CONFLICT, SECURITY AND DEVELOPMENT

Conflict, Security and Development

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Conflict, Security and Development

Ethnic conflict is one of the major threats to international peace and security. The conflicts in the Balkans, Rwanda, Chechnya, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Darfur are only among the best-known and deadliest examples. The destabilization of provinces, states, and in some cases even whole regions are common consequences of ethnic violence. Ethnic conflicts are often accompanied by gross human rights violations such as genocide and crimes against humanity, economic decline, state failure, environmental problems, and refugee flows. Violent ethnic conflict leads to tremendous human suffering.

Despite the fact that the number of conflicts has declined over the past decades, ethnic turmoil remains one of the main sources of warfare and instability in major regions of the wor1d. Between 1945 and 1990, near1y 100 ethnic groups were involved in violent conflicts. During the 1990s, about three quarters of conflicts were disputes between politically organized ethnic groups and governments. More than one third of the wor1d's states were directly affected by serious internal warfare at some time during the 1990s, and of these states, near1y two thirds experienced armed conflicts for 7 years or longer during the decade. In 2006, all 32 ongoing conflicts were internal, 5 of which were internationalized; most of them were caused by ethnic issues (Harbom & Wallensteen, 2007).

Joel D. Barkan, Professor of Political Science at the University of Iowa, provides a good one in his chapter on East Africa in the new book On the Fault Line: Managing Tensions and Divisions within Societies. He argues that the presence or absence of severe social divisions and their varying 'depth' is a function of the interplay between three variables:

The extent of ethnic, religious, or clan fractionalization and the relative size of competing groups

Whether the country in question is marked by uneven levels of development and incorporation into the world economy that has privileged some groups over others

The extent to which political leaders seek to mobilize populations on the basis of appeals to ethnic, religious, or clan identification and grievance

Where populations are divided into a small number of large identity groups, development is highly uneven (and is perceived as being highly favourable to some groups over others), and political leaders encourage the disadvantaged to feel aggrieved, politics becomes focused on a zero sum competition for state resources (Barkan and McNamee, 2012, pp. 58). Conversely, where populations are divided into a large number of small identity groups, the pattern of uneven development is less pronounced, and politicians do not stress identity politics, the probability that ethno-regional communities will conflict is low. Instead, policies and occupational or class interests are likely to matter more to political competition.

In Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Nigeria fit into the first category. Tanzania is the second. In the Middle East, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq fit the first category.The problem for leaders in countries with difficult political geographies and a history of uneven development is that they cannot change the first two variables, at least not ...