Ethnic Violence

Abstract

This chapter discusses the economic basis of ethnic hatred and violence. Different nations and different historical periods have different economic issues at stake, and the form of ethnic conflicts is very local specific. Some of the most common forms include hostility to a middle-class minority in a peripheral agrarian nation, which sociologists call a middleman minority; cheap labor minorities in industrial societies, which refers to the African American situation in the present-day United States; and anti-immigration hostilities in industrial societies. Another form is conflict over the control of a corrupt state. Hausa–Yoruba–Ibo conflicts in Nigeria were almost certainly centered on control of the state and control of the petroleum revenues pertaining to the Nigerian state. Finally, there is justification for land seizure. One of the most long-term and enduring conflicts has been between peoples of European extraction and indigenous people in the rest of the world. Nearly all of those conflicts were about land use.