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Ethnic conflicts have proved to be inherently dangerous and repressive across the globe. While this signification cannot be negated, a deeper articulation of liminal existences in the conflict‐prone areas requires more attention. Using case studies with a qualitative research design, the paper emphasizes on conflict as a social force, facilitating the (re)structuration of communities entangled within it. The paper explores the mundane lived experiences of the Adivasis and the Bodos, two of the ethnic communities living in Assam, a Northeastern state of India, by making a few claims. First, ethnic conflicts reorient social relations, intercommunity interactions and economic exchanges between the Adivasis and Bodos. Second, ethnic conflicts recourse varied negotiations and emotions in their being(ness), aspirational values, and embodied meanings in mundane life‐processes. The complex realization of identities for the Adivasis and the Bodos is fostered by the exposure of fear, past loss of life, and the varied interactions between victims and perpetrators in everyday social life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins by reviewing rational choice institutionalism's explanation of how political institutions incentivise patronage networks emphasising ethnic cleavage. Acknowledging the limits of rationalist institutionalism in explaining societal norm constructions and mass behaviour, the paper then adopts discursive institutionalism to analyse the social affects of institutional design. The case study of violence against Amharas deemed 'settlers' in Ethiopia's contemporary ethnic federation highlights how new cleavages create new norms and new historical narratives, influencing group dynamics. These dynamics result in group‐based mass violence when rents‐based orders and patronage networks collapse during times of institutional instability or change. Thus, precipitated by the discursive effects of hyper‐ethnicised institutional design, mass violence against Amhara in different ethnic regions in Ethiopia emerges as an unexpected outcome of regime change and democratic transition in the country. These incidents of targeted violence are not simply explained by institutions, but rather by the socio‐political climate effected by the interaction between institutions and discourse under ethnic federalism. In short, this study demonstrates how institutions go beyond incentivising or constraining elite behaviour, producing discursive markers that normalise violence during periods of institutional 'lapse', when formal provisions of social order temporarily collapse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conflict behavior is thought to result from attitudes. Attitude which is a tendency to favor or disfavor is thought to be a function of perceptions. Perceptions are influenced by our cultural identity. In Kenya, different communities have been involved in violent identity conflicts which peaked in 2007/2008 during the post‐election violence. The role of politics and natural resource competitions as sources for conflicts in Kenya has been widely exposed. This paper enriches the discourse on manifestation of conflict by an in‐depth analysis of how cultural identity is communicated drawing examples from communities residing adjacent to Eastern Mau forests complex in Kenya. The main research question is that, since inter‐group conflict involves identity competition, how are attitudes expressed in this context? Qualitative data sources were obtained for this study through key informant interviews and Focus Group Discussions. Data analysis was through thematization, content and linguistic analysis. Results from this study reveal that conflicts involving different ethnic communities have escalated over time. The study further reveals that attitudes are expressed through figures of communication such as stereotypes and nicknames, metaphors, and naming of places. Conflicts in Eastern Mau seemed to persist, vacillating between periods of relative peace and periods of escalation. Mediation has been proposed in recent literature as a sustainable solution for intractable conflicts. This paper suggests that more research is needed on traditional dispute resolution in Eastern Mau with a view to understanding how mediation could be integrated in the existing formal conflict resolution in the study area and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although we are aware that nation branding features across the media, discussion and debate continue over its perceived influence in peoples' everyday understandings and lives. This paper, by way of a response, examines peoples' reactions to specific government campaign messages of patriotism and unity designed to combat internal ethnic conflict in Malaysia. Malaysia, at this time, provides a unique subject of analysis as it includes an instance where a domestically focused nation branding campaign is being employed to instigate unity among ethnic groups residing within a country with a history of ethnic conflict and social engineering policies. The project introduces several TV campaign story examples, identified for their prevalence in the 1Malaysia nation branding campaign, to representatives from three prominent ethnic groups in Malaysia to map their responses. The paper finds that group representatives interpret the stories using their shared insider views of the nation or 'ethno‐national imaginaries'. Their acceptance of, and critical challenges to, the images and narratives of the TV campaign stories are seen therefore to reflect group representatives' wider positions, interests and participation in an ongoing political conflict shaped within the logics of the Malaysian nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the assertion of language rights through legal mobilization by the Hungarian minority in Romania, thus examining this emergent kind of mobilization aimed at the claiming of rights, often rights recognized by law, but not enforced in practice. This incongruity between rights on paper and their execution provokes interethnic rivalry for the visibility of language and culture, in which the exclusive ownership of sovereignty is marked by the dominance of national language in physical spaces coined as 'linguistic territoriality' (Csergő, 2007), fostering parallel, monolingual public spheres. Applying Rancière's theory to the case of the Hungarian minority in Romania, it is argued that civil society activists' legal mobilization initiatives are a manifestation of 'politics' in the Rancièreian sense as they challenge the distribution of public spaces along ethnic lines through pushing forward their integrative vision of the same spaces—thus 'seeking the litigious distribution of places and roles' (Rancière, 2003, p. 201). