In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Ethnic Conflicts and the Nation-State
  • John Quigley
Ethnic Conflicts and the Nation-State, by Rodolfo Stavenhagen (London: Macmillan Press Ltd. 1996), 310 pp. + bibliography and subject index, $79.95 (hardback), £16.99 (paperback).

Ethnic Conflicts and the Nation-State is an unlikely book. It was written, in effect, by committee. It is the product of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), which describes itself as being autonomous within the UN structure and as being engaged in “multi-disciplinary research on the social dimensions of contemporary problems.”1

In 1990 UNRISD initiated a project titled Ethnic Conflict and Development, motivated by a concern that third world development may be inhibited by ethnic conflicts, in particular when such conflicts lead to civil warfare. During the term of the project, however, events in Eastern Europe led the UNRISD team, comprised of fifteen principal researchers, to broaden the scope of analysis of ethnic conflict beyond the development context.

Most of the researchers focused on a particular ethnic conflict, while several others focused on issues common to ethnic conflicts. The text is written by Rodolfo Stavenhagen, the coordinator of the project, but, as he explains in the introduction, he draws on the work of the individual researchers.

It seemed that this approach to book writing would be a recipe for disaster. It is difficult enough to sustain coherence of presentation in a book when only a single author is involved, and so piecing together the work of fifteen seemed an impossible task.

Surprisingly, however, Ethnic Conflicts and the Nation-State is coherent in its presentation and, in fact, is highly readable. It is divided into chapters that focus on a particular aspect of ethnic conflict, using material drawn from anywhere between four to ten conflicts. A number of the conflicts appear in more than one chapter, different aspects of them being covered in each.

The third chapter, the book’s most interesting, is titled “How Conflict Came About,” and addresses the thorny question of how ethnic conflicts come to be. Stavenhagen’s premise is that in order to resolve a conflict one must know what caused it. This premise, while not shared by all analysts of ethnic conflict, seems eminently reasonable. If, to take a Central American example, there is a conflict between an indigenous Indian peasantry and a Ladino establishment, one may need to understand that Ladino owned coffee plantations have encroached on Indian crop growing lands, causing such conflict.

Stavenhagen rebukes analysts who find ethnic conflict, periodically breaking out in violence, to be an inevitable manifestation of hostility between ethnically defined communities that live in [End Page 864] proximity to each other. Such analysis has been common in the mass media with respect, for example, to the Serb-Muslim conflict in Bosnia.

Stavenhagen bases his conclusions in chapter three on an analysis of the conflicts in Kurdistan, Lebanon, the Horn of Africa, Fiji, Guyana, Malaysia, Burundi, Nigeria, Guatemala, and the former USSR. What becomes apparent is that there is no set pattern, and that different kinds of circumstances may spark a conflict, with considerable variation from one to another. For example in Fiji, conflict came with the immigration of Indians into Fiji. With Guyana, it was immigration by Indians and Africans, which eventually caused conflicts between the two groups. In Kurdistan, conflict arose because the territory inhabited by the Kurds was not made into a state after the Ottoman empire fell in World War I. Instead, other states were created, and Kurd lands wound up in Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria.

Whereas some might say that these situations merely put different groups in proximity so that their atavistic strivings for self-aggrandizement manifest themselves, Stavenhagen looks for the needs and interests of a group that are at odds with the needs and interests of another group, and thus cause conflict.

Stavenhagen’s fourth chapter, titled “The Structuring of Identities,” argues that group identity is a product of history. He suggests that it is not inevitable that a particular group will self-define as such. The character of groups may change over time, he says. A group may self-define in reaction to a threat against its land...

Share