Content area
Full Text
Ethnic groups have tended to conflict since the beginning of the known human history, and the intensity of violent conflicts does not seem to have decreased during the last centuries. Why are ethnic conflicts so common across all civilizational boundaries and over time? Researchers have explained particular ethnic conflicts as being due to various political, cultural, and other environmental factors, but they have not yet been able to produce any theoretical explanation that could be tested by global empirical evidence. It will be argued in this paper that the universality of ethnic conflict can be traced to our common human nature, to our evolved disposition to ethnic nepotism. This hypothesis is tested by empirical evidence on a scale of institutionalized ethnic interest conflict (IC) and on a scale of ethnic violence (EV), which are intended to measure the degree of ethnic conflict from two different perspectives, and by the degree of ethnic heterogeneity (EH), which is used to measure ethnic nepotism, in a group of 176 contemporary countries. The results show that EH explains approximately 70 percent of the global variation in IC and nearly half of the variation in EV. These results leads to the conclusion that ethnic nepotism provides the most powerful theoretical explanation for the persistance of ethnic conflicts.
Key Words: Ethnic nepotism; Ethnic group; Ethnic conflict; Ethnic violence; Ethnic heterogeneity; Human nature.
The problem: How to explain the universality of ethnic conflict?
Ethnic interest conflicts seem to be common in all ethnically heterogeneous countries of the world, but the nature of such conflicts varies greatly from institutionalized ethnic inequalities and more or less peaceful competition to violent clashes, civil war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide (cf., for example, Horowitz, 1985; Gurr, 1993; Hutchinson & Smith, 1996; Stavenhagen, 1996; Fearon & Laitin, 2003; Toft, 2003; Harff & Gurr, 2004; Wolff, 2006). Ben Kiernan (2007) emphasizes that ethnic violence has probably been used by modern humans throughout the history, although empirical evidence from earlier periods is scarce. He refers to the history of genocide and extermination in ancient world, mainly to Sparta and Rome, and focuses on some examples throughout the world since the fifteenth century. The history of genocides implies that all nations have been more or less equally capable to carry...