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the 1994 Declaration of Principles (DoP) for the resolution of the Sudanese civil war, adopted by the Inter‐Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD). This was the only occasion on which an African inter‐state organization included separation as an option for resolving a civil war. It was the basis for South Sudan's independence in 2011. The DoP was drafted by the Ethiopian government, and imposed on belligerent parties, both of which were, at the time, unionist. The paper identifies two concepts of self‐determination within the DoP— independence for colonial territories and the Marxist‐Leninist idea of self‐determination for national groups. The rationale for including both arose from Ethiopian leadership within IGAD. The paper also examines the diverse Sudanese debates on self‐determination, including several strands of nationalism, Islamism, and the 'New Sudan' of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM). There was radical disagreement among Sudanese on national identity and self‐determination, creating ambiguities that ironically facilitated the exercise in southern self‐determination in 2011. Drawing on documentation of Sudanese negotiations, the paper examines how the DoP unlocked the Sudanese debate on the issue, and how the different concepts fared up to the time of the independence of South Sudan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contends that cultural destruction during genocidal campaigns is a dimension of genocide itself and is evidence of the intent to completely erase the targeted group from existence. It focuses on a powerful, yet under‐examined, form of cultural violence, namely the destruction of cemeteries and graveyards. My argument will be demonstrated through the localised case study of the town of Zvornik, Bosnia–Herzegovina, and the destruction of two Muslim cemeteries that took place there during genocidal campaigns against the Muslim communities of Bosnia–Herzegovina in the 1992–1995 war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The five papers in this themed section seek to explain national identifications with Syria using diverse methods and focusing on various state and societal actors before and after 2011. Each contribution engages with the distinction of national identities into their 'ethnic/primordial' and 'civic/constructed' elements and examines their meaning within Syria in different times and contexts. Since its independence in 1946, Syria experienced strong tensions between sub‐ and supra‐state identities and experimented with diverse territorial nationalisms in their pan‐Arab and specifically Syrian forms. Through a distinctive mix of ethnic Arab and civic ideological elements, they helped to forge unity among a multiplicity of ethnicities, tribes and sects living on the Syrian territory and thus were moulded in tandem with the interests of those in power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of the ethno‐political socialization of young children in the context of intractable conflict, drawing on the case of Israeli society. The analysis is based on the integrative developmental‐contextual theory (IDCT), which proposes that in the context of intractable conflict, from a very early age onward, in‐group members acquire a socio‐psychological repertoire that consists of narratives, beliefs, attitudes, and emotions related to the conflict and to the rival group. IDCT highlights three central components that dictate the nature of this socio‐psychological repertoire: children's normative developmental trajectory, the context in which the development takes place, and the ethno‐political socialization that is performed by societal agents. We discuss the interaction between these components in socializing children's socio‐psychological repertoire, and ways to change the course of socialization in the context of intractable conflict towards peace‐oriented socialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the process and outcomes of Voices, a participatory action research project aimed to disrupt divisive ethnic identity narratives among youth living amidst protracted ethnic conflict. The project took place in the Garo Hills region of Northeast India, a site of protracted ethnic conflict. Moving away from crisis-based approaches, this paper explores the conflict transformative potential of participatory action research, specifically its effectiveness in facilitating civic engagement across ethnic lines. The findings indicate that young people's involvement in the project afforded them an opportunity to engage with local community concerns outside of polarized ethnic identity narratives. This involvement facilitated three critical outcomes: engagement in social critique, reconfiguration of a more inclusive researcher identity, and adoption of a language of possibility. Based on these findings, it is argued that opportunities for critical community engagement could interrupt divisive ethnic identity narratives and provide turning points for youth to reimagine inclusive social identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports upon a series of recent developments in New Guinea highlands warfare. Building upon existing literature highlighting the deep influence of modernity within this context, we draw attention to two particular developments yet to be reported in the literature and which appear to be of special significance. Through an analysis of Aiya warfare, Southern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea, we document the direct and increasing involvement of women within warfare, as well as the important role played by mobile phones used by warriors to communicate before and during fighting. These two developments are situated in relation to broader shifts currently reshaping Melanesian sociality, namely, the ambivalent and fraught position of women within an emergent PNG society, as well as the rapid diffusion of mobile phone technology throughout the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current phase of political conflict in Tibet began with pro-independence protests in the late 1980s and saw a significant surge of unrest in 