Policy Options for Resolving Post-Soviet
Ethnic Conflict
Robert M. Cutler
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Abstract:
This article examines in detail and gives an appreciation
two magisterial books on ethnicity, nationalism, conflict and conflict management in the former Soviet areas.
It compares their treatments in particular of two conflicts that
both address, reviews their general
conclusions, and evaluates their policy recommendations. For that
purpose, this article reviews independently the situations in the five Central Asian states, falling along a continuum from "absence of conflict" to "military conflict" and, arriving at a definition of "interest," explicates an implicit cognitive-behavioral
cycle: (1) an interest is grounded in historical inheritance and
international custom; (2) this inheritance and custom produce
knowledge in the form of an understanding and a definition of the
situation in which interest may be asserted; (3) that understanding is
projected into the future through that knowledge formalized as
particular norms that guide action; and (4) the exercise of power
motivated by those norms is the search to realize objectively and so
validate those interests as constructed. The roles of ideological ("political-cultural"),
economic, legal-financial, and military instruments for mitigating
conflict are explicated within the systematized framework thus
described. Conclusions follow of a general order, relating different
degrees of conflict situations with associated modalities of
intervention, and specifying those modalities in accord with
diplomatic instruments as enumerated and state interests as
constructed.
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This document is available in  full text.
Contents:
- [Preliminary remarks]
- Overview
- Tishkov’s accomplishment
- Common case studies and policy recommendations
- Comparative synoptic analysis of Central Asian conflicts
- Table 1. Tishkov’s prescriptions for engineering
ethnic accord in post-Soviet
states.
- Table 2. Modalities of intervention and their relative
priority as instruments, by degree of conflict.
- 4.1. Absence of
conflict: Turkmenistan
- 4.2. Absence of conflict: Kyrgyzstan
- 4.3. Conflict of interest:
Uzbekistan
- 4.4. Threat
of coercion: Kazakhstan
- Military conflict: Tajikstan
- Summary and
conclusion
- Table 3. Conflict situations, their degrees of conflict with
associated modalities
of intervention, and specification of the nature of Western instruments and interests.
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| Suggested
citation for this webpage: Robert M. Cutler, “Policy Options for Resolving Post-Soviet Ethnic Conflict,” Central Asian Survey 19, nos. 3–4 (September/December 2000): 451–468, available at <http://www.robertcutler.org/ar00cas.htm>, accessed 25 April 2024. |
[ page 451 ]
Policy Options for Resolving Post-Soviet
Ethnic
Conflict
- Managing Conflict in the
Former Soviet Union, CSIA Studies in
International Security.
Alexei Arbatov, Abram Chayes, Antonia Handler
Chayes and Lara Olson
(editors). Cambridge: MIT Press,
1997.
- Ethnicity,
Nationalism and Conflict in and after the Soviet
Union: The Mind
Aflame. Valery Tishkov. London: Sage
Publications for United
Nations Research Institute for Social
Development, 1997.
These two books are perhaps the most significant
recent works on the origins and regulation of ethnic conflict in the
post-Soviet area, yet there could not be a greater contrast between
them. Valery Tishkov became director of the Institute of Ethnology and
Anthropology in Moscow during Gorbachev’s perestroika
era and is a former Minister of Nationalities in Yeltsin’s
government. This work draws on his inside knowledge of major events as
well as on extensive primary research and an encyclopædic
knowledge of the literature. It is a brilliant tour de force
that makes available to English-readers an extremely wide range of
Russian-language ethno-historical and conflict-analytic work. Its
length, acute criticism of dominant Western theories and analyses, and
lack of a unified methodological approach will probably diminish its
appreciation by Western scholars. In the opinion of this reviewer,
however, the idiosyncratic combination of these characteristics,
married to Tishkov’s comprehensive familiarity with the
situations, is one of the work’s strengths and contributes to
its acuity. It is precisely the author’s political engagement,
combined with his use of personal reminiscences, interviews, notes and
conversations, as well as documents from his files as Minister and
institute director, which give his work its special
[ page 452 ]
qualities. When deployed by
someone like Jack
Matlock, these qualities are lauded.
A good review should outline the arguments of the
items under review and evaluate them. With only two books under review
here and with both of them of such heft and authority, the summary of
their arguments will necessarily be extended. Therefore the first
section of the review indicates in a more cursory manner how the books
are constructed and complement one another. This section will include
some details as to the basis for the conclusions of the book edited by
Arbatov, Chayes, Chayes and Olson, which is below denoted the
‘ACCO’ volume. The second section of the review examines
in detail the structure and argumentation of Tishkov’s
monograph. It turns out that the two volumes share two case studies
and that their general conclusions are mutually related. Therefore the
third section of this review compares their treatment of the Ingush-
Ossetian conflict and of the situation of Slavophones in Kazakhstan,
and it compares also the volumes’ respective policy
recommendations. The fourth section of this review evaluates those
recommendations on the basis of an examination of Central Asian
conflict situations in. the former Soviet area. The fifth section of
the review is a summary and conclusion.
Dr. Robert M. Cutler [ website — email ] was educated at MIT and The University of Michigan, where he earned a Ph.D. in Political Science, and has specialized and consulted in the international affairs of Europe, Russia, and Eurasia since the late 1970s. He has held research and teaching positions at major universities in the United States, Canada, France, Switzerland, and Russia, and contributed to leading policy reviews and academic journals as well as the print and electronic mass media in three languages.
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