This article presents a critique of how the dominant paradigms in international relations (IR)-neo-realism, neo-liberalism and systemic constructivism-approach and explain ethnic conflict. It deconstructs one of the most prominent explanatory frameworks that mainstream IR has contributed to the analysis of the internationalization of ethnic conflicts, the ethnic alliance model, and demonstrates theoretically and empirically, by way of a case study of the Kurdistan Workers' Party sanctuary in Iraqi Kurdistan, the epistemological and ontological deficiencies of this approach. Furthermore, by dissecting the inherent 'groupism' of this model and related frameworks, it problematizes how scholars as co-protagonists of ethnic conflicts substantialize and reify the ethnicized discourse and politics of ethnic division, and thus contribute to the construction of a normativist and essentialist 'reality' of the conflicts that they set out to describe.
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