2008. But that unrest was not continuous and for much of the last 25 years was at a low level of intensity. Yet the Chinese authorities have categorised the situation in Tibet as a 'life-and-death struggle' against pro-independence forces throughout this period. This paper notes earlier debates in Chinese history about political strategies for managing borderland peoples, including late imperial era attempts by Chinese officials to forcibly change Tibetan culture that provoked rather than assuaged conflict. It suggests that this happened again in the 1990s when a group of Chinese officials proposed policies that sought directly to change core cultural practices among Tibetans. These policies of selective cultural intervention, unprecedented in the post-Mao era in Tibet, fuelled long-term resentment, leading to the violence and unrest of 2008. The paper argues that these policies were inseparable from the institutional interests of the agency within the Chinese Communist Party, the United Front, which had promoted them, to the extent that its status and influence within the state bureaucracy depended on it preventing them from being challenged or reversed. It made cultural intervention in Tibet seem normative to the Chinese policy elite by invoking three interlocked imaginings about ways of managing borderland peoples - the perception of perpetual war, Han expertise at borderland management, and latent threat within borderland cultures. That these have led to the prolonging of conflict in Tibet for over a quarter-century is a reminder of the importance of considering institutional dynamics in the analysis of ethnic conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The culturally and ecologically diverse Pacific lowlands of Colombia are both the locus and product of key political economic and cultural political conjunctures. Twenty‐five years after they emerged in their current form, Afro‐Colombian ethnic and territorial struggles have become important icons of resistance to development and struggles for social change. But in Colombia as in other parts of the world, the rapid and violent expansion of capitalist accumulation and state power have had devastating consequences for the region's forests and communities—literally and epistemically fragmenting both. Based on long‐term fieldwork, this paper examines the ongoing and contentious co‐production of the Colombian Pacific region amidst the increasingly violent forces of neoliberal governmentality in the 21st century. It shows that the Pacific lowlands are an example of "political forests" in the sense that they are a contested site and product of Afro‐Colombian cultural politics and state territorialisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers in this special issue are the product of a comparative interdisciplinary workshop on ‘Natural Resources and Violent Ethnic Conflicts in the Asia Pacific Region’ held in Honolulu, Hawaii, 18–20 March 2005. The workshop brought together scholars who study conflicts between ethnic groups and those who study conflicts over natural resource claims in order to examine the interplay of resources and ethnicity and to seek answers to the question of why violence occurs in some cases and not in others. Both sets of scholars agreed on some points but disagreed on others. They agreed that ethnic and resource grievances occur not so much out of objective deprivation but out of ‘relative deprivation’ when groups compare their situation with others, to the past, or to future expectations. They both stressed the role of democratic processes in alleviating resource competition and ethnic conflicts – but they did this in different ways. The perspectives and solutions offered by these papers sum to a deeper and more contextualised understanding of the cause of conflict and to mutually reinforcing solutions for resolving them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, several violent conflicts erupted in different parts of its (former) territory. The South Caucasus region has experienced three ethnically rooted violent conflicts, yet other ethnic disputes in the same region remained dormant. Despite an extensive literature on the South Caucasus conflicts, research on those ethnic disputes that could have erupted during the collapse of the Soviet Union is scarce. This article discusses the case of the Armenian populated region of Javakhk (Javakheti) in Georgia. It explores the questions of how, unlike the Abkhazian and South Ossetian movements that were able to effectively mobilize against Georgian calls for sovereignty leading up to the Soviet collapse, Armenian populated territories in Georgia remained relatively quiet. Considering that the primary ethnic minority groups within the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic could each be linked by concerns over demographic shifts, economic discrimination/resource allocation, and political representation, the absence of conflict in Javakhk, as well as in Kvemo Kartli, is somewhat surprising. Based on existing theories of nationalism and ethnic conflicts and field interviews with the leaders of the popular movements in Javakhk, the paper examines the underlying reasons for the lack of conflict there. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates electoral outcomes produced by the two-round majority system in ethnically divided societies. Earlier studies, focused mainly on the Southern American states, have revealed that in ethnically mixed environments, competitors with radical positions on ethnic issues perform particularly well. This paper extends this idea to municipal elections in Serbia, showing how radical majority nationalist parties exhibit particularly strong performances in ethnically mixed municipalities. While this effect is also apparent under proportional representation, we argue that it is much stronger when a two-round majority vote system is employed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The post-colonial state is held to be a weak state whose ease of capture reduces its capacity to suppress violence. The focus on the state, however, risks neglecting the ways in which violence is deployed to render the state weak in popular perception. This perception in turn legitimates claims for a foundational shift in the basis of power. In this paper, the concept of “repertoire” as first used by Charles Tilly, is used to analyze continuities and discontinuities in the development of the “ethnic riot” in urban, western India. As an “extreme” case in