Explaining Post-Soviet Ethnic Conflicts: Using Regime Type to Discern the Impact and Relative Importance of Objective Antecedents

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The collapse of the Soviet Union unleashed a number of violent, usually secessionist ethnic conflicts. These conflicts were typically intensified (or “escalated”) by foreign intervention. Although there is a great deal of consensus about the fundamental forces driving these conflicts and their escalation, there remain considerable theoretical differences about how to understand these factors and assess their relative importance. These differences mirror debates in the broader literature on national identity and its consequences. This article seeks to clarify these debates by elucidating some theoretical distinctions among the factors taken to contribute to the outbreak and escalation of violent ethnic conflicts. These distinctions are then applied to post-Soviet conflicts in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and Tajikistan. The case studies bear out the relevance of the theoretical distinctions, but also reveal the difficulty of applying them unambiguously in any given case. These examples form the basis for some concluding suggestions. These suggestions aim to maximize the clarity with which theoretically distinct causal factors are empirically distinguished for purposes of testing hypotheses.