Handbook of War Studies III: The Intrastate Dimension

The Origins of Ethnic Wars: A Historical and Critical Account

The Origins of Ethnic Wars: A Historical and Critical Account monica duffy toft The volume of research on ethnic wars has grown tremendously in the last decade.1 While there are a number of useful ways to summarize and compare major contributions to this important ‹eld of inquiry, in this chapter I employ a historical review—an intellectual history of inquiry into the causes, dynamics, and consequences of ethnic war as a category of substate violence—in which I divide the literature into three broad time periods: the 1960s to 1989, 1990 to 1999, and 2000 to the present. I should add that while it is now largely taken for granted that the study of ethnic violence is an important undertaking in its own right, it was not always so. A historical division of the literature allows us to see how key facets of our pursuit of general knowledge have changed with our appreciation of the nature and intensity of the threat. We can also trace changes in the nature of the academic communities engaged in this pursuit over time; beginning with area specialists, anthropologists, comparative political scientists, diplomatic and military historians, and so on in the early literature, to the present-day alliance of these early communities with specialists in terrorism, strategic studies, international politics, international relations theory, and even economics. I begin this chapter with a discussion of what is meant by “ethnic war.” I follow this with a structured historical comparison of three generations of work on subjects on or close to ethnic war. For practicality’s sake 229 I start with the period of the 1960s, by no means the ‹rst decade of important research on the origins and nature of ethnic violence, but for our purposes a useful starting point. This ‹rst wave of scholarship—tracking as it does with the attempt by European states to reestablish control of their colonies and with the coming of the Cold War—was often driven by increasing concern over the dif‹culties experienced by the United States in its expanding roles in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; but concern with ethnic war remained overshadowed by the threat of global thermonuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Ironically , the end of the U.S. war in Vietnam did little to increase the interest of security studies and international politics researchers in substate violence . In the 1980s—far from intensifying their focus on the causes, dynamics , and consequences of substate violence—most academics and policymakers in the United States were instead turning with renewed interest toward the study of large-scale but nonnuclear interstate war. This turn away from substate violence as an important empirical category of war was powerfully abetted by the publication of Kenneth N. Waltz’s Theory of International Politics (1979), which, in its insistence that progress in understanding interstate violence—in Waltz’s view the most important type of violence—demanded commitment to positive theory, tended to further diminish interest in a category of violence most often relegated to the sui generis category (Waltz 1979). Thus, in the 1980s, only a very few researchers of substate violence appreciated the importance of understanding ethnic identity and nationalism as a cause of large-scale substate violence and dissent. It was this group, almost alone, who correctly anticipated the demise of the USSR when those in the state-centric security studies and international politics communities were caught by surprise . Second, I explore and analyze second-wave research into ethnic war, from 1990 to 1999. This literature was driven by a widely perceived rise in ethnic and nationalist violence around 1990, following the end of the Cold War, and by a concomitant decline in the likelihood of interstate war following the ‹rst Gulf War. I track the subject of ethnic war’s evolution from backwater to mainstream, and the productive new alliance of diverse research communities and methods now employed to help us understand and, ultimately, diminish either the frequency or intensity of ethnic war. Third and ‹nally, I summarize and critique the most recent scholarship on ethnic war, from 2000 to the present. Here the watershed event did not come from the real world, so much as the publication of a controversial series of articles originally supported by the World Bank, 230 Handbook of War Studies III which suggested that “ethnic” war was in fact a myth, and that the true cause of...