which riots have shown considerable durability over time, it highlights a key point, namely, that riots can form part of a strategy of power by simultaneously projecting themselves as popular insurrection and constructing a perception of the state as weak. The persistence of this repertoire, it is further argued, derives from the historical specificities of colonial state formation which promoted an ethnically imagined and hierarchized polity, as well as political struggles which weakened alternative forms of community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Ghana historical and modern legal and political circumstances have contributed to violent conflicts being structured around chiefs and tradition. Horizontal inequalities and local rivalries provide material for conflict narratives which in turn interact with national party politics, giving rise to the threat of inter and intra-ethnic violence being triggered by contentious events. By analysing the background to the series of inter-ethnic conflicts in the Northern Region which culminated in the 1994–1995 ‘Guinea Fowl War’ this paper examines how traditional and modern politics interact in Ghana and how they generate the categories and dynamics that fuel conflict. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a political ecology perspective to examine relationships between violence and territory in West Kalimantan, focusing on the violent incidents of 1996–1997 and 1967–1968. Besides a regional account, the paper examines some of the ways residents of one village were drawn into and chose to participate in violence. The author concludes that while regional analyses can identify broad patterns, local analyses enable a greater understanding of both variation and the processes by which ethnic categories are constructed through violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although India's Jharkhand movement resists classification as either an ethnic or an environmental movement, it has, at different times, mobilised clear elements of both with frequently violent outcomes. This paper examines the movement from a political ecology perspective and focuses on violence arising from natural resource-related grievances, notably land alienation, forest policy and employment from Jharkhand's mines. Drawing from political ecology's emphasis on the need to examine conflict from a range of different spatial scales, the paper emphasises the importance of a micro-political ecology approach for understanding how locally based conflicts over natural resources can harden into more established grievances that can be mobilised politically as part of a wider and potentially violent protest movement. It is also suggested that micro-political ecology approaches can assist participatory resource management initiatives in ameliorating local conflicts over access to resources, thus helping to prevent them from escalating into more widespread violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internal conflicts at the local and national levels in several South Pacific countries have revealed the fragility of national unity and the difficulties nations face in governing and managing their own economic development. In Papua New Guinea, the focus of this paper, an uncertain economic future for many rural and urban communities, and rising inequalities in income opportunities and access to resources, have coincided with greater intolerance of migrants at sites of high in-migration by customary landowners and provincial and local authorities. This paper draws on fieldwork undertaken in the major oil palm growing regions of Papua New Guinea where migrants from densely populated regions of the country have settled on state land alienated from customary landowners. We examine how struggles over land, resource control and development are polarising migrant and landowner identities resulting in increasing tensions and episodic communal violence. A settler identity is emerging based on a narrative of nation building and national development, while an ethno-regional identity amongst customary landowners is undermining the citizen rights of migrants and challenging the role and authority of the state in land matters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Violently divided cities are incubators of ethnic conflicts. Under the auspices of postwar reconstruction, these cities are supposedly disciplined into peace through the regeneration of the city centre, including privatization, commercial adaptation and gentrification strategies. Such dynamics render city centre space amnesiac, with no reference to the history of sectarian violence, and exclusivist by limiting public access. Rather than foster peacebuilding, city centre regeneration exposes the dangerous weakness of the neoliberal peace built on accommodating ethnic and socioeconomic divisions. This paper connects Lefebvre's right-to-the-city to non-sectarian social movements' struggle to forge participatory democracy in Beirut's city centre. A key aspect of these movements' activities is to reprogramme memory-cosmopolitan and inclusivist-into the city centre, a project supporting peacebuilding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on conflict claims that there has been a resurgence of ethnic conflict in the era of globalisation. This paper attempts to investigate how local conflict may be influenced by processes of globalisation. The paper argues that in order to understand how globalisation may be implicated in local violent events, it is essential to develop a nuanced understanding of the complexities of global-local interaction in places. This paper also hopes to contribute to the analytical potency of identity-oriented explanations of conflict by explicating how identity construction has an overt spatial dimension - it is simultaneously place based and global, and how this global-local identity construction simultaneously produces socioeconomic and socio-cultural strategies of 'othering' that define the complexion of contemporary conflicts. Using interviews from a case study of Hindu-Muslim conflict which happened in 2002 in Ahmedabad city, India, this paper explicates how locally embedded global narratives socioeconomically and socio-culturally produce the 'other.