Војно дело (Jan 2016)
Problems of defining the ethnic conflict
Abstract
After the end of the Cold War a large number of researchers in various disciplines studied ethnic conflicts. The possibility of studying different aspects drove anthropologists, ethnologists, politicologists, sociologists, social psychologists, and more and more theorists of international relations and security studies, to engage in these issues. The vacuum created by the disappearance of ideological competition was filled with ethnic conflicts, which started a wave of theoretical analyses seeking to explain them. Despite the large number of papers, no single comprehensive and universally accepted definition has been reached. The main objective of this paper is to explore the cognitive contribution of the existing definitions of ethnic conflict. As this is a complex phenomenon, which complicates the defining effort of even the most persistent and most qualified researchers, the paper first presents basic characteristics of ethnic conflict that make it complex to define. The main part of the paper is devoted to a critical reconsideration of the explanatory potential of the existing definitions of ethnic conflicts through the presentation of different ideas of scientists who base them on different views of this complex social phenomenon. Based on the critical approach, it can be concluded that even the attempt of consensual definition has not led to an acceptable definition either.
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