Identifying Potential Ethnic Conflict: Case Applications of a Process Model

Szayna, Thomas S.

ISBN 10: 0833028421 / ISBN 13: 9780833028426

Published by Rand Corp, Santa Monica, California, U.S.A., 2001

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Binding Tight Pages Clean Appears Unread.

Seller Inventory # 089075

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Identifying Potential Ethnic Conflict: Case Applications of a Process Model
• Publisher: Rand Corp, Santa Monica, California, U.S.A.
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0833028421
• ISBN 13: 9780833028426
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Near Fine
• Book Type: Book
• Seller catalogs:
  • Military History

About this title

Synopsis

Intrastate communitarian strife, often dubbed ethnic conflict, has gained much attention in the aftermath of the Cold War. Certainly, intrastate conflict has been by far the dominant form of strife in the world in the 1990s. This report outlines a model for anticipating the occurrence of communitarian and ethnic conflict. The model is not a mechanistic tool, but a process-based heuristic device with a threefold purpose: (1) to orderthe analyst's thinking about the logic and dynamics of potential ethnically based violence and to aid in defining the information-collection requirements of such an analysis; (2) to provide a general conceptual framework about how ethnic grievances form and group mobilization occurs and how these could lead to violence under certain conditions; and (3) to assist the intelligence community with the long-range assessment of possible ethnic strife. The theoretical model explains how the potential for strife should be understood; how the potential for strife is transformed, through mobilization, into a likelihood of strife; and how extant state capacities interact through a process of strategic bargaining withmobilized groups to produce, under certain conditions, varying degrees of strife. Use of the model is demonstrated through its application to four case studies, two retrospective (Yugoslavia and South Africa) and two prospective (Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia).

About the Author

THOMAS S. SZAYNA (Ph.D., Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles) is the associate director of the Strategy, Doctrine, and Resources Program, Arroyo Center, at RAND. His research includes strategic planning, NATO military force structure and planning, intra-state conflict, peace operations, and democratization and civil-military relations.