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of facilitated, technology-supported efforts to resolve complex problems, we recognize the critical role that visual representations can play in both the content and process of collaboration. How these representations are wielded by facilitators and interpreted by participants determines whether they help resolve conflicts or close down conversations. We identify three key attributes of scripted problem-solving facilitation, as well as three key attributes of visual representations that function as boundary objects, to gain insights into pivotal experiences when group problem-solving efforts turned from collaboration to conflict and vice versa. We draw on three vignettes from facilitated group problem solving to illustrate how these attributes can be deployed to move conflict-mired conversations into collaborative discussions. This paper contributes to collaborative problem solving by using the formal sociological theory of boundary objects to offer a deeper, richer understanding of successes and shortcomings of visual representations as drivers of conflict resolution in model-building approaches. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the observation that Brazilian history has led to the development of a very distinct system of race relations, this paper focuses on the (re)creation of ethnic divisions in a new city, Palmas, the capital of the Brazilian state Tocantins. Because the city was only founded in 1990, internal migration has heavily influenced the composition of the city's population. The research shows that residential proximity and interaction between whites and non-whites is largely limited to the poor neighbourhoods of the city. Subtle racism continues to exist, deriving from a way of thinking that naturalises the racial hierarchy. The absence of clearly defined racial categories and the centrality of miscegenation to the Brazilian identity complicate the further dismantling of this racist culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The many critical approaches to an ‘ethnicity framework’ have fallen short of a very possible conclusion—that the language of ethnicity provides, for the most part, a poor paradigm with which to work. In the present paper we seek not only to re-state some key weaknesses of this paradigm but also to suggest that these weaknesses are more general in an over-ethnicised sociology. There are numerous critiques of particular models or elements of ethnicity thinking, including critiques of primordialist approaches (Fenton 2003), of multiculturalism ( Barry 2000 ), and of the over-objectification of groups (Brubaker 2004; see also Jenkins 2008). The major critiques constitute a strong case against ‘thinking with ethnicity’; the broader weaknesses are more general in contemporary ‘identitarian’ sociology. From this position we turn to the question of offering an alternative approach in a sociology which emphasizes agency, and is grounded in an analysis of actors in material situations. This is allied to the concept of ideational resources, social categories and identities upon which actors draw, and a middle-range view of causality and tendency in social change. Ideas of ancestral belonging are among those ideational resources, and these ideas and assumptions are played out in a context of material and political change. The subject of study is not ethnicity, but power, resources, social relations and institutions (which may and may not be) informed by cultural identities and ideas of ancestry. The strategy of the paper will be first to re-state the deficiencies of ‘ethnicity thinking’ and second to offer an alternative framework for thinking about social action and social structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Temporal and spatial information on land use/cover is a prerequisite for effective planning decisions in the context of social and economic development. Satellite remote sensing data have become increasingly important in the study of land use/cover changes. This paper uses multitemporal satellite data to measure and spatially characterize land use/cover changes in the Jaffna Peninsula, northern Sri Lanka over the two decades from 1984 to early 2004 in terms of potential drivers. Over this period, the Jaffna Peninsula has been impacted severely by armed conflict between the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. A postclassification method is used to compare land use/cover classes from satellite images using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to analyze the spatial pattern of land use/cover changes over the study period. Results indicate that the land use/cover pattern has been very dynamic since early the 1980s, showing a remarkable decrease in agricultural land use and concomitant increase in non-agricultural land uses. The ethnic conflict and its consequences, particularly large-scale population migrations, have been the main driving forces for such land use/cover changes in the Jaffna Peninsula. The results of this study are not only important in aiding efforts to reconstruct this area after decades of physical and socioeconomic devastation, but should also prompt similarly urgent studies in other inaccessible war-torn areas of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On many measures of ethno-linguistic diversity, Papua New Guinea is the most fragmented society in the world. I argue that the macro-level political effect of this diversity has been to reduce, rather than increase, the impact of ethnic conflict on the state. Outside the Bougainville conflict, and (to a lesser extent) the recent upsurge of violence in the Southern Highlands, ethnic conflicts in Papua New Guinea have not presented a threat to national government. In contrast to most other ethnically diverse societies, the most consequential impacts of ethnic conflict in Papua New Guinea are at the local level. This paper therefore examines the disparate impacts of local- and national-level forms of ethnic conflict in Papua New Guinea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes 2 studies that evaluated a new instrument, the Perceived Ethnic Dis- crimination Questionnaire-Community Version (PEDQ-CV). The PEDQ-CV can be used across ethnic groups to assess perceived racism or ethnic discrimination. The scales measure several subdimensions of racism, permitting the examination of different forms of this race-related stressor. The first study evaluated the psychometric properties of the PEDQ-CV in a large sample of community-dwelling adults. The second evaluated psychometric properties of a brief version of the PEDQ-CV, developed for research protocols requiring a shorter administration time. Tests were made of reliability and several