Understanding the roots and causes of ethnic animosity; analyses of recent events in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Somalia, and the former Soviet Union. Most recent wars have been complex and bloody internal conflicts driven to a significant degree by nationalism and ethnic animosity. Since the end of the Cold War, dozens of wars—in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Somalia, the former Soviet Union, and elsewhere—have killed or displaced millions of people. Understanding and controlling these wars has become one of the most important and frustrating tasks for scholars and political leaders.This revised and expanded edition of Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict contains essays from some of the world's leading analysts of nationalism, ethnic conflict, and internal war. The essays from the first edition have been updated and supplemented by analyses of recent conflicts and new research on the resolution of ethnic and civil wars. The first part of the book addresses the roots of nationalistic and ethnic wars, focusing in particular on the former Yugoslavia. The second part assesses options for international action, including the use of force and the deployment of peacekeeping troops. The third part examines political challenges that often complicate attempts to prevent or end internal conflicts, including refugee flows and the special difficulties of resolving civil wars.

Popolo applies Foucauldian methodology to the understanding of Complexity Science for the purposes of generating new understandings related to International Relations in general and to the Kosovo conflict in particular. He provides an epistemic analysis to the history of International Relations theory to reveal its intrinsic 'modernity', highlighting how such modernity derives from a particular understanding of scientific epistemology, which is being radically undermined by the emergence of Complexity Science. Importantly, the book shows how these theoretical issues affect specific understandings of crisis - in this case Kosovo - leading to specific policy decisions in the real world of international policy-making.

This textbook introduces students of violent conflict to a variety of prominent theoretical approaches, and examines the ontological stances and epistemological traditions underlying these approaches. Theories of Violent Conflict takes the centrality of the group as an actor in contemporary conflict as a point of departure, leaving us with three main questions: What makes a group? Why and how does a group resort to violence? Why and how do or don’t they stop? The book examines and compares the ways by which these questions are addressed from a number of perspectives: constructivism, social identity theory, structuralism, political economy, human needs theory, relative deprivation theory, collective action theory, and rational-choice theory. The final chapter aims to synthesise structure and agency-based theories by proposing a critical discourse analysis of violent conflict. This book will be essential reading for students of war and conflict studies, peace studies, conflict analysis and conflict resolution, and ethnic conflict, as well as security studies and IR in general.

An overview of offense-defense theory, which argues that the relative ease of offense and defense varies in international politics. Offense-defense theory argues that the relative ease of offense and defense varies in international politics. When the offense has the advantage, military conquest becomes easier and war is more likely; the opposite is true when the defense has the advantage. The balance between offense and defense depends on geography, technology, and other factors. This theory, and the body of related theories, has generated much debate and research over the past twenty-five years.This book presents a comprehensive overview of offense-defense theory. It includes contending views on the theory and some of the most recent attempts to refine and test it.

This comprehensive new Handbook explores the significance and nature of armed intrastate conflict and civil war in the modern world. Civil wars and intrastate conflict represent the principal form of organised violence since the end of World War II, and certainly in the contemporary era. These conflicts have a huge impact and drive major political change within the societies in which they occur, as well as on an international scale. The global importance of recent intrastate and regional conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Nepal, Cote d'Ivoire, Syria and Libya – amongst others – has served to refocus academic and policy interest upon civil war. Drawing together contributions from key thinkers in the field who discuss the sources, causes, duration, nature and recurrence of civil wars, as well as their political meaning and international impact, the Handbook is organised into five key parts: Part I: Understanding and Explaining Civil Wars: Theoretical and Methodological Debates Part II: The Causes of Civil Wars Part III: The Nature and Impact of Civil Wars Part IV: International Dimensions Part V: Termination and Resolution of Civil Wars Covering a wide range of topics including micro-level issues as well as broader debates, Routledge Handbook of Civil Wars will set a benchmark for future research in the field. This volume will be of much interest to students of civil wars and intrastate conflict, ethnic conflict, political violence, peace and conflict studies, security studies and IR in general.

