ABSTRACT
The expression of ethnicity may lead to strife within multi-ethnic societies for instance, but it also produces conflict between states. In a speech on the 9th of November 1993, Boutros Boutros Ghali, the Secretary-General of the United nations warned that global security was under threat because of the spread of ethnic conflicts in the post cold war period. Eric Hobsbawm has argued that nationalism belongs with the study of political theory and ethnicity with sociology and/or anthropology. More notions of the ‘tribal’ in tribe evoke images of savagery, barbarism and a primitive state. The notion of retribalization carries with it the idea that society is regressing from a higher form to the older, more primitive form of the tribe. The problem with this kind of conceptualization is that it does not clearly distinguish tribalism from other forms of societal behaviour which is much discussed in the literature. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts in this book.
