Above, Below and Beyond the State: New Directions in Ethnic Conflict Studies

This essay argues that the research on ethnic conflict has for too long suffered from significant disciplinary divides among sociologists, historians, political scientists, anthropologists, geologists, and economists—these divides bring attention to underemphasized factors, but can also foster inattention to the influence of factors that fall outside of the specific purview of one’s field. Even within political science, there is a divide between comparativists’ focus on state-level factors and international relations scholars’ work on transnational dimensions. The past two decades have seen important cross-fertilization due to numerous projects that seek to bridge methodological and disciplinary boundaries that hamper fuller understanding of the causes and solutions of ethnic conflict. Unfortunately, there remains a strong statist bias in the field, which is, however, being challenged by a newer generation of scholars who are focusing on conflict processes above, below, and beyond the state.