ABSTRACT
This chapter gives special attention to the ways in which changes in government policies shape the internal processes of ethnic mobilization and conflict. It shows one other preliminary observation: The framework developed is designed to help one to understand the extent of ethnic mobilization and conflict. The chapter describes the theoretical framework developed to interpret and compare the domestic processes of ethnopolitical conflict in the four cases. It analyzes and compares the Kurds in Iraq and the Miskitos in Nicaragua, for whom the essential issue of conflict is greater autonomy from state control. The chapter examines the Chinese in Malaysia and the Turks in Germany. In the absence of deliberate discrimination, their sense of cultural identity is likely to be benign and is not a source of social conflict; it may eventually weaken or disappear entirely as successive generations are absorbed into growing economies and an evolving social order.
