Civil War and Ethnic Conflict

The final couple of weeks of this course took an interesting turn as we began examining civil wars and ethnic conflict. Up until this point most topics covered in this class seemed to agree with my previous conceptions of how political systems worked and the general implications of certain theories or ideas. That is not to say that studying electoral systems and regime types did not give me new insight into these topics, but rather that what we have learned about civil wars and ethnic conflict has shattered my previous misconceptions. I think for the average person, the more ethnic groups a country has the more likely it seems that there will be conflict. We saw, however that the exact opposite is true. That more ethnic groups creates stability rather than having one large majority group in clear and permanent domination. Also, it seems strange at first that authoritarian regimes do not inherently cause civil war or ethnic conflict. Such regime types seemed socially constructed to be synonymous with conflict prior to my current understanding of this course material. Furthermore, it is factors that seem insignificant at first that end up having the strongest correlation with civil wars. Factors such as per capita income and the population of young men in a nation are usually just lumped under a broad and general description such as how developed a country is or the extent of economic inequality. By doing so without asking why is said country undeveloped we fail to see the whole picture of a civil war and thus tend to draw the wrong conclusions about what causes them.

Another very interesting point that Prof. King brought up was the concept of violence as an institution. This was a radical idea for me at first. It was, however, clearly illustrated in the documentary about Bosnia, that fear can lead people to break social order and act violently. Violent action almost seems to offer a last chance for collective rational action in extreme circumstances. In Bosnia we saw the neighbors betray one another out of fear so that they may maintain as much rational social order as they could. It is interesting that in this case, and I'm sure in most others, violence wasn't a tool used by the state on either side of the conflict, but rather was its own independent institution.