One of the first theoretical approaches linking ethnic identity to civil conflict is primordialism. This argues that attributes are lineage-based and are relatively visible and therefore difficult to change. The primordialist image looks at how ethnic groups are comparable to different stones which then constitute a 'wall' that is society. There are clear and lasting boundaries between the stones and this same logic is applied between different ethnic groups. Each group has a distinct set of characteristics based on common ancestry, language, history, culture, race, or religion. The primordialist view emphasizes the “affective properties of ethnicity” and states that people's ethnic consciousness is “deeply rooted in the constitution of the self.” Ethnicity is considered the natural result of biological differences or a long historical process. Membership in ethnic groups is therefore fixed and passed down from generation to generation. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Looking at the conflicts in northern Mali in 1990 and southern Senegal in 1982 we can see how primordialism can be extremely useful for understanding contemporary civil conflicts. Both involved calls for separation from movements dominated by minority groups; the Tuareg and Maures in Mali and the Diola in Senegal. In Mali the Tuareg and Maure were easily identifiable and were known as the "whites" and this meant that ethnicity could be used to pressure members of these groups to join rebel movements. It also allowed “black” groups to engage in reprisals against arbitrary Tuareg and Maure civilians. This has led to a huge amount of communal violence. However, in Senegal the identification of ethnic groups has been much more difficult. As a result, ethnicity was not used to target individuals to the same extent and the intensity of violence was much lower. This suggests that greater ethnic identifiability leads to more violent ethnic conflicts. Primordialists propose that ethnic violence arises from antipathies and antagonisms that are enduring properties of ethnic groups. They argue that decolonized states were new, but ethnic or communal animosities were old and therefore deeply rooted in history. The primordialism of ethnic groups was a stronger bond and a more powerful motivator of human conduct than the civic bonds forged by new states. As Connor observes, primordialism explains the passions that led to the massacre of Bengalis by Assamese, Punjabis or Sikhs in 1971, known as one of the worst genocides in history, or the Rwandan genocide of 1994. The acts of rape, torture, genocide, Mass displacement, cutting off limbs, brutal murders and many other atrocities committed in conflicts such as Yugoslavia, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo can be described as behaviors emotionally driven by feelings of fear, anxiety and hatred. However, while primordialism may be useful in explaining civil conflict, there are a number of weaknesses that make the usefulness of this theory limited. For example, if ethnic antagonisms were so entrenched, why did ethnic violence increase and decrease at different times? Throughout history, ethnic groups have been hostile to each other, but this has not been an eternal condition. Longman also mentions how primordialists focused on how ethnic hatred was the main force motivating the Rwandan genocide; however there has been little empirical support and the degree to which ethnic hatred motivated the killing remains to be demonstrated. It is also assumed that ethnic ties imply“emotion” or “passion” because of their “nature”. However, too often, little explanation is given as to why ethnic motivations should be more powerful than materialist ones, for example. Primordialists also fail to explain why ethnic groups change over time. The instrumentalists' main criticism of primordialism centered on his failure to see that some examples of ancient hatred were "selectively recovered by the knowledge elite, ignoring the numerous examples of cooperation and coexistence." Furthermore, why did the same groups coexist peacefully in some places but not in others? An example of this is the tensions between Hindus and Muslims in India. Violence often flared in some parts of India between the two different ethnic groups, but not throughout India. Furthermore, most ethnic groups continued to interact cooperatively and peacefully rather than violently. In primordialism, group boundaries and membership are assumed to be common knowledge, suggesting that political actors have information about the identity of other actors that they may not actually possess. For example, during the 1997 massacre by Hutu rebels in Buta, southern Burundi, a group of rebels gathered 70 students in one room and demanded that they be separated into Hutu and Tutsi. The students refused and remained united and this led the rebels to throw their grenades on both the Hutu and Tutsi students. This example illustrates how it was clear that the Hutu rebels wished to kill selectively, wanting to eliminate the outgroup (Tutsi) and at the same time protect their own co-ethnicity. However, they were unable to easily classify the two different ethnic groups. This shows that ethnic categorization is not always as easy as primordialists believe. Finally, primordialism ignores the economic, structural, and political processes within which these conflicts erupt and implies that in ethnically heterogeneous societies there will naturally and inevitably be violent ethnic conflicts. However, this is not a fact, as some societies such as Botswana, an ethnically diverse country which, compared to many African countries, enjoy peaceful ethnic relations. These examples illustrated above show that there are a number of limitations of primordialist theory in explaining why civil conflicts occur. Following primordialism, instrumentalism can be useful in explaining how ethnic identity leads to civil conflicts. The central idea of ​​instrumentalism is that ethnicity is neither inherent to human nature nor intrinsically valuable. Ethnicity hides a deeper core of interests, which are political or economic. According to instrumentalists, ethnicity is a resource used by elites to define group identity, regulate group membership and boundaries, make claims, and extract state resources. They argue that such situations became severe in the late postcolonial period, when declining resources intensified competition and clientelism on an ethno-regional basis. Ethnic identification has become a crucial resource in the context of violent political struggles. It has been fueled by sectors of the elite who have used ethnicity for personal ambition and to mobilize mass support for their political agenda and can offer further security to the masses. In Rwanda, Uganda, and Nigeria, colonial practices favored one ethnic group over another, leaving some ethnic groups economically, politically, and culturally disadvantaged. This then resulted in civil conflicts in these countries. For example, the 1994 Rwandan genocide was fueled by Belgian colonization which led to hatred between Tutsi and Hutu. When Belgium colonized Rwanda, it believed that the Tutsis had"nobler" and "naturally" aristocratic