Study Of Contemporary Russian Ethnic Conflict Theory

The ethnic contradictions, which broke out in the Soviet Union and a series of ethnic unrest that happened in Russia and the Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union between the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s provided the seedbed for the Russian ethnic conflict theory. At that time a number of scholars turned to study the ethnic conflicts, which engendered the Russian ethnic conflict theory. On the early stage of the development of the theory the Russian scholars made case study researches and tried to uncover the essence and the reasons of the ethnic conflicts. By the different interpretation of these questions there are three main schools of the theory. They are primordialism, constructivism and realivism. Primordialism lays emphasis on the objective characteristics of the ethnicity, and they think that ethnic conflicts are arisen by differences of ethnic groups. Constructivism insists that ethnicity is constructed by a series of structrual factors during the social progress, although it admits the objective characteristics of the ethnicity. Constructivism takes the constradiction between the modernization of the country and the demand of the ethnic groups as the essence of the ethnic conflics. While realivism considers that ethnicity is formed by many times contrast of"we"and"they"during the interaction process. On the later stage of the development the scholars turned their priorities to the ethnic conflicts resolution and prevetion. Negotiation skills and third party intervetion are the important contents of the study. The main contents of conflict prevetion are information collection and the establishment of early warning mechanism.At the same time Russian scholars attach great importance to the racial tolerance and virtues of multicultrualism. By now the ethnic conflict theory has formed a relatively complete theoretical framework. The next direction of the theoretical development may be the establishment of the independent discipline.In this paper the whole ethnic theory will be introduced, including its development process, main contents and research characteristics, in the end the evalution will be given.