Political Virtue and Shopping

This book seeks to offer a brief, broad, comparative study of ethnic politics that places ethnic conflict within the context of particular political systems. The book is organized around three main themes: 1) the durability of ethnicity as a basis of political identity and source of conflict; 2) the factors which influence ethnic conflict in the contemporary, multi-ethnic and/or multinational world and their relevance to ethnopolitics in democratic, industrialized countries, democratizing countries, and the developing world; and 3) the relationship of ethnicity to forms of social and political differentiation like class and territoriality. To develop these themes, they are explored by comparing and contrasting the experiences of France, Czechoslovakia and its subsequent division, and Nigeria. The theoretical and practical implications of these cases are then explored in terms of how they may apply to other regions, such as Bosnia and Kosovo.