This report provides a practical tool--a guidebook and a methodology to follow--to help intelligence analysts determine the long-term potential for communitarian and ethnic conflict. It is based on a conceptual model of group conflict. The three-stage model traces the development of ethnic and communitarian strife, beginning with the conditions that may lead to the formation of an ethnic group, then the group's mobilization for political action, and ultimately its competition with the state. The main body of the handbook is formatted as a series of questions and guidelines for the analyst to consider while preparing an assessment. An appendix provides a full theoretical explanation of the model. As its goal is to provide a tool to help intelligence analysts predict whether a competition between an ethnic group and the state will end in violence, the model supplies a series of matrices to help identify the conditions that may lead to ethnic and communitarian strife.

Provides comprehensive, up-to-date coverage of the key themes and principles of conflict economics.

ABSTRACT: Resolving ethnic conflicts is no easy task. In the 1990s, civil wars engulfed Somalia, Mozambique, Rwanda, Cambodia, Yugoslavia...the list goes on. In the Balkans, the disintegration of Josip Tito's pan-Slavic dream destabilized the security of the region and relations between the people living in the Yugoslav republics. Minorities stranded on the other side of the border following the secession of the former Yugoslav republics were skeptical of the new governments in their internal policies fueled by nationalistic overtones. This caused a backlash of self-determined autonomy of minorities within the newly seceded republics The paper provides a theoretical application of crisis bargaining to explain the wars in Yugoslavia caused by the commitment issues among the dyadic couple. Crisis bargaining between civil war combatants is hindered by incredible commitments, issues of uncertainty and lack of third-party guarantees to safeguard ceasefires and military disengagement. Parties to a civil conflict are therefore unable to successfully commit to peaceful negotiations during periods of heightened vulnerability. Commitment issues arise during such periods which cause prolonged fighting for better position at the bargaining table, and are most likely to prevail in the absence of credible guarantees and honest communication.

Ethnic Bargaining introduces a theory of minority politics that blends comparative analysis and field research in the postcommunist countries of East Central Europe with insights from rational choice. Erin K. Jenne finds that claims by ethnic minorities have become more frequent since 1945 even though nation-states have been on the whole more responsive to groups than in earlier periods. Minorities that perceive an increase in their bargaining power will tend to radicalize their demands, she argues, from affirmative action to regional autonomy to secession, in an effort to attract ever greater concessions from the central government.The language of self-determination and minority rights originally adopted by the Great Powers to redraw boundaries after World War I was later used to facilitate the process of decolonization. Jenne believes that in the 1960s various ethnic minorities began to use the same discourse to pressure national governments into transfer payments and power-sharing arrangements. Violence against minorities was actually in some cases fueled by this politicization of ethnic difference.Jenne uses a rationalist theory of bargaining to examine the dynamics of ethnic cleavage in the cases of the Sudeten Germans in interwar Czechoslovakia; Slovaks and Moravians in postcommunist Czechoslovakia; the Hungarians in Romania, Slovakia, and Vojvodina; and the Albanians in Kosovo. Throughout, she challenges the conventional wisdom that partisan intervention is an effective mechanism for protecting minorities and preventing or resolving internal conflict.

Secession is a detachment of a territory from an existing state with the aim of creating a new state on the detached territory. Secession is usually an outcome of the political mobilization of a population on the territory to be detached and, as a political phenomenon, is a subject of study in the social sciences. Its impact on inter-state relations is a subject of study in international relations. But secession is also subject to regulation both in the constitutional law of sovereign states and in international law. Following a spate of secessions in the early 1990s, legal scholars have proposed a variety of ways to regulate the international responses to attempts at secessions. Moreover, since the 1980s normative justification of secession has been subject to an intense debate among political theorists and moral philosophers. This research companion has the following three complementary aims. First, to offer an overview of the current theoretical approaches to secession in the social sciences, international relations, legal theory, political theory and applied ethics. Second, to outline the current practice of international recognition of secession and current domestic and international laws which regulate secession. Third, to offer an account of major secessionist movements - past and present - from a comparative perspective. In their accounts of past secessions and current secessionist movements, the contributors to this volume focus on the following four components: the nature and source of secessionist grievances, the ideologies and techniques of secessionist mobilization, the responses of the host state or majority parties in the host state, and the international response to attempts at secession. This provides a basis for identification of at least some common patterns in the otherwise highly varied processes of secession.