement to violence on Facebook, which whipped up people's anger", according to David Gilbert writing in Vice.
Berhan Taye of Access Now stated that in Ethiopia, offline violence quickly leads to online "calls for ethnic attacks, discrimination, and destruction of property [that] goes viral".
John Coakley, for example, has developed a typology of the methods of conflict resolution that have been employed by states, which he lists as: indigenization, accommodation, assimilation, acculturation, population transfer, boundary alteration, genocide and ethnic suicide.
[40] John McGarry and Brendan O'Leary have developed a taxonomy of eight macro-political ethnic conflict regulation methods, which they note are often employed by states in combination with each other.
Moreover, the norm of proportional representation is dominant: each group is represented in the government in a percentage that reflects the ethnicity's demographic presence in the state.
[42] Another requirement for Arend Lijphart is that the government must be composed of a "grand coalition" of the ethnic group leaders which supposes a top-down approach to conflict resolution.
In power sharing-systems that are based on pre-determined identities, there is a tendency to rigidly fix shares of representation on a permanent basis which will not reflect changing demographics over time.
The inherent weaknesses in using pre-determined ethnic identities to form power sharing systems has led Ljiphart to argue that adopting a constructivist approach to consociationalism can increase its likelihood of success.
[48] Horowitz has argued that a single transferable vote system could prevent the ethnification of political parties because voters cast their ballots in order of preference.
[49] This in turn would compel political parties to broaden their manifestos to appeal to voters across the ethnic divide to hoover up second and third preference votes.
In this sense, special privileges are granted to specific minority groups as concessions and incentives to end violence or mute conflict.
[15] Moreover, the parallel institutions created to serve a particular nation or ethnic group might provide significant resources for secession from the central state.
[56] In the 1920s, Estonia granted some cultural autonomy to the German and Jewish populations in order to ease conflicts between the groups and the newly independent state.
Emphasizing the limits of approaches that focus mainly on institutional answers to ethnic conflicts—which are essentially driven by ethnocultural dynamics of which political and/or economic factors are but elements—Gregory Paul Meyjes urges the use of intercultural communication and cultural-rights based negotiations as tools with which to effectively and sustainably address inter-ethnic strife.
Meyjes argues that to fully grasp, preempt, and/or resolve such conflicts—whether with or without the aid of territorial or non-territorial institutional mechanism(s) -- a cultural rights approach grounded in intercultural knowledge and skill is essential.
Paula Pickering, a political scientist, who studies peace-building efforts in Bosnia, finds that formal workplaces are often the site where inter-ethnic ties are formed.
[65] She claims that mixed workplaces lead to repeated inter-ethnic interaction where norms of professionalism compel everyone to cooperate and to treat each other with respect, making it easier for individuals belonging to the minority group to reach out and form relationships with everyone else.
