1 Introduction 2 Theorizing on the Causes of Civil War And
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Notes 1 Introduction 1. Instead of the Russo-centric term “Transcaucasus” or “Trans-Caucasus” (commonly used until the breakup of the Soviet Union), the more politically neutral term “South Caucasus” is used throughout this study. 2. This fact may be at least partly explained by the high degree of politicization to which the social sciences were subjected within the post-Soviet states: In Soviet times, political science, history, anthropology, sociology, and related social sciences were either nonexistent or underdeveloped, or suffered from significant ideologization, which tended to deform them. Following the Soviet legacy, these disciplines – especially when issues of alleged national interest or security are believed to have been at stake – have been considered to be at the service of nation and society and thus have been brought into line with the political agenda of regimes and pro-regime intellectuals. 2 Theorizing on the Causes of Civil War and Ethnopolitical Conflict 1. Minorities at Risk Project (2002), Center for International Development and Conflict Management, University of Maryland, http://www.cidcm.umd.edu (downloaded on June 15, 2011). 2. Christian Scherrer, Ethno-Nationalismus als globales Phänomen: Zur Krise der Staaten in der Dritten Welt und der früheren UdSSR, Duisburg, Germany: Gerhard-Mercator-Universität, INEF-Report 6 (1994), 75. 3. David Singer: “Armed Conflict in the Former Colonial Regions: From Classification to Explanation.” In Luc van de Goor, Kumar Rupesinghe, and Paul Sciarone, eds., Between Development and Destruction: An Enquiry into the Causes of Conflict in Post-Colonial States (The Hague: Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs/The Netherlands Institute of International Relations: St. Martin’s Press, 76). 4. James Fearon and David Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” American Political Science Review (2003), 97: 1, 76–77 5. Bennett, D. Scott and Christian Davenport, Minorities at Risk Dataset, MARGenev1.0. Center for International Development and Conflict Management, University of Maryland, http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/inscr /mar/margene.htm (downloaded on June 19, 2011). 6. It is only recently, following the disastrous terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that an overwhelming interest in ethnopolitical conflict has been over- shadowed by the current Western preoccupation with combating terrorism, which is now seen as the major security threat to Western interests. 7. Among others, Neal Jesse’s and Kristen William’s recent book, Ethnic Conflict: A Systematic Approach to Cases of Conflict (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2010) 188 Notes 189 provides an overview of some of the relevant theories which have been recently propounded. Students of ethnic conflict and civil war might also be advised to consult a recently published encyclopedia on the matter: Karel Cordell and Stephan Wolff, Routledge Handbook of Ethnic Conflict (London and New York: Routledge, 2010). 8. Nicholas Sambanis, “Expanding Economic Models of Civil War Using Case Studies.” Perspectives on Politics, 2:2 (June 2004), 260. 9. Rogers Brubaker and David Laitin, “Ethnic and Nationalist Violence,” Annual Review of Sociology, 24:1 (1998), 436. 10. See, for instance, Henri Tajfel, Human Groups and Social Categories. Studies in Social Psychology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 268–87. 11. David Myers, Social Psychology (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2008), 17. 12. In fact, an ethnic group shares a host of similarities with a nation: indeed, these are largely overlapping concepts. Albeit that there is general lack of accord in this matter, a nation is generally considered to be a socially mobi- lized group which strives for political self-determination, whereas an ethnic group traces its roots to common myths and symbols (see below). 13. An adherent of this approach would argue that even if an ethnic Japanese were to learn the German language, absorb German customs, convert to the Protestant religion, and subscribe to German ethnonational myths, they would never be considered to be German by mainstream German society. 14. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic, 1973). 15. Clifford Geerz (1973) 16. For a brief overview of the above-mentioned approaches, see: Barbara Harff and Ted Gurr, Ethnic Conflict in World Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004), 96–97. 17. John Mueller, “The Banality of Ethnic War,” International Security, 25:1 (2000), 62–67. 18. As for the very notion of ethnicity or ethnic groups, I use the Horowitzean concept defined by “ascriptive differences, whether the indicum is color, appearance, language, religion, some other indicator of common origin, or some combination thereof.” Donald Horowitz (1985), 17. 