in size than the Hutus and thus assigned them all positions of power while the Hutus were forced into labor camps. This helped create racial divisions between the two groups and later resulted in a series of civil conflicts between the two groups, signaling how ruling elites can exploit ethnic groups for their own personal gain. Once group identities have been established and made concrete, and stereotypes have helped to dehumanize the other party and identify them as the enemy, it is also possible to create a sense of victimhood, based on real facts or perceived historical or contemporary grievances, which can then serve as a further precursor to internal warfare. This is the second strategy employed by conflict entrepreneurs; it is the story of how "communities of fear arise from communities of interest". In Burundi, for example, political actors appealed to ethnic feelings by highlighting the threat posed by the other group. Tutsi extremists denounced acts of Tutsi violence to all Hutus to promote a sense of community against the Hutu threat and thus consolidate their hold on the state. The justification given by the Tutsi elite for monopolizing power was the fear of a Hutu-led genocide against them, with constant reference to the Rwandan crises of 1959 and 1994 and the acts of violence against Tutsis in Burundi in 1988 and 1993. This was also the case in the former Yugoslavia. In Serbia, the official press began publishing stories of Albanian Muslims raping Serbian women, the expulsion of Serbian families by Albanian officials, and the desecration of Orthodox monasteries in Kosovo. Leaders often believe that the very survival of the nation is at stake, especially if communities are geographically mixed, “when the boundaries between us and them run not along defensible territorial boundaries but through the center of towns and villages.” They speak of enemies who must be disarmed and neutralized through exile or extermination. These examples illustrate through instrumentalism how ethnic identity has been used to manipulate individuals into taking part in civil conflicts. Furthermore, this theory explains why some ethnically disjointed societies choose to be right rather than cooperate. The decision depends on the groups' cost-benefit calculations, and when the cost of cooperation is greater than the perceived benefits, ethnic conflicts tend to be inevitable. Instrumentalism also explains why some people get involved in ethnic violence even if they are not personally convinced but decide to follow the crowd. Ethnic mobilization is a coordination game in which it is rational for individuals to cooperate as long as others can be seen to cooperate. The opportunity costs of participating in a rebellion are low, while the benefits in terms of sharing in the spoils are often quite substantial. The conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is often described primarily as the product of elite manipulation, state failure and the illegal exploitation of mineral resources. However, just as in primordialism, there are a number of weaknesses in instrumentalism that further undermine its usefulness in explaining civil conflict. . For example, why do leaders of multiethnic societies so often think that ethnicity is the means to achieve power or extract resources from the state and not mobilization based on economic or ideological agendas? Furthermore, if all behavior in ethnic conflicts is explained at the individual level as dominated by the desire for individualistic material gains of a few elites, how do the atrocities of members of these groupsethnic factors, such as rape, genocide, and torture, contribute to these gains? ? It is argued that war rape is sometimes a political tool to intimidate, humiliate and degrade the "enemy", as in the case of the Serbs during the Bosnian War, whose aim of raping Bosnian Muslim women was to produce small "Chetniks" " or Rwandans. case in which genocide is described as a political strategy of elites to buy the loyalty of one group by allowing the extermination of the other (ibid). While these arguments are plausible, they are incomplete without the emotional content mentioned in primordialism. Furthermore, if the masses were also decisive, wouldn't ethnic collective action be crippled by free rider problems? One can perhaps understand why it would be instrumentally rational for someone to join an ethnic movement when they are close to taking power, but why would they initiate ethnic mobilization? Why is it easy to mobilize mass participation effectively along ethnic lines? How do elites know they can use ethnicity effectively to gain these advantages? These mass sentiments and sentiments associated with ethnic identity are not produced by the elites, but merely recognize and appeal to it. This is not to say that elite manipulation or the desire for material gain is not a significant cause of ethnic conflict, but rather that elites' rational "power preservation" strategies alone are insufficient to address the complexity of this phenomenon. . Finally, if the chances are quite high that ethnic mobilization or protest will lead to violence by another group, or disciplinary action by the state, why would anyone participate in ethnic mobilization? Why would instrumentally rational people take such high risks? The latest theoretical approach linking ethnic identity to civil conflict is constructivism. This is the most useful theory as it combines elements of both the primordial and instrumentalist approaches. «According to primordialists, constructivists see ethnic identities as a cultural endowment; but in line with instrumentalists, they see ethnic identities as malleable.” For example, constructivists reject the primordialist claim that members of ethnic groups A and B have always been part of the same ethnic group and that the boundaries between them are fixed. They argue that individuals known as Croats and Serbs with a different nineteenth-century political history would be known as South Slavs or simply Serbs. This claim is that not only does the content of social categories change over time, but the boundaries between them also change. As a result of incorporating parts of both theories, constructivism is the most useful for explaining civil conflicts. Constructivist theory perceives ethnic identity as a fluid, socially constructed entity that can be formed through various means including conquest, colonization, or immigration. The key constructivist idea about conflict is that every society has a historically constructed “major fracture”. It focuses on how ethnic identities are constructs of the modern era. In many African countries, colonial regimes played an important role in the “promotion”, “systematization” and in some cases the actual “invention” of ethnic groups and identities. For example, Burundi offers an example of how ethnicity is a social construct supporting constructivist views. The different ethnic groups known as Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa all shared a common culture, belief system, and language. Cultural homogeneity between ethnic groups appears to call into question the degree to which they were historically mutually exclusive. This challenges.