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ABSTRACT
Throughout history, ethnic conflicts have long been a component of international politics. Even today, ethnic wars continue to be the most common form of armed conflicts around the world. Ethnic conflict is defined as disputes between groups of people defined by a common heritage, language, and/or culture. This article provides evidence that preexisting ethnic problems do influence ethnic conflict. In explaining ethnic conflicts, major scholars have agreed that there are three ideologies for it, which are primordialist, instrumentalist and constructivist. Ethnic conflict in Yugoslavia is used as a case example in explaining how the country was spawned with ethnic conflict.
Keywords: ethnicity, conflict, primordialist, identity and linguistic
INTRODUCTION
Ethnic community and identity are also often associated with conflict, particularly with political struggles in various parts of the world. Yet there is no essential connection between ethnicity and conflict, and in many instances, relations may in fact be peaceful and cooperative. Some of the works relate to the study of ethnicity and conflicts include by all the major contributors to debates on ethnicity, including Horowitz, Anthony Smith and conflict resolution in particular in the textbook by Ramsbotham, Woodhouse and Miall.
Over the second half of the 20th century, conflicts within national boundaries became increasingly dominant. Within the borders of most of states there exist numerous ethnic, national, racial, linguistic or cultural groups. In other words, the majority of states are composed of more than one ethnic group. Sometimes these groups are not accepted as full members of this state or the nation, which it purports to be or presented, or who actually excluded from it. In such circumstance number of ethnic groups demands more rights and recognition that leads in many cases to ethnic conflicts. One-third of all countries experienced civil conflict. Many (if not most) such conflicts involved violence along ethnic lines according to Gleditsch [1].
There are two remarkable facts about conflict that deserve notice. First, within country conflicts or intra-state conflicts, account for an enormous share of deaths and hardship in the world today. Since the Second World War, there have been 22 interstate conflicts with more than 25 battle-related deaths per year, and 9 of them have killed at least 1000 over the entire history of conflict [2].
Second,...