Race, Ethnicity, and War
Authors: Pichichero Christy 
Published: October 2024

Numerous forms of violence and armed conflict in human history have been pursued and justified by deploying the concepts of ethnic and racial difference. Race and ethnicity are social constructs, meaning that these ideas are created and shared by a group or society in order to establish patterns of identity, community, and power relations in human civilization. Ethnicity describes a group defined by a common sociocultural system including aspects such as language, religion, customs, history, and homeland. Race indicates the division of people and attribution of meaning to select physical traits, such as skin tone, and other qualities that are imputed to be inherent. In the twentieth century, the study of ethnic conflict burgeoned in the field of anthropology and expanded as an area of inquiry pursued across many other academic disciplines, from political science and religious studies to the “new military history.” Race and war is a newer historiographical development in New Military History and it elicits particular controversy as it exposes past and present systems of subjugation, exploitation, and elimination. The subject of this article is politically charged as well as chronologically and geographically expansive. It necessitates an interdisciplinary, decolonial, and global approach, drawing from sources in political science, anthropology, peace and conflict resolution studies, and varied subdisciplines of history while centering the study of war, culture, and society. Racial and ethnic war can and must be studied intersectionally across facets of identity (gender, sexuality, religion, economic or social class, nationality, and more) and in relation to civil wars, settler colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and fascism. Epistemic and cultural practices, war (regular and irregular), resistance, peacebuilding, and the experiences of military service people and civilians are key features of research on race, ethnicity, and war. The related topics of genocide and ethnic cleansing, gender issues, terrorism, and race in the US military are treated in separate articles of this Oxford Bibliography module. The first three sections of this article lay the conceptual groundwork for the study of race, ethnicity, and war. The first section focuses on formulations of race and ethnicity that serve as the foundation for thinking about these subjects in relation to war. The second section presents works examining race, militarism, and ethnic conflict. The third section treats terror, sexual violence, and gender, which is a central theme of global scholarly research on race, ethnicity, and war. Following this conceptual groundwork, the sections that follow are organized chronologically, surveying scholarly works that attend to racial and ethnic wars in different geographies or comparative frameworks: Race, Ethnicity, and War in Antiquity through the Middle Ages; Slavery, Colonialism, Revolution, and Imperial Warfare 1400–1899; Early Twentieth Century, World War I, and Interwar Period; World War II, Postwar Occupations, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and the Cold War; Post–World War II Anti-Colonialism, Wars of Independence, Postcolonialism, and Neocolonialism. The final section covers the Contemporary Era. This bibliography cannot be exhaustive due to the breadth of its subject matter, but it proffers key sources to ground further inquiry into this important global phenomenon.