Competing Theories of Ethnic Conflict

In the field of international relations, one of the most significant issues is the cause of wars and ethnic conflicts. Yet the study of conflict is plagued with conceptual turmoil. A major debate in conflict research concerns how to define and classify different types of armed conflicts. Lack of conceptual consensus is damaging to scholarly efforts to advance our understanding of armed conflict. This study contributes to improving our understanding of conflicts in one of the most dangerous regions of the world – the Caucasus. To accomplish this, the study creates Weberian ideal types of the inter- and intra-state conflicts that afflict the Caucasus. These include conflicts over Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, and Russia-Georgian war, Abkhazia, Chechen and Dagestan. The study presents four ideal types of conflicts: ethnic conflict, ideological, leadership and recourse conflict. It anticipates that there will be significant congruence between the ideal types and the actual conflicts. What makes the study’s typology valuable is that it does not pivot on naming a conflict, that is, whether it is ethnic or ideological, but rather permits us to acknowledge that any conflict in Caucasus region has aspects of all the ideal-types. This allows us to proceed further in analysis and to examine to what extent the conflicts in Caucasus region actually are about ethnicity. The study will explore to what extent ethnicity is a merely a convenient common dominator to organize a group in the struggle over resources, land, or power. From that foundation, the study will examine other factors and their significance in the outbreak of the conflict, for example, whether ideological conflicts are caused by different factors. Finally, I consider the role of ethnic history in permitting us to predict future ethnic conflict.