The Evolution of Protracted Ethnic Conflict: Group Dominance and Political Underdevelopment in Northern Ireland and Lebanon

Abstract

Political scientists have long recognized that conflict and the efforts to resolve it are at the heart of politics, and much ink has been spilled in attempts to explain it. In the literature of comparative politics, the reemergence of ethnonationalism in the last twenty years has raised particular questions about the sources of ethnically based conflict. Even more recently, international relations scholars have asked why conflicts' are so much more difficult to resolve than the more manageable ethnic divisions addressed by consociational theorists. Protracted conflicts take a very different form from their milder cousins. They are bloody (the violence often involving paramilitary organizations); they signal the loss of authority and eventual breakdown of governing institutions; and they trigger a fragmentation of public opinion, the growth of radical counterelites, and the evolution of a centrifugal political system. Moreover, protracted conflicts tend to be intractable, since resolving them requires warring ethnic groups to make concessions they can not contemplate while under threat.