ABSTRACT
Protracted conflicts over the rights and demands of ethnic and religious groups have caused more misery and loss of human life than has any other type of local, regional, and international conflict since the end of World War II. This chapter considers some implications of domestic and international conflict. It shows that the "explosion" of ethnopolitical conflicts at the end of the Cold War was, in fact, a continuation of a trend that began as early as the 1960s. The tension between the state system and ethnic identities, the impact the end of the Cold War has had on conflicts among nations and peoples, and the changing nature of international responses to ethnic conflict. In the early 1990s the European Union, the world's second most powerful economic entity, was divided about whether and how to respond to escalating ethnic conflict in adjacent East Central Europe.