forms of construct validity. Both versions of the PEDQ-CV have good reliability and construct validity. The PEDQ-CV can facilitate the development of an integrative body of knowledge across different ethnic groups regarding the existence, determinants, and consequences of discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are roughly 70 secessionist movements around the world, and all of them advance arguments for why they deserve independence. These include restorative rights, remedial rights, primary rights, a history of conflict and functionality‐based arguments. However, no one has conducted a comprehensive analysis to see how these arguments (or grievances) match reality. That is, are secessionists making the right arguments given their context? To answer this question, we utilise a data set of potential secessionist grievances to determine what normative arguments each secessionist movement ought to make given their setting. We conduct a content analysis of the normative appeals/grievances that have actually been made by specific secessionist movements since 2000. We then compare the predicted grievances against the actual grievances and summarise the patterns. The results matched our predictions where restorative rights, remedial rights and functionality‐based arguments are concerned. Our analysis returned a positive and statistically significant relationship. However, we found no evidence that those making conflict‐related arguments were more likely to exist in conflict settings. Interestingly, the findings for primary rights were the opposite of our expectations; it is the secessionists with the most political voice, not the least, that are the keenest to stress primary rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conflicts between the Qimant community – an intra‐state minority ethnic group endogenous to Amhara state in the Ethiopian federation – and the state's special police forces have caused hundreds of deaths and the internal displacement of close to 50,000 people. Linked to these conflicts are the Qimants' demands for recognition as a distinct ethnic community and the establishment of local government in the territories they inhabit; demands which have not received a satisfactory response from the federal or Amhara state government and which officials view with disdain. The situation raises several questions. Do the federal and regional‐state constitutions provide the necessary framework for accommodating intra‐state ethnic minorities such as the Qimant? If they do, why have the two levels of government failed to resolve the Qimant issue peacefully? What institutional mechanisms could they have used to satisfy the demands of the Qimant community? This article seeks to answer these and related questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts of studies discussed within the issue including "Not Thinking Ethnicity: A Critique of the Ethnicity Paradigm in an Over-Ethnicised Sociology," by Bob Carter and Steve Fenton, "Intersubjectivity: Towards a Dialogical Analysis," by Alex Gillespie and Flora Cornish and "Points of View, Social Positioning and Intercultural Relations," by Gordon Sammut and George Gaskell.

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We use detailed information on the location of agricultural and mining production to approximate international trade for different ethnic groups in order to study its impact on ethnic conflicts in Africa between 1993 and 2010. The goal is to go beyond the income effects of trade to study the residual effects of globalization on conflicts. We find that once we control for income but also for a wide variety of different factors in conflicts (using political variables and fixed effects), the international trade by ethnic groups has a pacific impact on conflicts. While this peaceful impact of trade is mainly found in the trade in agricultural products, it does not have a significant impact on the international trade in mining products. Finally, we propose an original two‐step analysis showing that exports significantly reduce conflicts by affecting time‐varying national characteristics. We interpret this result as an indication that globalization in Africa has participated in the formation of new national identities with peaceful effects between ethnic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do stances on public policies aimed at ethnic conflict resolution affect intergroup trust? Building on theories of prosociality, social identity, and intergroup bias, we expect redistributive policy preferences meant to resolve ethnic conflict to replace ethnicity as the main barrier to intergroup trust because their zero‐sum nature raises intergroup threat. We test our expectations in Chile's ongoing indigenous/nonindigenous conflict using behavioral trust games embedded in an online nationally representative quota survey (n = 1105). Results align with our expectation. Namely, a lack of shared ethnic identity between nonindigenous Chileans and indigenous Mapuche does not lower intergroup trust. However, shared stances on a policy that would raise taxes to spur development in indigenous communities do increase intergroup trust discrimination. We probe the psychological mechanism—meaningful policy‐based group identities—by testing whether trustor indigenous identification and trustor political ideology moderate the effect of trustee policy stances on intergroup trust. Results are consistent with our assumption that shared policy stances can, indeed, form the basis of a meaningful social identity. Hence the very policies meant to end intergroup conflict could potentially perpetuate or redirect it to institutional channels of representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1990s, Canadian historian Peter Hart claimed tens of thousands of native southern Irish Protestants experienced something akin to "ethnic cleansing" at the hands of the IRA in the early 1920s. Hart's research revised the "Irish nationalist revolution" (ca. 1917–1923) as an essentially ethnic conflict, and this article re‐examines his evidence and methodology. Exaggerating the number of forced migrations, Hart's analysis rests on erroneous statistical proofs which he supported with a gross evidence selection bias. To better understand Hart's revision, his work is compared with Michael A. Bellesiles' Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (2000), which also exhibited similar but also very different statistical errors. A central argument in this article is