| In the aftermath of the Cold war and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world has witnessed a number of particularly violent ethnic conflicts. Their appearance took both politicians and the International Relations discipline, which had remained silent on the issue for nearly five decades, by surprise. Since then, multiple explanations have been formulated. Most prominent are those based on the concept of the security dilemma, and the political and economic competition model. All these explanations share three major flaws: a lack of disciplinary self-reflexivity that seeks to understand this prolonged academic silence; a belief in the validity of overarching grand theory; and a neo-primordial approach to identity that accords ethnic identity ontological status and views it as the stable and unambiguous essence of being.; Against this, I wish to place a theory of nationalism and ethnic conflict that overcomes each of these flaws. This requires first and foremost an investigation into the epistemological assumptions of the discipline for the source of its silence. The result is a theory that argues that the label ‘nationalism’ contains a multiplicity of phenomena that exceeds the explanatory limits of a single totalizing theoretical system and that is based on a view of identity as a continuously contested and highly contingent process in constant need of redefining, rescripting and resecuring.; In this study, I concentrate on one specific circumstance of ethnic conflict—the sudden collapse of empire—and investigate the ethnic conflicts following the collapse of both the Soviet Union and the European colonial empires in Africa. I proffer that these particular conflicts must be understood not in terms of a quest for physical security or competition for political and economic power, but rather as expressions of ontological insecurity. This means that these conflicts are not inevitable clashes between unambiguous ethnic groups, but rather constitute an integral part of the process through which identities are being constructed in a situation of ontological chaos.; This view allows for the formulation of a foreign policy that overcomes the political paralysis engendered by the prevailing view of ethnic conflict as the resurgence of “age-old animosities”. |
