The Foundations of Ethnic Politics: Separatism of States and Nations in Eurasia and the World

Despite implicating ethnicity in everything from civil war to economic failure, researchers seldom consult psychological research when addressing the most basic question: What is ethnicity? The result is a radical scholarly divide generating contradictory recommendations for solving ethnic conflict. Research into how the human brain actually works demands a revision of existing schools of thought. At its foundation, ethnic identity is a cognitive uncertainty-reduction device with special capacity to exacerbate, but not cause, collective action problems. This produces a new general theory of ethnic conflict that can improve both understanding and practice. A deep study of separatism in the USSR and CIS demonstrates the theory's potential, mobilizing evidence from elite interviews, three local languages, and mass surveys. The outcome is a significant reinterpretation of nationalism's role in the USSR's breakup, which turns out to have been a far more contingent event than commonly recognized. International relations in the CIS are similarly cast in new light.

Author: Henry E. Hale
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 06/01/2008
Pages: 298
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.10w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9780521719209

About the Author
Hale, Henry E.: - Henry E. Hale (Ph.D. Harvard University, 1998, born February 5, 1966) is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University. His work on ethnic politics, regional integration, democratization, and federalism has appeared in numerous journals, ranging from Comparative Political Studies to Europe-Asia Studies to Orbis. His first book, Why Not Parties in Russia?: Democracy, Federalism and the State (Cambridge University Press, 2006), was selected a winner of the Leon D. Epstein Outstanding Book Award by the Political Organizations and Parties section of the American Political Science Association (APSA). His Divided We Stand (2004) won two awards, including the APSA Qualitative Methods Section's 2005 Alexander L. George Award for best article in qualitative methods. The National Science Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research have funded his research. He has also been the recipient of a Fulbright research scholarship, a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and a Peace Scholarship from the US Institute of Peace.