Identity-Based Conflict: Rethinking Security in a Post–Cold War World

Abstract

Bosnia. Sri Lanka. Rwanda. Northern Ireland. In the late twentieth century, and particularly in the nascent post-Cold War era, places have become metaphors for violent communal'1 or conflict. As Donald Horowitz has observed, such conflicts have fought and bled and burned [their] way into public and scholarly con sciousness. Yet, at the same time, we find ourselves ill equipped intellec tually and institutionally to face the complex challenges posed by identity based violence in a new, and very different, world. While the collapse of the Communist bloc and accelerating globalization have fundamentally al tered the structure of geopolitics, our conceptual frameworks and menu of policy prescriptions are indelibly infused with a Cold War political logic. This paper develops a twofold argument. First, the search for an ef fective response to identity-based conflicts requires more than the current mainstream (read: realist) efforts to fit them into the existing approaches to security. Such conflicts push us to rethink not only the way we deal with security challenges but the way we define and understand security is sues, as well. Correspondingly, identity-based conflicts push us to rethink our understanding of collective identity?its formation, mobilization, politicization and, most importantly, its connection to violent conflict. Through the process of rethinking security and identity, we argue that there is a need both to build on and to go beyond well-traveled realist paths. While we recognize that a sophisticated version of realism offers some insight into the dynamics of identity-based conflict, we argue that there is a need to go further in our thinking about, and our responses to, such conflict because even in this version, identity is still cast as being fixed, coherent, and self-contained. Thus, the second part of our argument is that a relational, historical, and dynamic understanding of identity is crucial not only for coming to terms with the connections between security and (ethnic) identity but also for constructing effective strategies for the management or resolution of conflict.1 This argument is developed in four main sections. In the first two sec tions, we deal theoretically with the questions of security and identity. In