Contents.

The breakup of the former Yugoslavia demonstrates the limitations of international law in the face of ethnic conflict. The contributors to this book examine the various roles international law and international institutions play in dealing with ethnic conflict. International Law and Ethnic Conflict first covers general philosophical, historical, and cultural issues arising from attempts to apply international law to ethnic conflict. The authors assess the legitimacy of demands based on group identity, the legal rights of ethnic groups, the validity of various entitlement claims, and the meaning of statehood. They then consider the institutional and policy responses of international organizations and states in their attempts to deal with ethnic conflict and analyze the extent to which various forms of intervention prove successful.

Why is it that Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland have been in perpetual conflict for thirty years when they can live and prosper together elsewhere? Why was there a bloody civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina when Croats, Serbs, and Muslims had lived peacefully side-by-side fordecades? Why did nobody see and act upon the early warning signs of genocide in Rwanda that eventually killed close to a million people in a matter of weeks? What is it that makes Kashmir potentially worth a nuclear war between India and Pakistan?In recent years hardly a day has gone by when ethnic conflict in some part of the world has not made headline news. The violence involved in these conflicts continues to destabilize entire regions, hamper social and economic development, and cause unimaginable human suffering. And the extensivemedia coverage of these conflicts all too often raises important questions that it signally fails to answer.This book aims to fill this gap. Drawing on the author's long experience of studying such conflicts around the world and his involvment in attempts to resolve them, it provides an illuminating and accessible introduction to the origins, dynamics, and management of ethnic conflict. In doing so, ithelps explain the fundamental question underlying all these conflicts: why do nationalism and ethnicity still have such terrible power to turn neighbour against neighbour?

The papers in this collection bring together a wide and diverse range of viewpoints to consider how the catastrophic consequences of deadly armed conflict can be addressed. Commentators are drawn from the United Nations and its agencies, key non- governmental organisations, world-class academic circles, senior members of government, leading human rights lawyers and judges with experience in international criminal law. These experts address deadly conflict in a comprehensive fashion covering all its stages: the causes and prevention of conflict; conflict resolution and peace-building; international criminal law and international humanitarian law and the role of the United Nations, humanitarian organisations and peacekeepers in post conflict situations. This collection is for those with an existing interest and expertise in international law, international relations, peace studies and criminal justice as well as for those who wish to become conversant with emerging developments in these fields.

The reigning consensus holds that the combination of free markets and democracy would transform the third world and sweep away the ethnic hatred and religious zealotry associated with underdevelopment. In this revelatory investigation of the true impact of globalization, Yale Law School professor Amy Chua explains why many developing countries are in fact consumed by ethnic violence after adopting free market democracy. Chua shows how in non-Western countries around the globe, free markets have concentrated starkly disproportionate wealth in the hands of a resented ethnic minority. These “market-dominant minorities” – Chinese in Southeast Asia, Croatians in the former Yugoslavia, whites in Latin America and South Africa, Indians in East Africa, Lebanese in West Africa, Jews in post-communist Russia – become objects of violent hatred. At the same time, democracy empowers the impoverished majority, unleashing ethnic demagoguery, confiscation, and sometimes genocidal revenge. She also argues that the United States has become the world’s most visible market-dominant minority, a fact that helps explain the rising tide of anti-Americanism around the world. Chua is a friend of globalization, but she urges us to find ways to spread its benefits and curb its most destructive aspects.

An historical analysis of how ethnicity shaped international law and why it is relevant to minorities and ethnic conflicts today.

Offering a new interdisciplinary approach to global justice and integrating the insights of international relations and contemporary ethics, this book asks whether the core norms of international law are just by appraising them according to a standard of global justice grounded in the advancement of peace and protection of human rights.