ABSTRACT
The essential quality of explanatory International Relation's (IR) conceptualization of the state-as-actor is sovereignty, or in the words of Gillian Youngs, what matters is that the state is an identifiable entity, thus clearly bounded. Most critiques of state-centrism in IR focus on these epistemological and ontological fallacies, which the state as a social construct cannot and should not be treated as a fixed, clearly bounded and static unit and unitary actor in the international arena. Symptomatic of the ways in which explanatory IR approaches, makes sense of, and explains ethnic conflict ways are the two main explanatory frameworks that explanatory IR has contributed to capturing the dynamics of the onset and development of ethnic conflicts. In both frameworks, the 'ethnic security dilemma' and the 'ethnic alliance model', supposed patterns of state behaviour are extrapolated to ethnic groups. Explanatory IR acknowledges that the modern state system and the sovereign nation state that constitutes it are the product of historical change.
