Ethnic conflict in the world today

Abstract

A somber reality and disillusionment of our epoch, which emerged from the ashes of the Second World War, is that although there have been successes in the push toward development and modernization, eradication of disease and the spread of literacy, economic and political development programs have generated and stimulated, whether by collusion or in reaction, in good faith and poor anticipation, massive civil war and gruesome interracial and inter-ethnic bloodshed. The same epoch has witnessed the rise of repressive authoritarianism in both military and democratic guises, fortified by Western weaponry, and inflamed by populist slogans and fundamentalist doctrines, and assisted by a flagrant manipulation of mass media which have vastly expanded their reach. The optimism of sociologists, political scientists and anthropologists who naively foretold the impending onset of the integrative revolution and inevitable decline of primordial loyalties such as kinship, caste and ethnicity in third world countries, has by now waned and dimmed with disenchantment. The introduction of constitutions and democratic institutions, enshrining human rights, universal franchise, the party system, elected legislature, majority rule and so on, has often resulted in strange malformations that are far removed from the goals of liberty, justice, tolerance, and freedom that were the ideological supports of Western European and North American liberal-democratic syntheses. Something has gone gravely awry with the center-periphery relations throughout the world, and a manifestation of this malaise is the occurrence of widespread ethnic conflict accompanied in many instances by collective violence amongst people who are not aliens but enemies intimately known. My book, Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy (1986), attempted to grapple with this problem in my own country. In this essay I hope to address some general issues.' Ethnic identity above all is a collective identity: we are self-proclaimed Sinhalese, Malays, Ibos, Thais and so on. It is a self-conscious and vocalized identity that substantializes and naturalizes one or more attributes-the usual ones being skin color, language, religion, territorial occupation-and attaches them to collectivities as their innate possession and their mythohistorical legacy. The central components in this description of identity are ideas of inheritance, ancestry and descent, place or territory of origin, and the sharing of kinship, any one or combination of which may be invoked as a claim according to context and calculation of advantages. These ethnic collectivities are believed to be bounded and to be self-producing and enduring through time. Although the actors themselves, invoking these claims, speak as if ethnic boundaries are clear-cut and defined for all time, and think of ethnic collectivities as self-reproducing bounded groups, it is also clear that from a dynamic and processual perspective there are many precedents for passing and the change of identity, for incorporations and assimilations of new