Suchergebnisse

A response to the article, "Mapping Pathways of Ethnic Conflict Onset: Preferences and Enabling Conditions.".

Rational choice theories claim that extreme ethnic violence (war and genocide) can be explained either as the result of information failures and commitment problems or as the utility-maximizing strategy of predatory elites. Symbolic politics theory asserts that such violence is driven by hostile ethnic myths and an emotionally driven symbolic politics based on those myths that popularizes predatory policies. Tests of these models in the cases of Sudan's civil war and Rwanda's genocide show that the rationalist models are incorrect: neither case can be understood as resulting from information failures, commitment problems, or rational power-conserving elite strategies. Rather, in both cases ethnic mythologies and fears made predatory policies so popular that leaders had little choice but to embrace them by playing up associated ethnic symbols, even though these policies led to the leaders' downfalls. Ethnic security dilemmas in such cases are driven not by uncertainty but by predatory leaders engaged in symbolic politics.

Existing approaches to resolving civil wars are based primarily on the assumption that these wars result from conflicts of interest among rational individuals. However, peacebuilding efforts based on this approach usually fail in cases of ethnic civil war, leading sooner or later to renewed fighting. Symbolic politics theory suggests the problem with these peace efforts is that they pay insufficient attention to ameliorating the emotional and symbolic roots of extremist ethnic politics. The theory suggests that resolving ethnic war requires reconciliation–changing hostile attitudes to more moderate ones, assuaging ethnic fears, and replacing the intragroup symbolic politics of ethnic chauvinism with a politics that rewards moderation. The only policy tools for promoting such attitudinal and social changes are reconciliation initiatives such as leaders' acknowledgement of their sides' misdeeds, public education efforts such as media campaigns, and problem-solving workshops. Integrating such reconciliation initiatives into a comprehensive conflict resolution strategy, it is argued, is necessary for conflict resolution efforts to be more effective in ending ethnic civil wars.