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Why does ethnopolitical conflict sometimes lead to genocide and other times to peace? In this volume, political scientists, psychologists, sociologists, and historians examine over a dozen international cases to try to understand what causes a society's ethnic conflicts to escalate or deescalate. This unique book contains cogent critiques of the political and historical antecedents to conflict around the world, combining them with psychological analyses of group identity and intergroup conflict.
In examining the escalation of ethnic conflict, the authors highlight the critical role of group identification. How group identification becomes enmeshed with threatened economic resources, violent political subcultures, and media manipulation of collective fear is stressed. The lessons from the histories of specific countries are given cogent review: Why is Tanzania a rare model of ethnic peace in Africa while its neighbor Rwanda houses the worst case of ethnic warfare on the continent? How can South Africa's history provide a positive example of the resolution of ethnopolitical tensions? This book illustrates the promise that an interdisciplinary approach has to offer in preventing further genocide and ethnic warfare in the 21st century.
Contributors
Preface
Acknowledgments
I. Theories of Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict
- Introduction
—Daniel Chirot - Ethnicity: Nice, Nasty, and Nihilistic
—Ken Jowitt - Nationalism and Ethnicity: Research Agendas on Theories of Their Sources and Their Regulation
—Brendan O'Leary
II. Genocides
- Theories of the Holocaust: Trying to Explain the Unimaginable
—Peter Suedfeld - Armenian Deportations and Massacres in 1915
—Fikret Adanir - The Ethnic Element in the Cambodian Genocide
—Ben Kiernan - Approaches to Measuring Genocide: Excess Morality During the Khmer Rouge Period
—Patrick Heuveline - Genocide in Rwanda
—Gérard Prunier
III. Major Ethnopolitical Warfare That Stopped Short of Genocide
- From Ethnic Cooperation to Violence and War in Yugoslavia
—Anthony Oberschall - The Yugoslav Catastrophe
—Misha Glenny - Kurds in Turkey: A Nationalist Movement in the Making
—Resat Kasaba - Explaining the Long Peace: War in Latin America
—Miguel Angel Centeno
IV. Limited, Contained, and Partly Resolved Ethnopolitical Warfare
- The Northern Ireland Conflict: Prospects and Possibilities
—Tony Gallagher - Control and the Stability of Jewish–Arab Relations in Israel
—Ian S. Lustick - Who Pays for Peace? Implications of the Negotiated Settlement for in a Post-Apartheid South Africa
—Brandon Hamber - The Accommodation of Cultural Diversity in Tanzania
—Ailia Mari Tripp and Crawford Young - Why Has There Been No Race War in the American South?
—John Shelton Reed
V. The Social Psychology of Ethnopolitical Warfare and Psychology's Contributions to the Solutions
- Ethnopolitical and other Group Violence: Origins and Prevention
—Ervin Staub - Psychosocial Assistance During Ethnopolitical Warfare in the Former Yugoslavia
—Inger Agger - Social Psychology and Intergroup Conflict
—Miles Hewstone and Ed Cairns - The Psychology of Group Identification and the Power of Ethnic Nationalism
—Clark McCauley
Author Index
Subject Index
About the Editors
Daniel Chirot, PhD, is Professor of International Studies and Sociology at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he is the founder and codirector of the Center for the Study of Ethnic Conflict and Conflict Resolution. He is the author of books about global social change, political sociology, and Eastern Europe. His recent books are How Societies Change (1994), Modern Tyrants: The Power and Prevalence of Evil in Our Age (1994), and Essential Outsiders: Chinese and Jews In the Modern Transformation of Southeast Asia and Central Europe (edited with Anthony Reid, 1997).
Martin E. P. Seligman, PhD, works with positive psychology, learned helplessness, depression, ethnopolitical conflict, and optimism. He is Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Among his books are Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life (1998), What You Can Change and What You Can't (1994), The Optimistic Child (with Karen Reivich, Lisa Jaycox, and Jane Gillham, 1995), and Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death (1992). He has received both the American Psychological Society's William James Award (for basic science) and the Cattell Award (for the application of science). Dr. Seligman's research has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. In 1997 he was elected president of the APA.
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