that erroneous statistical proofs are best understood as social constructs, where they articulate the prejudices of their host academies. Greater awareness of this problem is needed if it is to be avoided in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social psychological research on collective victimhood has focused on just a few ways in which people think about the ingroup's victimization that imply certain assumptions and limit our understanding of collective victim beliefs. Additionally, different historical and sociopolitical contexts may make different collective victim beliefs relevant. This article examines collective victim beliefs expressed in open‐ended survey responses among six different groups: Northern Irish participants, Greek Cypriots, Hungarians, Poles, Jewish Americans, and Armenian Americans (N = 638). Qualitative content analysis revealed five broader categories with several collective victim beliefs each. General appraisals of the ingroup's collective victimization entailed centrality of ingroup victimization versus defocusing victimhood. More specific appraisals included context‐specific characteristics of the ingroup's victimization, perceptions of the perpetrator group (attributions of blame), and perceptions of other victim groups (comparative victim beliefs, including rejecting comparisons). The findings extend and challenge commonly studied collective victim beliefs, and propose novel theoretical directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Kosovo War (1998–1999) that played out between ethnic Albanians and Serbs in the former Yugoslavia is often portrayed as an ethnic conflict because it involved different ethnic groups in confrontation with each other. This characteristic presupposes that ethnicity played an important role in the Kosovo conflict, but is that actually the case? To explore this question, the experience of Albanians in Kosovo is compared with that of Hungarians in Vojvodina. The latter formed the second largest minority in Serbia, behind Albanians, and their institutional and legal position greatly paralleled that of Kosovar Albanians. Despite this, Hungarians experienced far less conflict with the Serbian majority than did their Albanian counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the Meaning of Work (MOW) among 1201 Jews and 286 Arabs (or Palestinians that have Israeli citizenship), who are working in the Israeli labour market. It is the first time that the MOW among Israeli Arabs is examined and compared to the MOW among Jews. Between these two ethnic groups who have different cultures, there is alienation, mistrust, and social tension that stems mainly from the escalating ethnic conflict (the regional Israeli-Arab/Palestinian conflict). The findings reveal significant differences in most of the core dimensions of the MOW. The findings can be explained by the high degree of segregation, by cultural differences, by the employment discrimination and above all by the Israeli-Arab/Palestinian conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Will frequent interethnic personal contacts help Western countries overcome the strains associated with migration-based ethnic diversity? To address this problem, the authors of this article studied a setting - high school - that 'forces' individuals to have personal contacts. It is argued that schools are social laboratories from which one can learn about the likely effects of a less-segregated society. Moreover, this study concerns a European national setting (Sweden), rather than the very special American case. The article also focuses on three interrelated but distinct aspects of democratic citizenship: civic knowledge, institutional trust and interethnic tolerance. To estimate the contextual effects of ethnic diversity, multilevel modeling is used to analyse the 1999/2000 CIVED dataset, which covers 3,000 high school students nested within 94 schools. The authors conclude that interethnic contacts do not have the positive effects assumed in much of the literature, but their findings are less pessimistic than many recent reports of the deteriorating fundamentals of social life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite growing awareness of the limitations of group-level analyses in ethnic studies, research on ethnic conflict has paid virtually no systematic attention to variation at the individual or micro level. Addressing that gap, the present paper draws upon data from interviews conducted with members of two broadly-defined categories recently arrived in the Republic of Ireland, Muslims and Nigerians. Results indicate that while members of both immigrant categories experience a good deal of ethnic conflict or hostility, such conflict is rarely collective and invariably varies across individuals. The research data are consistent with Donald Black's theory of moralism. Black's theory, based on his theoretical system known as pure sociology, predicts that ethnic hostility increases with the social inferiority and cultural distance of the immigrant, and that higher status immigrants are more assertive in responding to hostility, though they experience less of it (the status paradox). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Systems scientists can play an important role in analyzing ethnic tensions and designing innovative approaches to sustaining peaceful relationships between groups with a history of inter-ethnic violence. A social systems approach was applied in a feasibility study sponsored by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The purpose of the humanitarian project was to improve ethnic relations and collaboration between Greek and Turkish Cypriots in Cyprus, and to determine the feasibility of establishing a bicommunal mental health unit. The project consultants conducted a mental health needs assessment of both communities and analyzed information from multiple sources and different perspectives. A follow-up workshop with a bicommunal team was held in the USA to facilitate development of the mental health unit. The study provided useful knowledge on systems-oriented action research to improve ethnic relations in a complex social and political environment. