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.

With the raging civil war continuing unabated in the former country of Yugoslavia, and the potential for similar conflict in other former members of the Eastern Bloc (such as Czechoslovakia), it is urgent to understand the underlying motivations of the various groups fighting in order to resolve the conflict before more lives are lost. This report provides an analysis of the significance of nationalism and ethnic conflict in the affairs of the populations of Central and Eastern Europe. It describes and analyzes nationalist developments--particularly in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia--and examines the response of European security institutions to problems of ethnic nationalism.

This report is the final product of a year-long project entitled "Ethnic Conflict and the Processes of State Breakdown: Improving Army Planning and Preparation," which sought to help Army intelligence analysts who monitor intrastate (including ethnically based) conflict potential around the world. The work of these analysts has grown more important since the end of the Cold War, as the U.S. Army has become increasingly engaged in peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations aimed at preventing, quelling, or dealing with the consequences of ethnic or communitarian strife in Somalia, Rwanda, Macedonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Facing the serious prospect of further involvement in such conflicts in the years ahead, the Army has to grapple with the problem of what such intrastate operations imply for its training, equipping, doctrine, and deployment. While the primary mission of the Army and the U.S. armed forces in general will remain the fighting of wars and protecting U.S. interests in the world, peace operations (ranging from traditional peacekeeping, to peace enforcement, to humanitarian assistance) will place increasing demands on the U.S. armed forces in the next 10-15 years, with the Army (and the Marines) most affected. To put it bluntly, there "will be more Somalias, Rwandas, Haitis and Burundis in the future, " and the Army will be called upon to deal with some of them. Since the end of the Cold War, the Army has been called upon 25 times to conduct peacekeeping and other humanitarian missions and, as the Army Chief of Staff General Dennis Reimer recently noted, "that is a 300 percent increase and that trend is expected to continue."

What kinds of civic ties between different ethnic communities can contain, or even prevent, ethnic violence? This book draws on new research on Hindu-Muslim conflict in India to address this important question. Ashutosh Varshney examines three pairs of Indian cities—one city in each pair with a history of communal violence, the other with a history of relative communal harmony—to discern why violence between Hindus and Muslims occurs in some situations but not others. His findings will be of strong interest to scholars, politicians, and policymakers of South Asia, but the implications of his study have theoretical and practical relevance for a broad range of multiethnic societies in other areas of the world as well. The book focuses on the networks of civic engagement that bring Hindu and Muslim urban communities together. Strong associational forms of civic engagement, such as integrated business organizations, trade unions, political parties, and professional associations, are able to control outbreaks of ethnic violence, Varshney shows. Vigorous and communally integrated associational life can serve as an agent of peace by restraining those, including powerful politicians, who would polarize Hindus and Muslims along communal lines.

The resurgence of racial, ethnic and nationalist loyalties in the contemporary world are examined in this volume. Considered collectively, the contributors offer both a conceptual understanding of race and ethnicity and an empirical examination of their renewed importance in and implications for contemporary societies. With sections on the American experience with ethnoracial pluralism and on ethnonationalist movements in other parts of the world, Hughey offers an extensive treatment of the origins, expressions and implications of the new tribalisms now confronting the world.

Ethiopia s unique system of ethnic-based federalism claims to minimise conflict by organising political power along ethnic lines. This empirical study shows that the system eases conflict at some levels but also sharpens inter-ethnic and intra-ethnic divides on the ground.