What strategies can a government use to end violent ethnic conflicts in the long term? Under what conditions do these strategies work best? Daniel Byman examines how government policies can affect the recurrence of violent ethnic conflict.

In them, Kolstø examines how the drivers behind ethnic conflicts in the non-Russian republics were not only struggles for collective identities but also more mundane interests, such as competition for jobs and positions.

Ethnic conflict now presents the thorniest problems for military and civilian strategists of all stripes. This book presents a new general theory of strategy, encompassing studies of the relationship between values, interest, and strategy as these relate to ethnic conflicts. It focuses on the relationship between values and strategy, building a theory on the hypothesis that national values influence national strategy. Paquette's research reveals that national values influence national strategy through three mechanisms: cognition, appreciation, and evaluation. Each mechanism, and indeed the whole value-focused approach to strategic thinking, is described using a network of interrelated statements. Paquette develops a methodology specific to the issues of international security and ethnic considerations. She tests this theory extensively for internal consistency before applying it to a single historical case: French decision-making on national strategy between 1955 and 1970; however, because of its generality, this same theory could easily be applied to other cases. As with any theory, it is possible to vary successively or simultaneously assumptions or conditions and to derive new predictions. This process of deriving variations has the potential to help in the training of strategists, both military and civilian.

This renamed and revised paperback edition of Irwin Deutscher's Accommodating Diversity shares most of the book's original content but reframes the work with teachers and students in mind. Part social policy analysis and part intellectual autobiography, Preventing Ethnic Conflict mines the world's most troubling incidences of racial and ethnic conflict in order to find national policies that defuse the strains of cohabitation and encourage true reconciliation. Debunking the notion that conflict is inevitable when dominant and minority communities cohabit, Deutscher looks at five successful policies, from Swedish legislation dealing with immigrant education to the Chieftaincy act in Ghana, as he examines the possibilities for successful and harmonious intergroup relations. Deutscher concludes that the pursuit of a benign pluralist policy leads ultimately to assimilation, providing a political solution, which satisfies the champions of both diversity and unity. With introductory essays to each section written by Linda Lindsey that place the material within sociological theory, its problem solving focus, and provocative study questions, Preventing Ethnic Conflict is an ideal supplement for courses in race, ethnicity, and social problems.

This work focuses on how, why and when ethnic conflicts either diffuse by precipitating similar conflicts elsewhere or escalate by bringing in outside parties and how such transnational ethnic conflicts can be managed. It focuses specifically on the conflicts in Eastern Europe and Africa.

"The wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in neighboring Croatia and Kosovo grabbed the attention of the western world not only because of their ferocity and their geographic location, but also because of their timing. This violence erupted at the exact moment when the cold war confrontation was drawing to a close, when westerners were claiming their liberal values as triumphant, in a country that had only a few years earlier been seen as very well placed to join the west. In trying to account for this outburst, most western journalists, academics, and policymakers have resorted to the language of the premodern: tribalism, ethnic hatreds, cultural inadequacy, irrationality; in short, the Balkans as the antithesis of the modern west. Yet one of the most striking aspects of the wars in Yugoslavia is the extent to which the images purveyed in the western press and in much of the academic literature are so at odds with evidence from on the ground."—from The Myth of Ethnic War V. P. Gagnon Jr. believes that the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s were reactionary moves designed to thwart populations that were threatening the existing structures of political and economic power. He begins with facts at odds with the essentialist view of ethnic identity, such as high intermarriage rates and the very high percentage of draft-resisters. These statistics do not comport comfortably with the notion that these wars were the result of ancient blood hatreds or of nationalist leaders using ethnicity to mobilize people into conflict. Yugoslavia in the late 1980s was, in Gagnon's view, on the verge of large-scale sociopolitical and economic change. He shows that political and economic elites in Belgrade and Zagreb first created and then manipulated violent conflict along ethnic lines as a way to short-circuit the dynamics of political change. This strategy of violence was thus a means for these threatened elites to demobilize the population. Gagnon's noteworthy and rather controversial argument provides us with a substantially new way of understanding the politics of ethnicity.

A definitive global survey of the interaction of ethnicity, nationalism and politics, this handbook blends rigorous theoretically grounded analysis with empirically rich illustrations to provide a state-of-the-art overview of the contemporary debates on one of the most pervasive international security challenges today. Fully updated for the second edition, the book includes a new section which offers detailed analyses of contemporary cases of conflict such as in Ukraine, Kosovo, the African Great Lakes region and in the Kurdish areas across the Middle East, thus providing accessible examples that bridge the gap between theory and practice. The contributors offer a 360-degree perspective on ethnic conflict: from the theoretical foundations of nationalism and ethnicity to the causes and consequences of ethnic conflict, and to the various strategies adopted in response to it. Without privileging any specific explanation of why ethnic conflict happens at a particular place and time or why attempts at preventing or settling it might fail or succeed, The Routledge Handbook of Ethnic Conflict enables readers to gain a better insight into such defining moments in post-Cold War international history as the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, and their respective consequences, the genocide in Rwanda, and the relative success of conflict settlement efforts in Northern Ireland. By contributing to understanding the varied and multiple causes of ethnic conflicts and to learning from the successes and failures of their prevention and settlement, the Handbook makes a powerful case that ethnic conflicts are neither unavoidable nor unresolvable, but rather that they require careful analysis and thoughtful and measured responses.