Plot Summary?
We’re just getting started.

Add this title to our requested Study Guides list!
SuperSummary Logo
Plot Summary

Ethnic Groups in Conflict

Guide cover placeholder
Plot Summary

Ethnic Groups in Conflict

Donald Horowitz

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1985

Plot Summary
In Ethnic Groups in Conflict (1985), Donald Horowitz, a political scientist, legal scholar, and specialist in the history and pathology of ethnic friction, rallies against the reductive readings many scholars give to conflict along ethnic lines, arguing that even in extremely divided societies, the phenomenon is more complex, even more rational, than often thought. He believes that ethnic affiliations are much more momentary and fragmented than we assume, creating divisions at familial, group, and organizational levels. He applies his thesis broadly to economic and political issues, including labor organization and party divisions. Moreover, he argues that group identities and solidarities form according to recognized political affordances rather than out of a need to politically identify for its own sake.


Horowitz relates ethnicity and the act of sociological analysis. He critiques the absence of a set of first principles which scholars could agree to use to examine ethnic relations in an intelligible and productive way. He asserts that the sociology of ethnicity is being held back by the lack of this intellectual foundation, which thwarts attempts to compare different situations and groups.

Horowitz cites several phenomena whose understanding, he believes, should be the utmost goal of analysis. First, there is the fact that different societies have different degrees of division. This phenomena, in his view, points to the differing roles of colonial, sovereign, ethnic, and indigenous identities in organizing people and instigating conflict. Second, he advocates trying to understand why different kinds of hierarchy emerge in social arrangements, and how they make possible or foreclose different economic transactions. Third, he argues that we must learn more about why systems tend towards centralization, often forging binary oppositions such as two-party political systems.



Fourth, Horowitz seeks to understand the role of differences that are ascribed rather than obvious. He uses as an example the fact that the ascription of one’s “ethnicity” is more complicated than how one dresses, or where one lives, or the religion or language in which one takes part. Difference constantly exceeds and overflows humanity’s categorizing capabilities, resulting in the formation of even more complex categories. Horowitz also argues, in the vein of Karl Marx, that ethnicity is more useful as a describing term than class, since it is more rigid, while class mobility is highly possible, even encouraged, in many societies.

Horowitz describes his theory of ethnic conflict. He holds that ethnic sentiment naturally takes on a primal, “raw” form that is then distorted and manipulated by self-interested institutional powers, which themselves have emerged out of years of ethnic struggle. He talks about the common capacity of institutions to actively affect ethnic sentiment. To do so, he reviews three primary frameworks for understanding ethnic conflict: cultural pluralism, economic self-interestedness, and the theory of modernization. None of them, in his view, are as comprehensive in describing ethnic conflict as the social psychological theory that he endorses. Horowitz rejects the notion that conflict happens because different ethnic identities feud over how labor is divided. Instead, most societies are driven by the creation of economic niches that constantly pull away from the notion that industries are to be few in number and ethnically contentious. Different ethnic groups naturally come to favor and participate in distinct economic activities.

Horowitz touches on how ethnic conflict relates to partisan politics. He believes that modern electoral systems make it easier than ever to form ethnic groups that eventuate in ethnic conflicts. If political partisanship is to be utilized well, in Horowitz’s view, it should publicly respond to as many issues as possible, participating in the languages of ethnicization. As grounds for this claim, he points to the fact that rarely, in the long run, do people simply vote for a party that engineers its identity to reflect a static ethnicity. Rather, their votes change rapidly and are highly sensitive to social evolution.



Using a number of well-researched examples from a broad set of nations across the most recent segment of the modern era, Horowitz delivers a compelling appeal to rethink ethnic conflict. The analytical position he arrives at is one of constant attentiveness to the psychology of ethnic formation, which provides a sounding board for new developments in economics and politics.

Continue your reading experience

SuperSummary Plot Summaries provide a quick, full synopsis of a text. But SuperSummary Study Guides — available only to subscribers — provide so much more!

Join now to access our Study Guides library, which offers chapter-by-chapter summaries and comprehensive analysis on more than 5,000 literary works from novels to nonfiction to poetry.

Subscribe

See for yourself. Check out our sample guides:

Subscribe

Plot Summary?
We’re just getting started.

Add this title to our requested Study Guides list!

A SuperSummary Plot Summary provides a quick, full synopsis of a text.

A SuperSummary Study Guide — a modern alternative to Sparknotes & CliffsNotes — provides so much more, including chapter-by-chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and important quotes.

See the difference for yourself. Check out this sample Study Guide: