ABSTRACT
Simmering communal tensions between relatively well-defined social groups divided along racial, religious, linguistic, or ethnic lines are a pervasive feature of most societies. In both developed and developing countries, such tensions often spill over into open and widespread conflict, including large-scale violence. While the recent history of countries such as India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Rwanda, and Yugoslavia bear extreme testimony to this phenomenon, few societies, if any, past or present, have been completely free of non-class communal divisions. Indeed, one of the major challenges facing both individual countries and supra-national institutions today appears to be the problem of holding inter-group conflicts in check. 1