The Dilemmas of Ethnic Policy: A Global Perspective argues that ethnic conflict increases or decreases in relation to changes in the social structure and the location and distribution of political power. Ethnic grievances derive from lack of access to valued resources, and elites play a crucial role in allocating those resources. This book examines the experiences of five countries with a history of ethnic conflict: former Yugoslavia/Bosnia-Herzegovina, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States. It finds that in many cases, solutions adopted to mitigate ethnic conflict have unintended consequences. Often, supposed solutions confuse cause and effect and in fact worsen ethnic conflict. Attempts to address identity issues by pandering to them often led to further ethnic demands. This book argues that, based on the experiences of the countries under examination, the best course is to adopt policies that encourage alliances between and among ethnic groups.

Understanding Ethnic Conflict provides all the key concepts needed to understand conflict among ethnic groups. Including approaches from both comparative politics and international relations, this text offers a model of ethnic conflict's internationalization by showing how domestic and international actors influence a country's ethnic and sectarian divisions. Illustrating this model in five original case studies, the unique combination of theory and application in Understanding Ethnic Conflict facilitates more critical analysis of contemporary ethnic conflicts and the world's response to them.

Experts consider whether American primacy will endure or if the future holds a multipolar world of several great powers. The unprecedented military, economic, and political power of the United States has led some observers to declare that we live in a unipolar world in which America enjoys primacy or even hegemony. At the same time public opinion polls abroad reveal high levels of anti-Americanism, and many foreign governments criticize U.S. policies. Primacy and Its Discontents explores the sources of American primacy, including the uses of U.S. military power, and the likely duration of unipolarity. It offers theoretical arguments for why the rest of the world will—or will not—align against the United States. Several chapters argue that the United States is not immune to the long-standing tendency of states to balance against power, while others contend that wise U.S. policies, the growing role of international institutions, and the spread of liberal democracy can limit anti-American balancing. The final chapters debate whether countries are already engaging in "soft balancing" against the United States. The contributors offer alternative prescriptions for U.S. foreign policy, ranging from vigorous efforts to maintain American primacy to acceptance of a multipolar world of several great powers. Contributors Gerard Alexander, Stephen Brooks, John G. Ikenberry, Christopher Layne, Keir Lieber, John Owen IV, Robert Pape, T. V. Paul, Barry Posen, Kenneth Waltz, William Wohlforth

This captivating book presents innovative answers to the question: why storytelling? Each chapter represents leading edge narrative research designs from Arthur V. Mauro Institute for Peace and Justice in central Canada, one of the world’s leading academic programs for Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS), and a major contributor to PACS scholarship. The authors are candid and offer inspiration for other scholars seeking groundbreaking ideas for their own research design while offering profound expansions to the current PACS literature. The scholarship reflects a diversity of ideas, passions, approaches, disciplinary roots, and topic areas. Each chapter explores different and critical issues in the field of PACS through various forms of storytelling, while providing recent original research designs for the future development of the field and the education of its practitioners and academics. This volume, co-edited by three of the early graduates of the program, presents and explores a number of these issues across the broad spectrum of Peace and Conflict Studies. Contributors to the book are recognized scholars and practitioners in their respective fields. The book has a wide audience, targeting those particularly interested in tackling and understanding old conflicts in new ways, and for those seeking to learn at the growing edges of PACS, at the undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate levels.

This book examines the origins and development of nationalism and national movements in the twentieth century and provides an analysis of the nature and dynamics of nationalism and ethnic conflict in a variety of national settings. Examining the intricate relationship between class, state, and nation, the book attempts to develop a critical approach to the study of nationalism and ethnonational conflict within the broader context of class relations and class struggles in the age of globalization. The book consists of three parts, made up of seven chapters. Part I examines classical and contemporary conventional and Marxist theories of nationalism. Part II provides a series of empirical comparisons of nationalism and ethnic conflict on a world scale, focusing on the Third World, the advanced capitalist countries, and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. A highlight of this section of the book is a detailed comparative case study of the Palestinian and Kurdish nationalism and national movements. Part III provides a political analysis of the relationship between class, state, and nation, and lays out the class nature of nationalism and the role of the state in ethnonational conflicts that are the political manifestations of deeper class struggles that have been the driving force of nationalism and ethnic conflict in the era of globalization. Berberoglu contends that future studies of nationalism and ethnonational conflict must pay closer attention to the dynamics of class forces that are behind the ideology of nationalism by examining national movements in class terms. For only through a careful class analysis of these forces and their ideological edicts will we be able to clearly understand the nature of nationalism and ethnonational conflicts around the world.