Department I : Integration and Conflict Director : Günther Schlee Integration and Conflict

1. Introduction This part of the report tries to clarify some basic concepts of current studies on integration and conflict, as well as some which might not be so useful but which are nevertheless commonly used. These basic concepts comprise types of actors as opposed to the object of contention and passive victims, they comprise identity and difference and the social categorisations derived from them – in both their limiting and enabling capacity for the people using them – and they comprise the logic of identification, in terms of the costs and benefits of being the same or being different. A very widely used concept and thereby a topic which cannot be ignored – though of limited analytical value – is ethnicity. Ethnicity is a complex means of identification based on a plurality of features. The list of criteria used for defining one ethnic group might differ from that used to define another. One might therefore doubt that ethnicity is one social phenomenon and suspect that it is a blanket to cover a variety of different social phenomena. In some settings, there are no ethnic groups even in the widest possible sense, because cultural discontinui-ties used to circumscribe groups elsewhere cannot be found in these settings and cultural variation takes the form of continua instead. A closer examination of our conceptual tools reveals that they are su f-ficient to ask relevant questions about the changing composition of collective actors and the dynamics and logic of identification in hostile and peaceful forms of interaction. The department aims at answering such questions in a more systematic way than is usual in the discipline. 2. Necessary Distinctions: parties in conflict and objects of conflict Those who discover the 'true' reasons for a conflict behind the alleged ones may be said to pursue an enlightened activity and to contribute to the critique of ideology. When we find that the conflict in Iraq was not about freedom, but about oil, we believe to have detected the tougher, more real, more important reason for war. Undoubtedly, naming the resources involved is an important part of explaining a conflict. There are studies of great merit in which conflicts are treated from the point of view of the resources contested. One chapter deals with conflicts over oil, the next with those over water (Klare 2001). By naming the resource, however, we have only addressed one aspect of a …