How Enemies Are Made

Towards a Theory of Ethnic and Religious Conflict

Günther Schlee

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780857450609
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

In popular perception cultural differences or ethnic affiliation are factors that cause conflict or political fragmentation although this is not borne out by historical evidence. This book puts forward an alternative conflict theory. The author develops a decision theory which explains the conditions under which differing types of identification are preferred. Group identification is linked to competition for resources like water, territory, oil, political charges, or other advantages. Rivalry for resources can cause conflicts but it does not explain who takes whose side in a conflict situation. This book explores possibilities of reducing violent conflicts and ends with a case study, based on personal experience of the author, of conflict resolution.

Part I

Introduction

Figure 1.1 Map of north-east Africa with some of the principal ethnic groups mentioned in this book.

Chapter 1

Why We Need a New Conflict Theory

We expect science to provide insights we cannot gain from a mere everyday view on things.¹ A systematic conceptual understanding, a methodical process, and data gathered in some standardised fashion or at least intentionally and with a sense of purpose are supposed to sharpen our awareness of hidden connections. To differentiate between science and an everyday understanding does not usually pose problems for natural scientists. Simply, by concerning themselves with different scales of phenomena from the ones accessible to the human senses without technical support – for instance talking about molecules or galaxies – they mark their knowledge as clearly distinct from everyday knowledge. They do not have any difficulties in defining science as a special form of knowledge. On the contrary, their problem is rather to make their knowledge generally comprehensible: to explain to an audience not trained in their own specific discipline, to laymen in their field, what it is exactly they do – and this includes the politicians who are to provide them with the financial means for their research. Their problem therefore is translation of their scientific language into everyday language. Some social scientists seem to reverse this process. They translate an everyday experience into a special jargon, and call that professionalisation. Whoever sees through the trick will become suspicious and ask about the scientific gain: that is, the proportion of knowledge which would not be available to society without a separate functional area of science.

A major problem of the social sciences is that, contrary to the natural sciences, their objects of interest are no different from the interests of their non-scientific surroundings. Social scientists concern themselves with wealth and poverty, war and peace, love and death, and much more, all of which is of a general human interest, and about which non-scientists talk just as much. Do social scientists display any knowledge at all which is superior to everyday wisdom? Only that would justify consulting them in policy matters or as experts in court.

In this volume I will show that a systematic conflict analysis can lead to different conclusions from popular perception. I will start by demonstrating that there may be something wrong with popular perception. This is not merely my personal point of view; particularly in the area of ‘ethnicity’, scientific and popular opinions have differed significantly for a long time. Starting with fundamental questions, my next chapter will try to develop a sounder perspective.

The phrase ‘ethnic conflicts’ has come to be used rather naturally, particularly since the end of socialism and the rejection of the perspective of class struggle. Nobody asks what exactly is ‘ethnic’ in ethnic conflicts. It is assumed that ethnicity (and according to this model every form of difference, particularly also religion) represents the cause of conflicts. Every media consumer constantly learns that the ethnic factor is the reason for political fragmentation, be it in the former Soviet Union or Yugoslavia, where we seem to be confronted with a continuation of the processes which had once led to the dissolution of the precursor states, namely the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Thus, ethnicity is perceived as a constant or recurrent factor which, resistant to time, generates conflict. Unfortunately, this is also the view taken by the political elites, who therefore have difficulty in negotiating ethnic or religious differences constructively.

The convictions on which this opinion about ethnicity is based can be subsumed under six points:

1. Cultural differences, i.e., ethnicities, are the cause of ethnic conflicts.

2. The clash of different cultures reflects ancient, inherited, deeply rooted oppositions.

3. Ethnicity is universal: that means every human belongs to an ethnic group.

4. Ethnicity is ascriptive: that means as a rule one cannot change one’s ethnic affiliation.

5. A people is a community of shared descent.

6. Ethnic groups are territorial. They strive for a united territory and, eventually, for national sovereignty.

Regarding the first proposition of ethnicity as the cause of ethnic conflicts, such a proposition would only be supported if the extent of difference between the conflicting parties reflected the intensity of their conflicts. Observation, however, shows that the degree of such difference is not in the least connected to the existence of conflicts or their intensity.

The prime example for the ethnic factor as a cause of conflict is supposed to be former Yugoslavia. As is the general belief, oppositions originating in the Middle Ages have broken out once more, and indeed the Serbs refer to the Battle of Kosovo Polje and identify modern Muslims as their then enemies. Ancient ethnic oppositions, only temporarily suppressed by a communist regime, have been said to collide. But, if ethnicity is a form of social identity, then it is fixed by definitions of self and other. That means nobody can have an ethnic affiliation which is unknown either to themselves or to others. Ethnicity cannot exist unless people are aware of it. Some children of Yugoslavian immigrants in Germany had entirely lost this awareness by the end of the 1980s. There were cases of teenagers who had no idea to which ethnic group they belonged and what the language they spoke at home was even called. They would have to ask their parents first. Today, probably every single child from former Yugoslavia, be it in Germany or elsewhere, knows their ethnic affiliation. At least in such cases it should be obvious that the new emphasis on ethnicity is a result, not the cause of ethnic conflicts.

