Ethnic Conflict: A Systematic Approach to Cases of Conflict
Ethnic Conflictbridges the sub-fields of international relations and comparative politics. As someone who does research in this area and has taught the subject to undergraduates, I believe this approach will help students make sense of the overlapping factors that contribute to conflict. Another asset is that the authors apply the three levels of analysis (common to most IR scholarship) throughout the book, which is of value even when the book is used in comparative politics courses like political development or ethnic politics. Integrating the literature in IR and comparative politics by using the levels of analysis framework to analyze the causes of and solutions to ethnic conflicts is an innovative and impressive idea. --- Gigi Gokcek, Dominican University of CaliforniaJesse and Williams offer a new synthetic treatment of the causes of ethnic conflict in the contemporary era. Integrating across the levels of analysis, they deftly meld individual, domestic, and international factors to probe the origins of conflict in five important cases-Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Israel/Palestine, Sri Lanka, and Sudan. Drawing on the best of recent scholarship, their compelling text will introduce students to the problems and complexities of this tragic, enduring, and still perplexing form of violence. --- David A. Lake, University of California, San Diego