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides evidence that rainfall shocks affect conflict through their effect on agricultural production and that irrigation infrastructure can mitigate this effect. Using data from Indonesia, we document that low rainfall during the agricultural season decreases agricultural production and increases civil conflict. We then show that the rainfall‐conflict link is attenuated by the presence of irrigation infrastructure in a district. This attenuating effect is specific to irrigation infrastructure; we find no evidence for a similar effect of hydropower dams. Our results are stronger for small‐scale conflicts over natural resources and popular justice than for conflicts over ethnic identity or ethnic separatism. These results are robust to controlling for interactions between rainfall and a wide range of socio‐economic and geographic district characteristics. We conclude that adaptive policies that mitigate the negative effects of weather shocks on agriculture may also prevent conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Power‐sharing is a leading institutional strategy for the management of ethnic conflict. Yet its performance is uneven. It often delivers a peace dividend: stopping violence, avoiding minority exclusion, and reducing group‐based insecurity. Its decision‐making efficiency and governance record, however, have weaker evaluations. We conceptualize 'the power‐sharing lifecycle' to better understand the reasons for this uneven record. Exploring power‐sharing performance through a lifecycle lens helps illuminate the experiences of – and potential for – power‐sharing in the post‐uprisings Arab world and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this special feature is to reflect theoretically and normatively on consociational power‐sharing, take stock of its empirical record in Lebanon and Iraq, and interrogate its potential utility for other postwar states and societies in the Arab World following the popular uprisings. Allison McCulloch and Joanne McEvoy open the collection by deploying the 'lifecycle' heuristic to explain consociationalism's mixed record as an institutional strategy to manage ethnic or sectarian conflict in different contexts. This process‐oriented approach allows them to shift the consociational debate towards greater sensitivity to contexts: how macro‐institutional types such as liberal and corporate consociation interact with formal and informal micro‐institutional rules in determining the success or failure of consociational power‐sharing arrangements. Paul Dixon and Ibrahim Halawi follow with critical evaluations of consociationalism's embedded violence against alternative political economic choices. Dixon's radical critique is chiefly aimed at how consociationalism precludes the emergence of alternative identities, political choices, and socioeconomic struggles. Halawi magnifies this critique and considers elite consociational arrangements in the Arab World to be exclusionary and counter‐revolutionary. The contributions by John Nagle and Toby Dodge converge on how the institutional architecture of consociational power‐sharing as observed in Lebanon and Iraq – whether through formal or informal rules, corporate or liberal arrangements – creates a host of distortions that ossify identities, shape modes of political mobilization, and eviscerate state institutions by turning them into clientelist platforms. Finally, Steven Heydemann and Simon Mabon explore prospects for consociational power‐sharing in Syria and Bahrain, respectively, with implications for postwar Libya and perhaps Yemen. Although in both cases prospects for power‐sharing may appear remote, both authors suggest that the reality is far more complex, and that ultimately some kind of consociational power‐sharing may prove necessary to secure postwar reconstruction and reintegration into the international community in Syria, and genuine representation and peace in Bahrain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We test the longstanding hypothesis that ethnic groups organized around "segmentary lineages" are more prone to conflict. Ethnographic accounts suggest that in such societies, which are characterized by strong allegiances to distant relatives, individuals are obligated to come to the aid of fellow lineage members when they become involved in conflicts. As a consequence, small disagreements often escalate into larger‐scale conflicts involving many individuals. We test for a link between segmentary lineage organization and conflict across ethnic groups in sub‐Saharan Africa. Using a number of estimation strategies, including a regression discontinuity design at ethnic boundaries, we find that segmentary lineage societies experience more conflicts, and particularly ones that are retaliatory, long in duration, and large in scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use Hammond and Axelrod's (Hammond, R. A. & Axelrod, R. (2006). The evolution of ethnocentrism. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 50, 6: 926–936) agent‐based model of ethnocentrism to show how people's willingness to cooperate with outsiders is affected by mutually beneficial exchange. In environments where one person gains at the expense of others ("charity economies"), we find discrimination to be a dominant behavior. However, non‐discrimination becomes the dominant behavior when an environment contains productive investment and mutually beneficial exchange ("investment economies"). These results point to market‐improving policy prescriptions to reduce racial/ethnic tension and the conflict that arise from it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Violent conflicts have often been observed to generate social environments in which human rights violations are more easily tolerated and legitimized. However, recent research has documented cases in which communities exposed to violence react with increased condemnations of human rights violations. In this article, we focus on the distinction between generalized and particularized violence. Our findings show that, in the postwar ex‐Yugoslavia context, when local communities have been exposed to violence that was generalized across different ethno‐national groups, they strongly condemn human rights violations. Multilevel structural equation models show that the relationship between generalized victimization and the condemnation of human rights violations is mediated by a collective sense of anomie. The processes that move from collective exposure to violence to the collective reaffirmation of human rights are more likely to unfold in communities where violence transcended group boundaries than in communities where particular groups were disproportionately affected by the violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]