Abstract
The purpose of this article has been to explore why ethnic conflicts tend to break out in all ethnically divided societies. The principal explanation was traced to the evolved disposition for ethnic nepotism shared by all human populations. Ethnic nepotism was measured roughly by the degree of ethnic heterogeneity of the populations. It was correlated with the scale of ethnic conflicts in the group of 187 countries. The results of correlation analysis indicate that ethnic heterogeneity explains 55% of the variation in the scale of ethnic conflicts, and the results of regression analysis disclose that the same relationship more or less applies to all 187 countries. These results led to the conclusion that ethnic nepotism is the common cross-cultural background factor which supports the persistence of ethnic conflicts in the world as long as there are ethnically divided societies.
Highlights
The purpose of this article is to explore why some ethnic conflicts tend to break out in all ethnically divided societies, in some of them, but virtually in all of them, the extent and intensity of conflicts may vary significantly
I assume that all populations share cross-culturally the same disposition to ethnic nepotism, which makes it justified to hypothesize that the more deeply a population is ethnically divided, the more interest conflicts become canalized along ethnic lines see (Vanhanen, 2012: pp. 18-26)
My intention is to test this hypothesis by empirical evidence on the degree of ethnic heterogeneity and ethnic conflicts and to see whether some alternative explanatory factors are able to explain as much or more of the extent of ethnic conflicts than ethnic heterogeneity
Summary
The purpose of this article is to explore why some ethnic conflicts tend to break out in all ethnically divided societies, in some of them, but virtually in all of them, the extent and intensity of conflicts may vary significantly. The smallest countries, whose population was less than 100,000 inhabitants in 2010, are excluded from the sample of countries for the reason that it may be more difficult to find reliable data on ethnic cleavages and conflicts from mini states than that from bigger countries. This is not my first study of ethnic conflicts. The first article on this subject “Politics of Ethnic Nepotism in India” was published in a book Ethnicity and Political Development in South Asia, edited by Diethelm Weidemann, New Delhi. In this article I continue the same line of argumentation, but the number of countries is larger than that in any of my previous studies of ethnic conflicts and data are partly new and more recent ones
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