Article in Sociology · August 000 doi: 10. 1177/S0038038500000304 citations 37 reads 5,200 author

Like the Kninska Krajina, this region, Bosanska Krajina, has produced some of the most

insecure and hence militant Serbs of all. The memory of the Kozara massacre plays a

central part in the people’s social psychology.

The most militant are (usually) men who are unwilling to trade off ethnic

preferences against other preferences and who try to impose their views on their

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m i c h a e l  ba n to n

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co-ethnics. (Maybe women are less prominent in mobilisation movements because

they are less frequently in a position to decide trade-offs.) The mobilisers’ actions

stimulate counter-actions from similar persons in opposed groups, and when each

side nurses its grievances conflict escalates, especially if people on one side fail to

predict how the others will react. It would appear that sometimes atrocities are

perpetrated in order to accelerate processes of escalation. Individuals who have

earlier been well disposed towards members of an opposed group have at times been

forced to shoot members of that group just because they belonged to it. More often, it

would seem, they have been ready to shoot them because they have come to feel

morally obliged to retaliate for what members of the other group have done (or for

what they believe them to have done).

1

In such circumstances, persons who were

accustomed to neighbourly relations with others of different ethnic origin come to

believe that they can be safe only when they live together with co-ethnics. Ethnic

preferences override norms of neighbourliness. Local communities are then, in their

internal relations, no longer multidimensional with respect to ethnicity.

Mobilisers offer their services as bargaining agents. Sometimes they serve as the

mouthpieces of those they lead, voicing long-held sentiments. At other times they

speak for themselves, and their followers get caught up in movements over which

they exercise little influence. Ethnic bargaining can occur only under certain

conditions. In any but a small community the parties are best represented by agents

who have the power to discipline potential dissidents. The parties must believe that

the benefits to be obtained from bargaining are likely to outweigh the costs. They

must also trust that any bargain can be enforced and that their concessions will not

be betrayed. Bargaining has been institutionalised in countries in which different

ethnic groups have a fixed number of seats in the legislature and the political elite has

an interest in using state power to maintain the prevailing structure, as in the former

Yugoslavia in the time of President Tito. Open conflict is an attempt to change the

terms of bargaining, to break what is seen as a stalemate and force another party to

negotiate about matters it refuses to regard as negotiable. Its genesis is to be found in

the inadequacy of institutional arrangements for balancing incompatible prefer-

ences and regulating inter-group bargaining, and, in particular, for limiting the

influence of extremists.

In a two-party zero-sum situation in which a benefit to one party is a cost to the

other there may be no scope for bargaining unless a third party intervenes to offer a

new benefit, threaten a new cost or be accepted as an arbitrator with binding powers.

Some conflicts between states over the rights of ethnic minorities have been resolved

by international treaties. For example, when Finland secured independence from

Russia in 1917 the population of the Åland Islands wished to remain culturally

Swedish although they were closer to the Finnish than to the Swedish mainland. The

League of Nations negotiated an agreement guaranteeing to the Ålanders ‘the

preservation of their language, of their culture, and of their local Swedish tradition’

Ethnic Conflict

495

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within the Finnish state, and the conflict has dissolved. International guarantees can

overcome the parties’ mistrust of one another’s future actions. The intervention in

Northern Ireland of the government of the United States made a crucial difference

(as in Palestine, Bosnia and Kosovo), though attempts to mediate in Cyprus have

failed. Often a major obstacle is disagreement within one or both of the parties to a

dispute. It may be easier to reach a settlement if negotiations are conducted in secret

(as in the Oslo talks about the future of Palestine), because then the bargaining

agents do not have to strike attitudes to reassure those they represent that their hopes

are not being betrayed. ‘Proximity talks’ (with the parties in separate rooms) can

prevent differences within delegations from spoiling negotiations between delega-

tions. The conditions for effective bargaining may be present at one moment in time

but if they are not then exploited they may not reappear for a generation. The 1973

opportunity in Northern Ireland did not recur until 1998.