Ethnic Identity and Contemporary Civil Conflict

One of the first theoretical approaches which links ethnic identity to civil conflict is primordialism. This argues that attributes are descent-based and relatively visible and so are therefore hard to change. The primordialist image looks at how ethnic groups are comparable to various stones which then constitute a ‘wall’ that is society. Between stones there are clearcut and enduring boundaries and this same logic is applied between different ethnic groups. Each group has a distinct set of features based on common descent, language, history, culture, race or religion. The primordialist view emphasises the ‘affective properties of ethnicity’ and asserts that people’s ethnic consciousness is ‘deeply embedded in the constitution of the self’. Ethnicity is regarded as a natural result of biological differences or a long historical process. Membership of ethnic groups is therefore fixed and passed down through generations.

Looking at the conflicts in the North of Mali in 1990 and the South of Senegal in 1982 we can see how primordialism can be extremely useful in understanding contemporary civil conflicts. Both involved bids for separation by movements dominated by minority groups; the Tuaregs and Maures in Mali and the Diola in Senegal. In Mali the Tuaregs and Maures were easily identifiable and were known as the ‘whites’ and this meant ethnicity could be used to pressure members of these groups to join rebel movements. It also allowed ‘black’ groups to take reprisals against arbitrary Tuareg and Maure civilians. This led to huge amount of communal violence. However, in Senegal identification of ethnic groups was far more difficult. As a result, ethnicity has not been used to target individuals to the same degree and the intensity of violence has been much lower. This suggests that greater ethnic identifiability leads to more violent ethnic conflicts.

Primordialists propose that ethnic violence results from antipathies and antagonisms that are enduring properties of ethnic groups. They argue that decolonised states were new, but ethnic or communal animosities were old and therefore deeply historically rooted. The primordialism of ethnic groups was a stronger bond and more powerful motivator of human conduct compared with the civic ties being forged by the new states. As Connor observes, primordialism explains the passions that led to the massacre of Bengalis by Assamese or Punjabis or Sikhs in 1971 known as one of the worst genocides in history or the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The acts of rape, torture, genocide, mass displacement, hacking of limbs, brutal murders and many other atrocities committed in conflicts like Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Democratic Republic of Congo can be depicted as emotionally driven behaviour from feelings of fear, anxiety and hatred.

However, although primordialism can be useful in explaining civil conflicts there are a number of weaknesses which make this theory’s usefulness limited. For example, if ethnic antagonisms were so deep-rooted, why did ethnic violence rise and fall at different times? Throughout history ethnic groups have been hostile with each other but it has not been an eternal condition. Longman additionally mentions how primordialists focused on the way in which ethnic hatred was the primary force motivating the Rwandan genocide; however there was little empirical support and the degree to which ethnic hatred motivated the killing remains to be proved. It is further just assumed that ethnic bonds involve ‘emotion’ or ‘passion’ because of their ‘nature.’ However, too frequently, little explanation is given as to why ethnic motives should be more powerful than for example materialist ones’. Primordialists also fail to explain why ethnic groups change over time. Instrumentalists’ primary criticism of primordialism concentrated in its inability to see that certain instances of ancient hatred were ‘selectively retrieved by the knowledge elite, ignoring the many instances of cooperation and coexistence’. Furthermore, why did the same groups live peacefully in some places but not in others? An example of this is the tensions between Hindus and Muslims in India. Violence often flared up in certain parts of India between the two different ethnic groups but not all over India. Moreover, most ethnic groups have continued to interact in a cooperative and peaceful rather than violent way.

In primordialism, borders and membership of groups are assumed to be common knowledge suggesting that political actors have information about the identities of other actors which in fact they may not possess. For example, during the 1997 massacre by Hutu rebels in Buta, southern Burundi a group of rebels gathered 70 students in a room and demanded that they separated into Hutus and Tutsi. The students refused and stayed united and this led to the rebels firing their grenades on both Hutus and Tutsis students. This example illustrates how it was clear that the Hutu rebels wished to kill selectively, wanting to eliminated the out-group (Tutsi) while protecting their own co-ethnics. However, they were unable to easily categorise the two different ethnic groups. This shows that ethnic categorisation is not always as easy as primordialists assume. Lastly, primordialism ignores the economic, structural and political processes within which these conflicts erupt and implies that in ethnically heterogenous societies there will naturally and inevitably be violent ethnic conflicts. However, this is not a fact given that some societies like Botswana, an ethnically heterogenous country which, compared with many African countries, have peaceful ethnic relations. These examples illustrated above show that there are a number of limitations of primordialist theory in explaining why civil conflicts occur.

