Introduction: Comparative Perspectives on Ethnicity and Ethnic Conflicts

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Twenty years ago I had the privilege of being the guest editor for a special issue of The international Journal of Comparative Sociology, devoted to 'The Global Crisis: Sociological Analyses and Responses' (1984, Volume 25, Nos. 1-2). In retrospect, although the East-West confrontation is no longer present, several problems noted in the issue are still very much with us, foremost among these being, in a different form perhaps, North-South relations. Thus, I noted at the time: The reflects a in the hegemony of the formal and substantive aspects of the post war pax americana [America's] paramount remedy to social ills seems to be a myopic but massive military response, in Central America as in the Middle East as in Southeast Asia. (Tiryakian 1984: 125-27) On the whole, there is much in that issue that remains relevant for a macroscopic view of our situation in this still formative period of the new century. However, two decades later, there are new observations to be made, new themes that have been raised that should be analyzed on a comparative basis, and new multidisciplinary approaches to be proposed. Our of advanced modernity is prone to serious risks; risks that often are unforeseen consequences of purposive action in one sector which trigger negative reaction in another sector. The risks are environmental (Beck 1999), economic (such as the rogue trader in distant Singapore whose speculative trading brought the collapse in 1995 of an old British banking institution, Baring Bank), and political. Regarding the political risks, for example, twenty years ago American foreign policy found it expedient to arm Hussein's Iraq in its war against Iran and to provide training to the Taliban in Afghanistan in their struggle against dominance. Both turned out to be very bad investments for the United States. Twenty years ago the concept of globalization was not current, but despite the then too facile polarization of the into two superpowers--the Free world and the Soviet world--there was growing recognition of increasing interdependence and, consequently, of the growing vulnerability (risk) of the to events in one region having significant ramifications elsewhere. The initial hardline of the Reagan administration toward the evil empire and the deployment of missiles in Germany increased the threat of a conflict across national and even regional borders. And them almost miraculously for a secular age, new leadership in the seeking to reform outdated economic structures instead led unwittingly to the astonishing implosion of a total societal system that had been seen at the beginning of the decade as a monolith of hierarchical power. The global crisis had passed, at least in part. But reemerged in the decade of the 1990s, in several forms. AIDS, unknown at the start of the 1980s, has become one of the great scourges of human medical history and is still raging in sub-Sahara Africa. It has attracted, of course, enormous attention and vast resources have been spent in seeking remedies, vaccines, and informed scientific knowledge to neutralize the virus. Another sort of virus, which may have been dormant in premodern times, seems to have come out of the night soil in many parts of the with a vengeance in the last century. Although it has many strains, the virus in question is manifest in severe protracted conflicts and violence between racial and ethnic groups that traditionally live or have lived within a given territory, even in situations where the two groups were not strictly exogamous. The most virulent form of the virus took the form of genocide, with the most notorious examples being the genocide of Armenians in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire and the genocide of Jews in the dying days of the Third Reich. Although the world's democracies could join the chorus of those demanding 'never again! …