The purpose of this article has been to explore why ethnic conflicts tend to break out in all ethnically divided societies. The principal explanation was traced to the evolved disposition for ethnic nepotism shared by all human populations. Ethnic nepotism was measured roughly by the degree of ethnic heterogeneity of the populations. It was correlated with the scale of ethnic conflicts in the g...

the fall of soviet :union: and independence of republics of central asia as well as south caucasus have brought both chances and challenges for iran. at first it seemed that muslim republics, which broke from soviet :union:, might have brought great chances for iran to promote her ideological claims and economic interests. dreams of islamic revolution in new independent central asian republics ...

O the past decades, ethnonationalist conflict has become the dominant form of mass political violence. The overwhelming majority of civil wars in the postwar era were fought in the name of ethnonational autonomy or independence (Scherrer 1994:74)—as was the case during earlier waves of civil wars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as during the Balkan wars or following the dissolut...

Why do ethnic conflicts arise? This question has been a persistent one in the field of political science, and has generated various theories and approaches attempting to explain conflict proliferation from different angles. Consulting current political science literature and Prof James Fearon, an expert on ethnic conflicts, we identify two main approaches to understanding the problem: one has e...

In this paper, we study the effects of economic factors on the intensity of internal armed conflicts. We show that adverse ethnic compositions in the form of ethnic dominance and polarization are a critical determinant of the way countries react to commodity-induced income shocks and that positive as well as negative income shocks can intensity ongoing conflicts. While negative income shocks in...

In several post-colonial countries, nation building has been regarded as one of the most important tasks since World War II. Globally, all aim to achieve unity and harmony among ethnic groups. This effort is not an easy task because of the characteristics of a third world country itself is colored by ethnic diversity. In some countries, the government's efforts to unite the nation face failure ...

This essay analyzes the role of ethno-political organizations in Nigeria's quest for democracy. It inquires into how their interaction in the recent transition to democracy curtailed and/or exacerbated politically pertinent conflicts among ethnic groups. It is argued that the salience of ethno-political organizations in Nigeria's recent transition rests, first, on the historical process of stat...