19. See Dan Smith, “Trends and Causes of Armed Conflict,” The Berghof Handbook for Conflict Transformation, eds. David Bloomfield, Martina Fischer, Beatrix Schmelzle, http://www.berghof-handbook.net/documents/publications/smith_ handbook.pdf, August 2004 (downloaded on June 27, 2011). 20. I largely draw on Anthony Smith’s ethnosymbolist definition of an ethnic group as a community of people sharing five crucial traits: a belief in a common ancestry, common historical memories, some shared culture including language and religion, and, last but not least, a sense of attachment to a specific terri- tory which is regarded as the ethnic homeland. Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 57–97. 21. James Fearon, “Iraq’s Civil War,” Foreign Affairs 86:2 (2007), 86. 22. Dorte Andersen, Ulrike Barten, and Peter Jensen, “Challenges to Civil War Research. Introduction to the Special Issue on Civil War and Conflicts,” Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe 2:1 (2009), http://www. ecmi.de/fileadmin/downloads/publications/JEMIE/2009/1–2009-Intro- Andersen-Barten-Jensen.pdf (downloaded on August 2, 2011), 2. 190 Notes 23. Roy Licklider, “How Civil Wars End,” in Roy Licklider, ed., Stopping the Killing (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 9. 24. For a wider discussion of the concept of civil war, see Nicholas Sambanis, “What Is Civil War? Conceptual and Empirical Complexities of an Operational Definition,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 48:6 (2004), 814–58 25. Bruce Gilley, “Against the concept of ethnic conflict,” Third World Quarterly, 25:6 (2004), 1158. 26. Karl Cordell and Stephan Wolff, Ethnic Conflict. Causes, Consequences, Responses (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 4. 27. Ibid., 5. 28. James Fearon and David Laitin, “Ordinary Language and External Validity,” paper presented at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., September 2000, www.stanford.edu/~jfearon /papers/ordlang.doc (downloaded June 20, 2011). 29. Chaim Kaufman, “Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Conflict,” International Security 20:4 (1996), 137. 30. Ibid., 138. 31. This, in turn, accentuates ethnicity as the most eminent layer of identity furthering its politicization. 32. I define ethnic polarization as a process of increasing animosity between representatives of two or more ethnic groups in conflict who find themselves in a situation of increasing social division based directly upon ethnicity. 33. Emphasis in the original. Christopher Marsh, “The Religious Dimension of Post-Communist “Ethnic’ Conflict,” Nationalities Papers, 35:5 (November 2007), 811. 34. Nicholas Sambanis, “Do Ethnic and Non-Ethnic Civil Wars Have the Same Causes? A Theoretical and Empirical Inquiry,” Journal of Conflict Resolution (2001), 259–82. 35. James Fearon, “Ethnic Mobilization and Ethnic Violence,” http://www. stanford.edu/~jfearon/papers/ethreview.pdf August 11 (2004), 5 (down- loaded on June 20, 2011). 36. Horowitz (1985). 37. Chaim Kaufman, “Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Conflict,” International Security 20:4 (1996), 138. 38. Collier and Hoeffler (2001). 39. Fearon and Laitin (2003). 40. Cordell and Wolff (2010). 41. David Dessler, “How to Sort Causes in the Study of Environmental Change and Violent Conflict,” in Nina Græger and Dan Smith, eds., Environment, Poverty, Conflict, PRIO Report No. 2 (Oslo: International Peace Research Institute, 1994). 42. Dessler, David, “How to Sort Causes in the Study of Environmental Change and Violent Conflict,” in Nina Græger, Dan Smith, eds., Environment, Poverty, Conflict (Oslo: International Peace Research Institute, 1994). 43. Naturally, the scheme of conflict escalation proposed here presupposes a certain degree of simplification. In fact, it is quite rare for conflicts to proceed in a perfectly straightforward fashion: only in hindsight is it possible to strictly identify specific stages of conflict. Quite often, a latent conflict Notes 191 (i.e., one in its mobilization phase) will transform episodically into the stage of sporadic violence (i.e., its radicalization stage) and then back and forth – without necessarily culminating in the phase of civil war (i.e., of large-scale violence). Conflict escalation is in fact often marked by a variety of indi- vidual, micro-level determined conversions which may effectively come to influence the interplay of successive conflict stages. 44. In order to avoid conceptual divergences from the tenets of a body of quan- titative scholarship which I both draw from and attest to in this book, I adopt the same definition of civil war utilized by the COW project, according to which the threshold of full civil war is defined as a thousand battlefield deaths per annum. 45. In my understanding, the