ABSTRACT
However, the frequent use of 'ethnicity' is not confined to these extreme conflagrations. One influential commentator has argued that the world has entered 'a period of ethnic conflict, following the relative stability of the Cold War' in which, as large formal structures break up and ideology loses its hold, people 'revert to more primal identities' (Moynihan 1993: v). Another has written with great concern about the ways in which ethnic war acts as a kind of metaphor for what he calls 'the modern conscience' (Ignatief 1998). It has become almost a truism to assert, as Manuel! Castells puts it, that 'we have experienced, in the last quarter century, the widespread surge of powerful expressions of collective identity that challenge globalisation and cosmopolitanism .... ' (Castells 1997: 2).
