Ethnic Conflicts in South Asia

Shibashis Chatterjee
Additional contact information
Shibashis Chatterjee: Shibashis Chatterjee is Senior Lecturer, International Relations, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India.

South Asian Survey, 2005, vol. 12, issue 1, 75-89

Abstract: This article is an attempt to employ the constructivism of Alexander Wendt to understand ethnic conflicts in South Asia. The article surveys the theoretical literature on constructivism to create a set of propositions regarding ethnic conflicts and attempts to test these propositions for several of South Asia's ethnic conflicts. The article argues that ethnic conflicts are essentially identity conflicts in which the definition or construction of threats, enemies and friends plays a pivotal role. Ethnic conflicts evolve according to how identities are defined, the definitions being predicated on the material condition facing the communities themselves in relation to the manifest practices of the state. In contrast to realist discourses that see only endless conflicts and an invariable security dilemma for groups, and liberalism that defines ethnic peace (or conflict) in terms of transaction costs and utility calculations, the constructivist reading of ethnicity enables International Relations to interrogate ethnicity in cultural-ideational terms. By using constructivist propositions to a select set of ethnic conflicts in South Asia, the article attempts to explain the salience of ethnicity as a pervasive mode of conflict in the subcontinent.

Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/097152310501200106 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:soasur:v:12:y:2005:i:1:p:75-89

DOI: 10.1177/097152310501200106

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in South Asian Survey
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().