Ethnicity Matters: Theorising the Specificity of Ethnic Conflict and Violence

Does ethnicity matter? The wide corpus dedicated to ethnic conflict and ethnic conflict management might suggest answering this question by an obvious yes. Yet, a convincing theoretical answer to this question is missing in the literature and empirical tests have been inconclusive. More generally, a persistent weakness of this literature is its lack of conceptual clarity. This has led some authors to question the relevance of differentiating between ethnic and non-ethnic conflicts. This paper argues that ethnicity does matter and attempts to explain why and how it does so. The article proposes new, clear definitions of the concepts of ethnic identities, ethnic conflict and ethnic violence; and builds a theoretical framework to understand the specificity of ethnic conflict and ethnic violence as compared to non-ethnic conflict and violence. While most previous contributions on the topic have focused on the inheritance of ethnic attributes, this paper argues that it is the transmission of ethnic attributes by decent that constitutes the central defining characteristic, and which allows to better understand the essence of ethnic conflict and violence.