Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars

Ethnic civil wars are burning in Bosnia, Croatia, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola, Sudan, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Chechnya, Tajikistan, Kashmir, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka, and are threatening to break out in dozens of other places throughout the world.1 Many of these conflicts are are so violent, with so much violence directed against unarmed civilians, and are apparently intractable, that they have provoked calls for military intervention to stop them. As yet, however, the international community has done little and achieved less. Advocates of international action seek to redress the failures of local political institutions and elites by brokering political power-sharing arrangements, by international conservatorship to rebuild a functioning state, or by reconstruction of exclusive ethnic identities into wider, inclusive civic identities.2 Pessimists doubt these remedies, arguing that ethnic wars express primordial hatreds which cannot be reduced by outside intervention because they have been ingrained by long histories of inter-communal conflict.3