Suchergebnisse

Ethnic conflicts have shaped the 20th century in significant ways. While the legacy of the last century is primarily one of many unresolved conflicts, the author contends that Western Europe has a record for settling ethnic conflicts which provides valuable lessons for conflict management elsewhere

Established in 1992, the High Commissioner on National Minorities of the Organization for Co-operation and Security in Europe has made significant contributions to conflict prevention and management in multi-ethnic societies. In this article, I trace how, over the three decades of its existence, the institution has adopted the notion of "integration with respect for diversity" as the guiding principle of its work. I demonstrate that successive High Commissioners have relied on three main tools in their efforts – mediation and facilitation, advising on legislation and policy making, and capacity building – and illustrate this approach with examples from across the OSCE area before providing two detailed case studies of how the institution has supported Kyrgyzstan and Moldova in the development of their respective national integration strategies. I conclude that the sustainability of positive change that follows from the engagement of the High Commissioner depends significantly on the institution's ability to build local capacity to manage the process of integration with respect for diversity in the long term and with a wide range of national and international governmental and non-governmental stakeholders.

AbstractFocusing on process tracing and using the example of fieldwork in Donbas, I develop an argument on what theoretically grounded and empirically detailed methodological solutions can be considered to mitigate the challenges of research on conflict zones and assure the robustness of any causal claims made. I first outline my assumptions about process tracing as the central case study method and its application to research on conflict zones, and then discuss in more detail data requirements, data collection, and data analysis. Using two examples of case studies on the war in and over Donbas, I illustrate how three standards of best-practice in process tracing—the need for a theory-guided inquiry, the necessity to enhance causal inference by paying attention to (and ruling out) rival explanations, and the importance of transparency in the design and execution of research—can be applied in the challenging circumstances of fieldwork-based case studies of conflict zones. I conclude by suggesting that as a minimum threshold for reliance upon causal inferences, these three standards also should align with a standard of evidence that requires both the theoretical and empirical plausibility of any conclusions drawn.