ABSTRACT
The state and quality of the peace relationship between ethnic groups have tended to depend not only and not so much upon past legacies. Even more important have been institutional and strategic choices made at the onset and at critical junctions of democratization process. Analyzing specific features of democratizing ethnic peace as a category in its own right gives a better understanding of the nature of the relationship and the complexity of tasks that democratization in multiethnic setting is faced with. The crisis-prone attribute of ethnic peace more often than not has tended to come to the fore in ethnopolitical dynamics of all of the above-reviewed cases of post-Soviet democratization. At both the system and the interactional levels, problems of democratizing ethnic peace have, in fact, been coterminous with the tasks of ethnopolitical crisis management. Successful democratization in multiethnic systems is called upon to transform ethnic politics into a positive and sustainable relationship of peace.