By subdividing their countries into constituent republics mostly named after a titular ethnic group, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union actively contributed to preserving an awareness of ethnic affiliation as a part of identification in the minds of their citizens. If indeed ethnicity was the factor that undermined these structures, the central powers had their share in it. In national censuses the citizens were regularly asked to which ethnic group they belonged, and in cases of doubt had to make a decision. In spite of this, about 5 per cent of the persons questioned refused to identify with one or the other nationality and declared themselves to be ‘Yugoslav’. Where are these 5 per cent now?

In the mid-1970s, an American anthropologist wrote a book about the Bosnian Muslims called European Moslems (Lockwood 1975). One of his findings was that, in an urban context, ethnic and religious identifications were fading. His prognosis was that the ethnicities of Yugoslavia would dissolve and in the end there would be a Yugoslav nation, whose previous ethnic subdivisions would be reduced to historical reminiscences or regarded as of folkloristic interest at best. In this evaluation he followed the line of prevailing modernisation theories, all of which assumed that, in the course of the advance of modernism, ethnicity would only survive for a while in rural areas, if at all.

Apparently in the 1970s, ethnicity played a minor and, compared to earlier realities, diminishing part. The political will corresponded to that. The vast majority of Bosnians – in the sense of the entire population of Bosnia, not one or the other ethnic group – were up until the 1990s determined to keep the significance of the ethnic factor to a minimum. In the face of the developments in Slovenia and Croatia, they wished to preserve the pluralistic character of their republic as a ‘Yugoslavia on a small scale’.

Many thousands demonstrated in the streets of Sarajevo to support the preservation of their multicultural community. These demonstrations were terminated by a few snipers, and the spiral of violence and counter-violence resulting from this is only too well known. Only then was every person forced to choose an ethnic identification. To be a ‘Yugoslav’ could not protect one from being killed or exiled as a ‘Croat’, ‘Serb’, ‘Muslim’, or, in a later phase, as a ‘Kosovo Albanian’; in order to escape this fate one had to join together with those presented as one’s own kind according to the ethnic principle – a development called ‘becoming hostages of the militias’ (Geiselhaft der Milizen) by Dizdarevic (1993).

An examination of the actual or alleged cultural differences between the ethnic groups of Bosnia shows that the linguistic differences between them are not significant at all. They all speak Serbo-Croatian, with only slight variations. Slovenian, on the other hand, is a distinct Slavic language and markedly different from Serbo-Croatian. If one looks at the levels of violence accompanying the processes of separation in the different cases, it is striking that the linguistically clearly distinct Slovenians managed to secede comparatively peacefully from the federal state of Yugoslavia, whereas, among the linguistically hardly distinguishable Serbs, Croats, and Muslims of Bosnia, atrocities took place on a scale which had been believed to be no longer possible in Europe.

The dialectal differences within the Serbo-Croatian language are far smaller than the ones between the different German dialects, which obviously do not prevent their speakers from living peacefully in one and the same federal state. However, cases in which a low level of difference coincides with a high intensity of conflict are frequent. One is almost tempted to postulate a negative correlation between cultural and linguistic differences on the one hand and levels of violence on the other.

The element of differentiation between Serbs, Croats, and Muslims which also seems to play a political role is religion. For the Muslims, the denominational term has become an ethnonym, i.e., an equivalent to the ethnic terms ‘Serb’ and ‘Croat’. This probably means that, after several decades of an agnostic or irreligious regime, the Yugoslavs had to a large extent forgotten their respective religious practices, and in today’s conflicts identified with the religion of their grandparents, rather than referring to actually held beliefs and actually practised forms of worship of their own. This interpretation is supported by the fact that, though the entire Muslim world showed solidarity with the Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian refugees in Malaysia caused bewilderment due to their ignorance of religious practice.

In the case of Somalia, an extremely high level of factionalism and violence likewise coincides with little or practically no cultural differences. Somalia is a state with a culturally, linguistically, and religiously homogeneous population,² which was often called the only ‘national’ state of Africa. It is well known from the news media that the factionalism here takes place on a subclan level. In concrete terms this means that the respective opponents belong to descent lines of one and the same clan which have separated for only a few generations and whose founders are known by name. Linguistic or other cultural differences, any more than religious schisms, neither are to be suspected nor in fact exist in this case (Schlee 1996, 2002b).

Cultural homogeneity is not a guarantor of peaceful coexistence. Kenney (2002) has shown that the opposing groups in Northern Ireland cultivate symbolisms which are very similar even in their details: the marching bands, the parades, or the iconographies of violence painted on the walls. It is a conflict taking place within a single cultural system of signs. The enemies understand each other all too well (ibid.).

Now let us look at the second proposition, which claims that, in ethnic conflicts, ancient and deeply rooted oppositions erupt. Where these have not surfaced recently, they are said to have been submerged by other forces, say a communist regime or colonialism. This is countered by the fact that ethnicity is constantly redefined, not only regarding its cultural contents but also with regard to the collectivity of persons defining a respective ethnicity (Barth 1969). The border between ‘us’ – the ‘we’ – and the ‘other’ is constantly being renegotiated.

