ABSTRACT
Ethnic confl ict remains one of the prevailing challenges to international security in our time. Left unchecked, or managed poorly, it threatens the very fabric of the societies in which it occurs, endangers the territorial integrity of existing states, wreaks havoc on their economic development, destabilises entire regions as confl ict spills over from one country into another, creates the conditions in which transnational organised crime can fl ourish, and offers safe havens to terrorist organisations with an agenda far beyond, and often unconnected, to the confl ict in question. To be sure, not every confl ict has all of these consequences and not all of them occur in equal scale everywhere. Yet one feature that most ethnic confl icts above all share is the sheer human misery that they create: people are killed, tortured, maimed, raped; they suffer from displacement, starvation, and disease. If for no other reason, social scientists need to study ethnic confl ict in order to understand better what its causes are, how it can be prevented, managed and resolved. While we may never be able to stop ethnic confl icts from happening, understanding them better will improve our abilities to respond more quickly and more effectively, thus reducing the scale of human suffering.
