The Roots of Intense Ethnic Conflict may not in fact be Ethnic: Categories, Communities and Path Dependence

Abstract

This article criticizes two theoretical strategies of approach to ethnicity and ethnic conflict and proposes an alternative. One strategy emphasizes the intense solidarity generated by the ethnic or ethno-national bond and the resistance to change of the communities thus formed; it explains these phenomena in terms of the deep feeling surrounding the quasi-kin sense of ethnicity. The other strategy emphasizes the contingency, situatedness, variability, even superficiality of ethnic feeling, and shows how the emergent and unstable linkages which constitute ethnic 'groups' are formed from an interplay of ethnic categories and ethnic entrepreneurs within a given institutional and legal context. We adopt an alternative theoretical strategy, seeing ethnicity as a product of a multiplicity of determinants rather than a simple essence, and locating it as one factor among many, which, depending on the tightness or looseness of their interlinkages and mutual feedback mechanisms, may form a path dependent self-reproductive system generating communal opposition and ethnic conflict.

Ethnicity and Religion: Redefining the Research Agenda

“…First, and conceptually, to take such an indiscriminate approach to ethnicity is to focus on boundaries rather than on the meaning and organisation of those boundaries (religious, or racial, or narrowly ethnic). This dissociation of boundary from content is, we believe, a wrong turn in the social sciences (Cornell, 1996;Ruane and Todd, 2004;Jenkins 2008). Symbolic boundaries and symbolic content, social boundaries and the intricacies of institutional organisation, are intrinsically interrelated (Jenkins, 2008, pp.…”

History, Structure and Action in the Settlement of Complex Conflicts: The Northern Ireland Case

“…They provide a framework for explanation of the generation and regeneration of conflict, the identification of possibilities for and constraints on settlement, and the understanding of what any particular settlement did or did not change. Historically embedded structural relations and configurations lock in oppositions of 'ethnic' interest and limit political possibilities of change (Ruane and Todd, 2004). Whether these configurations should be upheld or changed is itself a source of conflict, and action to change them -whether in the form of social movements, violence or negotiation -itself produces new cycles of conflict and rolling processes of settlement (Darby and MacGinty, 2008: 1).…”

Does being Protestant matter? Protestants, minorities and the re-making of ethno-religious identity after the Good Friday Agreement

“…51-2). The prediction that radical social and political restructuring would stimulate change in symbolic and social boundaries (Ruane and Todd, 1996) is borne out by the intensity of renegotiation of ethnic and religious boundaries evidenced above. Our respondents themselves mentioned the following changes as impelling their rethinking: the political restrictions and demographic changes which render problematic the assumptions and values of the old Protestant world ; the equality ethos that relativises older unionist certainties, thrusts republicans into every public body and requires Protestants to find a new modus vivendi with them ; the new cross-community and cross-border networks and opportunities (in which a section of our respondents were involved or employed) ; the relaxation of movement brought by peace, decommissioning and demilitarisation ; the more diffuse sense of a 'new beginning' which has surrounded the Good Friday Agreement.…”