Ethnic Conflict: An Organizational Perspective

To talk about the behavior of others is to generalize especially if that behavior is perceived to be negative.  As researchers who have studied ethnic discrimination and ethnic conflict for close to two decades, we have noticed, anecdotally at least, that this penchant for generalization is rampant in discussions of ethnic politics. Newspapers are not the only forum in which one will find articles that talk about one or another ethnic group’s involvement in violence without specifying a political organizational agent—by which we mean groups with a set of political goals along with an organizational structure. If an organization is mentioned, the article often offers a generalization about the use of violence or the behavior of an entire ethnic group based solely on the characteristics of one organization within that ethnic group. This problematic type of analysis is too often present in policy and academic journals as well.