Concerning the age of conflict groupings we find a very high degree of empirical variation. For the Armenians and Azeri – again selecting an example that has made the headlines since the dissolution of the Soviet Union – it is claimed that they fought each other in the same groupings as long as 1,000 years ago. Indeed, such ancient conflicts do recognisably exist, though possibly with changing reasons, mutable front lines, and in different historical forms. On the other hand, we have the example of the so-called ‘Kalenjin’ (see Figure 1, p. 1), which van Nahl (1999: 306f.) describes. The Kalenjin are an ethnic group in Kenya. However, once the old people of today never knew they were Kalenjin. Although the history of the Kalenjin cannot be traced back further than colonial times, and although originally only the educated knew how European linguists drew dialect boundaries and defined language groups and families, today the existence of the Kalenjin as an ethnic group, even a highly politicised one, is beyond doubt. It is the group of former President Daniel arap Moi, who knew how to place numerous members of his group in important positions and in this way thoroughly excluded other ethnic groups in Kenya from effective power. The first letters on the number plates of Kenyan government vehicles always read ‘GK’, meaning ‘Government of Kenya’. But in the jargon of the Moi era they came to mean ‘Government of Kalenjin’.

Aggressively articulated ethnicities can therefore be very old or very young, and their age has nothing to do with the intensity of ethnic mobilisation. Frequently, the seeming antiquity of ethnic differences and ethno-nationalisms is, of course, a back-projection into the past. Each nationalism tends to refer to ancient oppositions and differences (see Elwert 1989: 441). It is a virtual feature of nationalisms that they assume venerability, and always assert their historical roots, which are often driven into the past only through this act of assertion, like a tree drives its roots into the soil and does not grow out of its roots.³ The age of ethno-nationalisms may be a contested issue but it has nothing to do with the intensity of ethnic conflicts. There is not a shred of evidence to support the contention that older antagonisms are more intense than younger ones.

The third proposition under discussion concerns the universality of ethnicity, i.e., the claim that every human belongs to a people. Unlike this claim, ethnicity is on no account a natural or universal structural principle of humanity. In pre-colonial Africa it could be observed that a given group with a self-chosen name would regard the villages a little to the east or a little to the west as still affiliated to its own group: two or three villages further away, however, the inhabitants would be perceived as foreign. Changing the point of reference and switching to one of the neighbouring villages, we find that this group also considers itself the centre of distribution of similar features. In other words, in such a setting no ethnic ‘group’ possesses a fixed outside border and that means that we are not dealing with groups at all, but rather with a continuum in which the border between the ‘we’ and ‘the others’ shifts depending on the point of view of the observer (Elwert 1989: 445). Needless to say, without groups⁴ we cannot have ethnic groups or ethnicity in its proper sense. Here, ethnicity frequently only emerged as a result of colonial administration, when districts were divided according to the tribes allegedly settled there. Furthermore, ethnicity cannot be viewed separately from modern science and education. How, if not ultimately from ethnographic literature, should an Inuit from Greenland know where exactly the distribution area of the Inuit as a whole ends? Where, if not in school, should they hear about Alaska or the north-eastern tip of Siberia? In this way, scientific ideas – correct ones as well as incorrect ones – about similarities and differences are occasionally reimported into local political discourses, and influence the modern boundaries of community sentiment. In particular, names of language families often undergo curious careers.

Proposition number four states that ethnicity is ascriptive, an irreversible attribute from the individual’s perspective, which as a rule cannot be changed. In Kenya’s arid north, however, which is used by several pastoral-nomadic groups speaking different Cushitic languages, we find many regular forms of transition between ethnic groups, which are open to at least the more competent bearers of local cultures, i.e., to those who know the relations and opportunities of transition and know how to use them manipulatively. Due to historical conditions, the discussion of which is not within the scope of this text, different clans are spread out over various ethnic groups so that different linguistic and cultural entities – i.e., ethnic entities – consist of sub-entities they share with each other. In times of drought, for instance, or when all livestock is lost as a result of violent conflicts, members of a particular clan in a particular ethnic group can appeal to their clan brothers in a neighbouring ethnic group for help, or they can go there as immigrants or refugees and make claims to pasture and water rights. Should they and their families stay there, ultimately their ethnic affiliation will adjust to the new surroundings, i.e., via the clan bridge, one’s ethnicity can be changed, although this process may take a few generations.

There might be institutionalised bridges between ethnic groups like the ones described for Kenya elsewhere in the world, and the cultural features perceived as distinctive for the ethnic groups involved will not necessarily change when members move from one group to another. Only the groups’ membership changes. The individuals switch from one cultural container to another. The ethnic groups themselves remain: they only exchange a proportion of the individuals they consist of (Barth 1969).

For example, in the lower reaches of the Omo in southern Ethiopia, Turton (1994) also observed that politico-territorial groups like the Mursi and Surma (see Figure 1, p. 1) consist of clans which are partly the same in both ethnic groups and seem to have existed prior to the emergence of the present ethnic configurations.

The fact that the ‘tribes’ – which became established during colonial times...