Following on from primordialism, instrumentalism can be useful in explaining how ethnic identity leads to civil conflicts. The core idea of instrumentalism is that ethnicity is neither inherent in human nature nor intrinsically valuable. Ethnicity disguises a deeper core of interests, which are either political or economic. According to instrumentalists, ethnicity is a resource used by elites to define group identity, regulate group membership and boundaries, and make claims and extract state resources. They claim that such situations have become severe in the late post-colonial period where declining resources have intensified competition and patronage on an ethno-regional basis. Ethnic identification has become a crucial resource in the context of violent political struggles. It has been fuelled by sections of the elite who have used ethnicity for personal ambitions and to mobilise mass support for their political agenda and it can further offer security to the masses. In Rwanda, Uganda and Nigeria colonial practices favoured one ethnic group over another leaving certain ethnic groups economically, politically and culturally disadvantaged. This then resulted in civil conflicts occurring in these countries. For instance, the Rwandan genocide in 1994 was fuelled by Belgian colonisation leading to hatred between the Tutsis and Hutus. When Belgium colonised Rwanda it believed that the Tutsis had ‘nobler’ and more ‘naturally’ aristocratic dimensions than the Hutus and so gave them all the positions of power whilst the Hutus were forced into labour camps. This helped to create racial divisions between the two groups and later resulted in a number of civil conflicts between the two groups signalling how the ruling elites can exploit ethnic groups for their own personal gain.

Once group identities have been established and made concrete, and stereotyping has helped to dehumanise the other side and identify them as the enemy, it is also possible to create a sense of victim-hood, based on real or perceived historical or contemporary grievances, which can then function as another precursor to internal war. This is the second strategy employed by conflict entrepreneurs; it is the story of how ‘communities of fear are created out of communities of interest’. In Burundi for example, political actors appealed to ethnic sentiments by emphasising the threat posed by the other group. Tutsi extremists pointed to every Hutu on Tutsi acts of violence in order to foster a sense of community against the Hutu threat and thereby consolidate their hold over the state. The Tutsi elite's justification for monopolising power has been the fear of a Hutu-led genocide against them, with constant reference to the Rwandan crises of 1959 and 1994 and acts of violence against Tutsi in Burundi in 1988 and 1993. This was also the case in the former Yugoslavia. In Serbia, the official press started to run stories about Albanian Muslims raping Serbian women, the expulsion of Serbian families by Albanian officials and the desecration of orthodox monasteries in Kosovo. Leaders often present a view that the very survival of the nation is at stake especially if communities are geographically mixed, ‘when the boundaries between us and them do not run along defensible territorial borders but through the middle of towns and villages’. They talk of enemies who must be disarmed and neutralised by exile or extermination. These examples illustrate through instrumentalism how ethnic identity was used to manipulate individuals to take part in civil conflicts.

Furthermore, this theory explains why some ethnically disjointed societies choose to right rather than cooperating. The decision depends on the cost and benefit calculations that groups make and when the cost of cooperation is more than the perceived benefits, ethnic conflicts tend to be unavoidable. Instrumentalism also explains why some people become involved in ethnic violence even if they are not personally convinced but decide to follow the crowd. Ethnic mobilisation is a coordination game in which it is rational for individuals to cooperate as long as you can see others cooperating. The opportunity costs of participation in a rebellion are low whilst the benefits in terms of having a share in the loot/spoils are often quite substantial. The conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo is often described mainly as a product of elite manipulation, state failure and illegal exploitation of mineral resources.

However just like primordialism, there are a number of weaknesses in instrumentalism which further undermine its usefulness in explaining civil conflicts. For example, why do leaders in multi-ethnic societies so often think that ethnicity is the means to power or for extracting resources from the state, not mobilisation based on economic or ideological programs? Further, if all behaviour in ethnic conflict is explained at the individual level as dominated by the desire for individualistic material gains of a few elites, how do the atrocities of the members of these ethnic groups, like rape, genocide, torture contribute to these gains? It is argued that war rape is sometimes a political instrument to intimidate, humiliate and degrade the ‘enemy’ as experienced in the case of the Serbs during the Bosnian war whose aim of raping Bosnian Muslim women was to produce little ‘Chetniks’ or the Rwanda case where genocide is described as a political strategy by the elite to buy one groups loyalty by allowing the extermination of the other (ibid). While these arguments are plausible, they are incomplete without the emotive content that is mentioned in primordialism.

Additionally, if the masses were also instrumental, would ethnic collective action not be crippled by free rider problems? One can perhaps understand why it would be instrumentally rational for someone to join an ethnic movement when it is close to capturing power, but why would ethnic mobilisation begin at all? Why is it easy to mobilise mass participation effectively along ethnic lines? How do the elite know they can use ethnicity effectively for these gains? These feelings and mass sentiments associated with ethnic identity are not manufactured by elites, they only recognise it and appeal to it. This is not to suggest that elite manipulation or desire for material gains are not a significant cause of ethnic conflicts but rather that rational ‘power-conserving’ elite strategies alone are not sufficient to address the complexity of this phenomenon. Lastly, if the chances are quite high that ethnic mobilisation or protest would lead to violence by another group, or to disciplinary action by the state, why should anyone participate in ethnic mobilisation at all? Why would instrumentally rational people take such high risks? 

