Collective violence within states in a political economy perspective

Abstract

There is no phenomenon on our globe today that does more to create feelings of anxiety and insecurity than intrastate war. Often, such events are described as ethnic or religious conflicts. For example, observers tracing the history of the genocide in Rwanda, sometimes describe Bahutu-Batutsi relations as principally based upon primordial ethnic differences. Those who see intra-state war today primarily as ethnic conflict, will, however, find it difficult to answer two crucial questions: (a) how is it possible that the same people who are now engaged in violent conflict can in other times live in peaceful coexistence?; and (b) how is it possible that in other parts of the world other peoples with more substantial cultural differences can live peacefully together in the same nation-state? Such questions become less difficult to answer when, with Claude Ake, we see the upsurge of ethnic identity and consciousness as an expression of "the multiple crises of economy, polity and society" (Ake 1994: 51). In conflict analysis, perhaps more than in any other field of social sciences research, we have to accept that the "polity and the economy are inextricably interlinked" (North 1990).