Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

We may not be able to make you love reading, but archaeology of knowledge will lead you to love reading starting from now. Book is the window to open the new world. The world that you want is in the better stage and level. World will always guide you to even the prestige stage of the life. You know, this is some of how reading will give you the kindness. In this case, more books you read more knowledge you know, but it can mean also the bore is full.

The archaeology of knowledge

For their empirical evaluation, several active research programs in economics and political science require data on ethnic groups across countries. “Ethnic group,” however, is a slippery concept. After addressing conceptual and practical obstacles, I present a list of 822 ethnic groups in 160 countries that made up at least 1 percent of the country population in the early 1990s. I compare a measure of ethnic fractionalization based on this list with the most commonly used measure. I also construct an index of cultural fractionalization that uses the structural distance between languages as a proxy for the cultural distance between groups in a country.

Ethnic and Cultural Diversity by Country

The Logic of Violence in Civil War: List of Tables and Figures

1. The argument 2. Ethnic cleansing in former times 3. Two versions of 'we, the people' 4. Genocidal democracies in the New World 5. Armenia, I: into the danger zone 6. Armenia, II: genocide 7. Nazis, I: radicalization 8. Nazis, II: fifteen hundred perpetrators 9. Nazis, III: genocidal careers 10. Germany's allies and auxiliaries 11. Communist cleansing: Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot 12. Yugoslavia, I: into the danger zone 13. Yugoslavia, II: murderous cleansing 14. Rwanda, I: into the danger zone 15. Rwanda, II: genocide 16. Counterfactual cases: India and Indonesia 17. Combating ethnic cleansing in the world today.

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The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing

We examine the theoretical implications of the observation that ethnic identities are socially constructed for explaining ethnic violence, distinguishing between two classes of mechanisms. If individuals are viewed as the agents who construct identities, then constructivist explanations for ethnic violence tend to merge with analyses that stress strategic action by both elites and mass publics. In contrast, if discursive formations are the agents that construct ethnic identities, then constructivist explanations tend to merge with accounts that stress internal logics of specific cultures. Using the books under review as a “sample,” we find considerable evidence linking strategic aspects of ethnic identity construction to violence and more limited evidence implicating discursive systems. The most common narrative in these texts has largescale ethnic violence provoked by elites, often motivated by intra-ethnic conflicts. Followers follow, despite the costs, out of increased fear of thugs and armies “let go” by elites (both the other side's and their “own”) and often in pursuit of local grievances that may have little ethnic component. Several other mechanisms are also discussed, including the role of discursive systems in conditioning publics for violence and the role of violent efforts to enforce “everyday primordialism” by policing supposedly primordial ethnic boundaries.

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Paul Brass

Papers

Violence and the Social Construction of Ethnic Identity