The Territorial management of ethnic conflict

Frank Cass

1993

230 pages

Regions and regionalism ; 2

Includes bibliographical references and index

9780714634654

Introduction: The Territorial Management of Ethnic Conflict / John Coakley -- The Case for Ethnic Federalism in Multilingual Societies: Canada's Regional Imperative / J. A. Laponce -- Belgium: From Regionalism to Federalism / Liesbet Hooghe -- Czechoslovakia: The Creation, Federalization and Dissolution of a Nation-State / Stanislav J. Kirschbaum -- The Soviet Union: From 'Federation' to 'Commonwealth' / Ronald J. Hill -- Managing Ethnic Conflict: The Case of Pakistan / Charles H. Kennedy -- Ethnic Strife in Sri Lanka: The Politics of Space / A. Jeyaratnam Wilson -- Ethnic Minorities in Eastern Africa: Kenya and Tanzania / Philip Mawhood and Malcolm Wallis -- Shadow Games: Ethnic Conflict and Political Exchange in Israel / Alex Weingrod

Recent history has thrown up vivid examples of the renewed capacity of ethnic differences to lead to deep tensions within states, tensions which frequently find expression in some form of inter-territorial conflict. The recent break-up of Czechoslovakia and the decomposition of the Soviet Union (and the continuing ethnic crises in its former constituent republics) are obvious examples. The collapse of Yugoslavia and the continuing bitter dispute in Bosnia illustrate just how serious the political and human consequences of such conflicts can be. Efforts to resolve disputes of this kind, or at least to reduce their destructive capacities to a minimum, take a variety of forms. One of the most characteristic approaches is to seek to arrive at an accommodation between the competing groups through some form of territorial restructuring. The object of this volume is to look at the very topical issue of the manner in which states attempt to cope with ethnic conflict through such territorial approaches. Although ethnic conflict is not always territorially based, it is when groups with a highly developed sense of ethnic consciousness also have a strong sense of territorial identity that conflict tends to be at its most intense. Following a comparative introduction, the volume looks at case studies that illustrate the whole range of such conflicts: from Kenya and Tanzania, at one extreme, where ethnic groups are territorially mixed, to the former USSR and Czechoslovakia on the other, where territorial differentiation has permitted different groups to go their own way. In between are such cases as Pakistan and Sri Lanka, where peripheral ethnic groups continue to mount a challenge to the central state; Canada and Belgium, where the central state has responded by conceding considerable regional autonomy; and the special case of Israel, where two groups lay exclusive claims to the same territory

Английский