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Priorities for Research on
Conflict in Multiethnic Countries
Charles Tilly
Columbia University
olitical conflict in which at least one participant claimed to speak in
the name of a distinctive national, ethnic, racial, or religious group-
ethnic conflict for short became common in many parts of the world
during the nineteenth century. It takes a wide variety of forms, from
peaceful demonstrations to genocide. Ethnic conflict accelerated world-
wide after World War II, as rival claimants for state power recurrently
argued that they spoke for distinct, authentic nations. Africa and Asia
experienced a great deal of violent ethnic conflict from the 1940s onward.
It reached new heights, however, toward the end of the twentieth cen-
tury. In the Soviet Union and its successor states, such encounters swelled
from the late 1980s to the early l990s, then diminished except in a few
regions, such as the Caucasus and Tajikistan. As it fragmented, Yugosla-
via bled with ethnic conflict.
Both within the post-Soviet world and elsewhere, ethnic conflict,
broadly defined, currently takes far more lives than any other form of
political conflict. Yet participants, politicians, public authorities, interna-
tional agencies, and academic specialists lack consensus about explana-
tions of ethnic struggles. In hopes of reducing uncertainty and increasing
useful knowledge, this report summarizes the major recommendations
for further inquiry that emerged from discussions among Russia- and
U.S.-based specialists in political conflict during 2000 and 2001. It pre-
sents the common points of the discussions by working groups on sys-
tematic comparative study of conflict events; culture, identity, and con-
flict; and collective violence.
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2
CONFLICT AND RECONSTRUCTION IN MULTIETHNIC SOCIETIES
Although working group participants drew on their familiarity with
particular conflicts, competing explanations, and available methods for
collecting and analyzing relevant evidence, in this workshop they did not
aim at empirical generalizations, theoretical syntheses, or methodological
recommendations. Instead, they sought to identify open questions con-
cerning ethnic conflict that appear to be tractable, significant, and suitable
for collaboration between Russian and American scholars.
Disagreements concerning what exists, what is possible, and what
cause-effect chains are in operation lie behind many policy disputes. The
world at large has much to gain from better knowledge of causes, con-
straints, means of termination, means of prevention, and processes of
conflict settlement in the area of ethnic conflict. Superior knowledge
would have a supremely practical advantage. It would improve the ca-
pacities of responsible specialists, officials, participants, and third parties
to anticipate the consequences of alternative policies, and even to design
creative, nonviolent ways of settling conflicts.
Academic specialists themselves play four quite different roles in the
search for answers, as
· investigators seeking better explanations and more effective forms
of intervention
· communicators with students, intellectuals, and the general public
· advisors and critics of governments and other agencies that seek to
resolve serious conflicts, suppress them, prevent them, or terminate those
that are already under way
· advisors to participants in serious conflicts and advocates for their
causes
Specialists engage in the last three activities from day to day. The first
challenge takes time, collaboration, extensive exchanges among special-
ists, access to evidence, and support for research. In the present state of
knowledge, specialists in ethnic conflict have identified a number of long-
term, contextual, and immediately precipitating influences on open con-
flict without arriving at a widely accepted synthesis of all these elements.
With that state of knowledge in mind, we concentrate here on agendas for
the longer-term investigation of ethnic conflict without laying out a spe-
cific set of policy recommendations for day-to-day action.
Specialists in such regions as Africa, Latin America, and South Asia
have no choice but to recognize the importance of ethnic conflict in the
polities they study. Most embed their analyses in knowledge of their
regions' distinctive histories and cultures without paying much attention
to similar conflicts elsewhere. A few scholars examine ethnic conflict,
genocide, or collective violence in general, but they generally lack the
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PRIORITIES FOR RESEARCH ON CONFLICT IN MULTIETHNIC COUNTRIES 3
local knowledge to arrive at either detailed explanations or policy recom-
mendations regarding particular struggles. Clearly some form of collabo-
ration between area experts and comparative-historical students of politi-
cal conflict will benefit both sides.
Any such collaboration will gain from locating particular varieties of
contemporary conflict in comparative and historical perspective. That
means relating and comparing ethnic conflict to other forms of struggle
based on religion, race, class, region, or other social divisions. It also
means examining historical precedents for contemporary conflicts on the
premise that earlier conflicts not only supply cases for comparison but
can become models, pretexts, or even causes for later ones.
