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

Ethnic Groups in Conflict

This article introduces the new Family of Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) data sets, version 2014, which is the latest in a series of data sets on ethnicity that have stimulated civil war research in the past decade. The EPR Family provides data on ethnic groups’ access to state power, their settlement patterns, links to rebel organizations, transborder ethnic kin relations, and intraethnic cleavages. The new 2014 version does not only extend the data set’s temporal coverage from 2009 to 2013, but it also offers several new features, such as a new measure of regional autonomy that is independent of national-level executive power and a new data set component coding intraethnic identities and cleavages. Moreover, for the first time, detailed documentation of the EPR data is provided through the EPR Atlas. This article presents these novelties in detail and compares the EPR Family 2014 to the most relevant alternative data sets on ethnicity.

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Integrating Data on Ethnicity, Geography, and Conflict

Understanding Ethnic Violence: Fear, Hatred, and Resentment in Twentieth‐Century Eastern Europe

The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. By V. P. Gagnon, Jr. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004. 217p. $35.00Publications focusing on Yugoslavia's collapse and the wars in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo abound. One of the key category errors committed in much of this work—and especially in the mountains of journalistic output throughout the 1990s—has been to classify Yugoslavia's wars merely as wars of rival ethnicities and nationalisms, if not ancient hatreds. Conventional wisdom has it that Yugoslavia's wars in the 1990s were typical “Balkan” wars emanating from primordial nationalisms, heavily laden with historical baggage and rich in potent myth and symbols. The easiest way to explain Yugoslavia's violent disintegration in the late twentieth century was to relapse into cliche-ridden accounts of base, primeval ethnic rivalries that hitherto had been contained by a combination of the restraints imposed by Tito's brand of communism and the exigencies of a polarized Cold War international system in which Yugoslavia inhabited a very particular space.

The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s

This article evaluates the effect of territorial autonomy on the outbreak of internal conflict by analyzing ethnic groups around the world since WWII. Shedding new light on an ongoing debate, we argue that the critics have overstated the case against autonomy policies. Our evidence indicates that decentralization has a significant conflict-preventing effect where there is no prior conflict history. In postconflict settings, however, granting autonomy can still be helpful in combination with central power sharing arrangements. Yet, on its own, postconflict autonomy concessions may be too little, too late. Accounting for endogeneity, we also instrument for autonomy in postcolonial states by exploiting that French, as opposed to British, colonial rule rarely relied on decentralized governance. This identification strategy suggests that naïve analysis tends to underestimate the pacifying influence of decentralization.

L-E Cederman

Papers

Territorial Autonomy in the Shadow of Conflict: Too Little, Too Late? (vol 109, pg 354, 2015)