The last theoretical approach which links ethnic identity to civil conflicts is constructivism. This is the most useful theory as it combines elements of both the primordial and instrumentalist approaches. ‘In keeping with the primordialists, constructivists view ethnic identities as a cultural endowment; but in keeping with instrumentalists, they view ethnic identities as malleable’. For example, constructivists reject the primordialist claim that members of ethnic groups A and B have always been part of the same ethnic group and that boundaries between them are fixed. They argue that individuals known as Croats and Serbs with a different nineteenth-century political history would be known as South Slavs or simply Serbs. This claim is that not only does the content of social categories change over time but so do the boundaries between them. As a result of incorporating parts of both theories constructivism is the most useful in explaining civil conflicts.

The constructivist theory perceives ethnic identity as a socially constructed and fluid entity that can be formed through various means including conquest, colonisation or immigration. The key constructivist idea on conflict is that each society has a historically constructed ‘master cleavage’. It focuses on how ethnic identities are constructs of the modern epoch. In many African countries, the colonial regimes played an important role in the ‘promotion’, ‘systematisation’ and in some cases the actual ‘invention’ of ethnic groups and identities. For example, Burundi offers an example how ethnicity is a social construct backing up constructivists’ views. The different ethnic groups known as Tutsi, Hutu and Twa all shared a common culture, belief system and language. Cultural homogeneity across the ethnic groups appears to challenge the degree to which they were historically mutually exclusive. This once again challenges the primordial view that ethnic identity is descent based and visible to other groups and instead is a social construct.

Research has revealed that a significant number of contemporary ‘tribes’ have no pre-colonial antecedents and exposed the colonial state's role in defining and categorising the African population into supposedly distinct ethnic groups for the purposes of political control. In the process of identity construction, a crucial role is played by so-called ‘cultural entrepreneurs who codify and standardise a language, equipping it with a written form, create an ethnos-centred historical narrative, populated with internal heroes and external villains, and build a literary tradition’. This can create a hatred for other ethnic groups and can often result in civil conflict taking place. For constructivists, modernisation or state policies have played a large role in forming groups where no group consciousness existed before. They argue ethnic groups are not holdovers from ancient times as indicated by primordialists but instead a very recent phenomena. Group membership tends to change over time as people come and go and develop new traditions and ways of life, but the group itself endures as a way of structuring social life. An example of how ethnic groups have been altered by the state to suit their own personal gain can be seen in Turkey. When the PKK (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan) launched an insurgency in the 1980s Turkey introduced the category ‘loyal Kurd’ for Kurdish-speaking collaborators. The Turkish state was then able to mobilise thousands of Kurdish peasants, many of whom had previously sympathised with the PKK into local village militias. This led to the PKK attacking these Kurdish peasants and resulting in many losing their lives.

Although it is contended by many that constructivism has become the dominant mode of argumentation about ethnicity it too has its weaknesses reducing its effectiveness in explaining civil conflicts. Constructivism does not explain why certain societies with similar historical processes and structural features commonly associated with conflict do not produce similar conflict histories to other societies with large amounts of civil conflict. For example, Botswana, described as ‘Africa’s haven of ethnic peace and harmony’ is a weak state like its neighbour Zimbabwe; however, it has not had the same conflict history that Zimbabwe has had. Moreover, the argument that ethnic cleavages are deeper or harder than nonethnic ones implies that few people fight for or can be recruited by the opposing ethnic group and that leaders cannot broaden their appeals to include members of rival groups. In other words, people cannot ‘escape their identity’ (for example, the Serbs cannot become Albanians or Croatians). Constructivists believe that ethnic identities are socially constructed, fluid and malleable but their only possible transformation is towards consolidation or hardening, therefore they can be treated as fixed. This is the view shared by primordialists which is far more valuable in explaining why certain individuals support an ethnic group in a civil conflict compared with constructivist reasoning.

Finally all three theories of ethnic identity (primordialism, instrumentalism and constructivism) focus on a one-dimensional perception of ethnic identity and so their explanations of the origin of ethnic identity and its role in ethnic conflict appears over simplistic resulting in the theory lacking in making meaningful analyses. A framework that incorporated greed, weak states, grievance, breakdown of security, intergroup policies, elite politics, ethnic geography, historical processes, unequal economic distribution systems and other socio-political factors could provide a far better explanation as to why civil conflicts occur.