Scarcity and Surfeitthe resources available to the state and not so much to a change in policy, ideology
or patterns of patronage). C Clapham. Introduction: Analysing African insurgencies,
African guerrillas, C Clapham (ed), James Currey, Oxford, 1998, pp 6-7.
It should be pointed out that the need for explanation is not merely academic. As
Shehadi points out, "government officials and international civil servants world-
wide are seeking to respond to the challenges posed by these claims, while inter-
national organisations are trying to mediate an end to these conflicts and allevi-
ate the humanitarian disasters they create': K S Shehadi, Ethnic self-detennina-
tion and the break-up of states, International Institute for Strategic Studies,
Adelphi Paper 283, London, 1993, p 3.
Singer, Armed conflict in the former colonial regions: From classification to expla-
nation, op cit, p 38.
D Jung with K Schlite & J Siegelberg, Ongoing wars and their explanation, Luc
Van de Goor et al, op cit, p 61. To this respect, Dietrich Jung et a1 point out that
"since the end of the Cold War, the slogan 'ethnic conflict' does not only appear
more and more often in the media, but also in the discourse of social science':
Ibid, pp 60-61.
See inter alia, P van den Berghe, The ethnic phenomenon, Elsevier, New York,
1981.
D Lake & D Rothchild, Ethnic fears and global engagement: The international
spread and management of glcbal conflict, op cit. The instrumentalist approach
is used by, inter alia, N Glazer & D P Moynihan, Ethnicity: Theoly and experi-
ence, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1975; D Rothchild, Interethnic con-
flict and policy analysis in Africa, in Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol 9, no 1,
January 1986 and P Brass (ed), Ethnic groups and the state, Croom-Helm,
London, 1985.
T D Sisk. Power sharing and international mediation in ethnic conflicts, Carnegie
Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, United States Institute of Peace,
Washington DC, 1996, p 1.2.
Ibid,. p 13.
Ibid.
Lake & Rothchild, op cit. For a discussion of the relational approach see, among
others, M Esman, Ethnicpolitics, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1994.
Sisk, op cit. p 13.
Gurr, Minorities, nationalists and ethnopolitical conflict', op cit, p 63. In this
regard Peter Worsley considers that "cultural traits are not absolutes or simply
intellectual categories, but are invoked to provide identities which legitimise
claims to rights. They are strategies or weapons in competitions over scarce social
goods". As cited in T H Etiksen, Ethnicity and nationalism: Anthropological per-
spectives. Pluto Press, London, 1993. This is also the position of the instrumen-
talists, as defined by Timothy Sisk: "Instrumentalists often view ethnic conflict as
less a matter of incompatible identities and more a consequence of (a) differen-
tial rates and patterns of modernisation between groups and (b) competition over
economic and environmental resources in situations where relations among
groups vary according to wealth and social status. In other words, ethnicity is
often a guise for the pursuit of essentially economic interests Sisk, op cit, p 12.