Introduction
Introduction
The vast majority of violent conflicts in the past half-century have taken place at the substate level, including the recent or ongoing wars in Congo, Colombia, Palestine, India, Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Myanmar, Yugoslavia, Angola, Nigeria, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Russia, and Georgia. In the nineteen nineties, only eight of the one hundred ten armed conflicts around the world were between states. Most of the remaining wars were waged between minorities and their governments over demands for national self-determination. In prosecuting these campaigns, the leaders of resistance movements have used terrorism and guerrilla warfare to achieve autonomy for the minorities they claim to represent. Cases include the Palestinians in Israel; the Tamils in Sri Lanka; the Chechen separatists in Russia; the Transdniestrians in Moldova; the Kashmiris in India; the Kosovar Albanians in Yugoslavia; the newly independent East Timorese; and the periodically secessionist Acehnese in Indonesia. Lacking established protocols for halting violence at the substate level, such conflicts can drag on for years or even decades, as we have seen in Sudan, Ethiopia, Angola, Northern Ireland, Palestine, and Cyprus.
This book addresses important puzzles that lie at the heart of these struggles. On the macro-level, it investigates why ethnicity is still so politically salient-why so many internal conflicts are waged in the name of self-determination and why tribal conflicts persist in the face of modernization and globalization. I suggest that the discourse of minority rights and self-determination-promulgated by the victors of World War One to serve their geopolitical interests and ensure the stability of the postwar order-effectively constructed both the category of national minorities and the methods they later used to challenge their governments. Today, minority leaders around the world employ this discourse as a means of extracting concessions from their state centers. In some cases, this has improved the status of marginalized groups. In other cases, however, it has worsened and prolonged conflicts at the substate level.
On the micro-level, this book explores why minority leaders vary the intensity of their demands (sometimes rapidly) over time while their grievances remain relatively constant. To illustrate the bargaining logic underlying this behavior, I introduce a model that formalizes the interactions between minority representatives and their host government in the presence of an external lobby actor. The central prediction of the model is that when the minority's external patron credibly signals interventionist intent, minority leaders are likely to radicalize their demands against the center, even when the government has committed itself to moderation. It follows that the successful mediation of triadic conflicts is possible only after relations have been normalized between the minority's host government and lobby actor at the international level. This requires de-triangulating the conflict into separate, and thus more tractable, dyadic disputes between the state government and external lobbyist, on the one hand, and the majority and minority, on the other.
The Puzzle of Minority Radicalization
The Puzzle of Minority Radicalization
The literature on minority mobilization is vast, particularly with respect to secessionism and irredentism. Theories of mobilization may be divided broadly into structural and dynamic variants. Structural theories, in turn, fall into three broad subcategories (see table I point one).
Primordialist or essentialist arguments hold that nations today have always existed in one form or other as "proto-nations" or "ethnies" with cultural roots that extend far back in time. Once a group has "awakened" to its identity as a nation in the modern sense, it is only natural that it will seek self-determination-through violence, if necessary. This logic leads us to expect that groups with distinctive national identities will ultimately mobilize around separatist demands in order to achieve the nation-state ideal. Thus, the Chechens sought to secede from the Russian Federation due to profound ethnic differences between the Chechens and Russians. Similarly, the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia rallied around irredentism because they saw themselves as a constituent part of a larger German nation rather than an ethnic German minority in a Slavic state.
More nuanced social psychological accounts acknowledge that ethnic groups are constructed social forms as opposed to organic entities that developed naturally over time. However, because human beings are tribal by