Despite starting from rather different questions and perspectives, the
three working groups converged on a number of shared recommenda-
tions. The plenary discussion did not reject any of those recommenda-
tions, but underlined some, added specifications to others, and placed
additional items on the agenda. Recommendations identified open ques-
tions, problems to be solved, and types of evidence to collect. The recom-
mendations set forth below and in the working group reports reflect the
views of the individuals in each group and are not necessarily those of the
National Academies or one of its appointed committees.
After reconciling differences in terminology, the most widely shared
recommendations for inquiries include the following:
1. investigations of social processes that promote mobilization, de-
mobilization, and division of populations along lines of ethnicity rather
than according to other divisions, such as industry, locality, and age; the
subject definitely includes
a) examining how groups and conflicts come to be defined
b) comparing ostensibly ethnic conflicts with those in which par-
ticipants align themselves along religious, political, racial, regional, or
other divisions
2. investigations of social processes that move ethnic conflict (which
often proceeds in relatively nonviolent ways) into or out of violent forms
of struggle, including conditions, processes, and interventions that pro-
mote nonviolent conflict resolution
3. research on how political entrepreneurs (such as ethnic leaders),
violence specialists (such as heads of militias), and dealers in contraband
(such as drug merchants) promote and inhibit transitions between violent
and nonviolent forms of struggle
4. studies of which combinations of governmental form and popula-
tion composition promote or inhibit acute conflicts in the names of ethnic
groups; how and why this occurs
5. compilations of extensive, comparable catalogs of conflict events
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CONFLICT AND RECONSTRUCTION IN MULTIETHNIC SOCIETIES
across the space of the former Soviet Union before, during, and after the
Soviet collapse, that include
a) brief accounts and descriptions of events for selected periods
across the entire territory
b) closer studies of long-term changes in conflict for selected re-
glons
c) analyses of selected episodes with evidence on both violent and
nonviolent forms of interaction before, during, and after collective vio-
lence
6. studies of interventions in ethnic conflicts, covering the whole
range from explanation of conditions and processes that promote (or in-
hibit) interventions by third parties authorities, allies, emigres, interna-
tional agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and mass media to con-
ditions and processes of intervention that actually contribute to the
incitement (prevention, alteration, enlargement, or termination) of vio-
lent conflicts
7. conduct of complementary comparative studies of social changes
in localities and regions with dual purposes of
a) identifying early stages and precipitants of serious conflicts
b) using area expertise to look closely at the processes generating,
inhibiting, mitigating, or terminating serious conflicts
8. analyses of impacts of varying and changing state policies for pro-
tection, recognition, representation, or repression of ethnic categories'
rights and obligations on the extent and character of ethnic conflict, in-
cluding violent conflict
9. studies of the impacts of legal systems (for example, the establish-
ment [or refusal] of separate legal codes and enforcement mechanisms for
specific ethnic or religious categories) on the extent and character of eth-
nic conflict
10. assessments of the effects of changing forms of communication
and mobility (for example, access to television and the Internet) on ethnic
mobilization, conflict, violence, and conflict resolution
The reports of the three working groups contain much more detail on
approaches to addressing the 10 topics. Although these themes may seem
to cover the entire range of possible topics, they actually outline a distinc-
tive approach to the analysis of ethnic conflict. Instead of concentrating
on the individual orientation of one actor or group at a time and taking up
the explanation of one action at a time, they constitute a program of
focusing on interaction among multiple parties to ethnic conflicts, stress-
ing transitions among forms of conflict, and engaging in rigorous com-
parisons among local episodes.
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PRIORITIES FOR RESEARCH ON CONFLICT IN MULTIETHNIC COUNTRIES 5
Altogether, these 10 topics outline a considerable range of difficult
but manageable problems concerning ethnic conflict upon which collabo-
ration among Russian and American scholars could considerably advance
our store of knowledge. Inquiries into any one of these topics would
augment the knowledge available for the design of effective policies to
help resolve conflicts without widespread losses of life and property.
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
serious conflicts
