ABSTRACT
Violent ethnic conflict has become one of the most important threats to global peace. It has replaced ideological competition as the main source of strife within and between nation-states. 1 After the collapse of Soviet Union, a number of ethnic struggles turned violent, and this trend has for the most part continued since then. There is much controversy over the causes of ethnic conflict. It is a fact that the definition of ethnicity still remains one of the most contested issues in social science. Partly due to this definitional problem, there are several perspectives on how ethnicity relates to group conflict. According to primordialists, for whom human societies are virtually collections of ‘tribes’, 2 conflicts among ethnic groups in pluralist societies occur as a result of competition over resources. On the other hand, the epiphenomenalist approach, based on Marxist tradition, argues that ethnicity is an incidental appearance, which hides the identity of some class groupings fighting for political and economic power. 3 The instrumentalists (alternatively known as structuralists), in using the ascriptive approach, make an attempt to bring together primordialists and epiphenomenalists, and argue that ethnic groups can exist but it does not necessarily lead to social action without the involvement of political community acting as ‘identity entrepreneurs’. 4
