An influential conventional wisdom holds that civil wars proliferated rapidly with the end of the Cold War and that the root cause of many or most of these has been ethnic and religious antagonisms. We show that the current prevalence of internal war is mainly the result of a steady accumulation of protracted conflicts since the 1950s and 1960s rather than a sudden change associated with a new, post-Cold War international system. We also find that after controlling for per capita income, more ethnically or religiously diverse countries have been no more likely to experience significant civil violence in this period. We argue for understanding civil war in this period in terms of insurgency or rural guerrilla warfare, a particular form of military practice that can be harnessed to diverse political agendas. The factors that explain which countries have been at risk for civil war are not their ethnic or religious characteristics but rather the conditions that favor insurgency. These include poverty—which marks financially and bureaucratically weak states and also favors rebel recruitment—political instability, rough terrain, and large populations.We wish to thank the many people who provided comments on earlier versions of this paper in a series of seminar presentations. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation (Grants SES-9876477 and SES-9876530); support from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences with funds from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; valuable research assistance from Ebru Erdem, Nikolay Marinov, Quinn Mecham, David Patel, and TQ Shang; sharing of data by Paul Collier.

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Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War

THE NEW LONDON GROUP 1 In this article, the New London Group presents a theoretical overoiew of the connec­ tions between the changing social environment facing students and teachers and a new approach to literacy pedagogy that they call "multiliteracies. " The authors argue that the multiplicity of communications channels and increasing cultural and lin­ guistic diversity in the world today call for a much broader view of literacy than portrayed by traditional language-based approaches. Multiliteracies, according to the authors, overcomes the limitations of traditional approaches by emphasizing how ne­ gotiating the multiple lingustic and cultural differences in our society is central to the pragmatics of the working, civic, and private lives of students. The authors maintain that the use of multiliteracies approaches to pedagogy will enable students to achieve the authors' twin goals for literacy learning: creating access to the evolving language of work, power, and community, and fostering the critical engagement necessary for them to design their social futures and achieve success through fulfilling employment. If it were possible to define generally the mission of education, one could say that its fundamental purpose is to ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, and economic life. Literacy pedagogy is expected to play a particularly important role in ful­ filling this mission. Pedagogy is a teaching and learning relationship that creates the potential for building learning conditions leading to full and equitable social participation. Literacy pedagogy has traditionally meant teaching and learning

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A pedagogy of Multiliteracies Designing Social Futures

The authors analyze the nation‐state as a worldwide institution constructed by worldwide cultural and associational processes, developing four main topics: (1) properties of nation‐states that result from their exogenously driven construction, including isomorphism, decoupling, and expansive structuration; (2) processes by which rationalistic world culture affects national states; (3) characteristics of world society that enhance the impact of world culture on national states and societies, including conditions favoring the diffusion of world models, expansion of world‐level associations, and rationalized scientific and professional authority; (4) dynamic features of world culture and society that generate expansion, conflict, and change, especially the statelessness of world society, legitimation of multiple levels of rationalized actors, and internal inconsistencies and contradictions.

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World society and the nation-state

Qualitative researchers rely — implicitly or explicitly — on a variety of understandings and corresponding types of validity in the process of describing, interpreting, and explaining phenomena of ...

Understanding and Validity in Qualitative Research

indeed may not be quite possible But I have no doubt it is worth a try It has to do with the nature of thought and with one of its uses It has been traditional to treat thought, so to speak, as an instrument of reason Good thought is right reason, and its efficacy is measured against the laws of logic or induction Indeed, in its most recent computational form, it is a view of thought that has sped some of its enthusiasts to the belief that all thought is reducible to machine computability But logical thought is not the only or even the most ubiquitous mode of thought For the last several years, I have been looking at another kind of thought (see, eg, Bruner, 1986), one that is quite different in form from reasoning: the form of thought that goes into the construction not of logical or inductive arguments but of stories or narratives What I want to do now is to extend these ideas about narrative to the analysis of the stories we tell about our lives: our "autobiographies" Philosophically speaking, the approach I shall take to narrative is a constructivist one a view that takes as its central premise that "world making" is the principal function of mind, whether in the sciences or in the arts But the moment one applies a constructivist view of narrative to the self-narrative, to the autobiography, one is faced with dilemmas Take, for example, the constructivist view that "stories" do not "happen" in the real world but, rather, are constructed in people's heads Or as Henry James once put it, stories happen to people who know how to tell them Does that mean that our autobiographies are constructed, that they had better be viewed not as a record of what

Life as Narrative

Series Editor's Preface. Introduction by John Breuilly. Acknowledgements. 1. Definitions. State and nation. The nation. 2. Culture in Agrarian Society. Power and culture in the agro-literature society. The varieties of agrarian rulers. 3. Industrial Society. The society of perpetual growth. Social genetics. The age of universal high culture. 4. The Transition to an Age of Nationalism. A note on the weakness of nationalism. Wild and garden culture. 5. What is a Nation. The course of true nationalism never did run smooth. 6. Social Entropy and Equality in Industrial Society. Obstacles to entropy. Fissures and barriers. A diversity of focus. 7. A Typology of Nationalisms. The varieties of nationalist experience. Diaspora nationalism. 8. The Future of Nationalism. Industrial culture - one or many?. 9. Nationalism and Ideology. Who is for Nuremberg?. One nation, one state. 10. Conclusion. What is not being said. Summary. Select bibliography. Bilbliography of Ernest Gellner's writing: Ian Jarvie. Index

Nations and Nationalism

A slogan is born the two neighbours Islam the Marxist failure the successful Umma a contrast between the Abrahamic faiths civil society completes the circle Adam Ferguson east is east and west is west political decentralization and economic decentralization ideological pluralism and liberal doublethink, or the end of the enlightenment illusion modular man modular man is nationalist friend or foe? the time zones of Europe the varieties of nationalist experience easternmost zone resumed a note on atomization the end of a moral order from the interstices of a command-admin system the definition of socialism a new positive definition towards a desirable unholy alliance democracy or civil society historical overview future prospects internal problems the range of options validation?

Ernest Gellner

Papers

Nations and Nationalism

Conditions of liberty : civil society and its rivals

Thought and Change

The Idea of a Social Science

Postmodernism, reason and religion