Institutions are important in mitigating the extent to which shocks produce violent consequences, but their effectiveness is conditioned by the behavior of local and international leaders. Ostensibly perfect institutions may fail due to poor stewardship, while even imperfect ones can succeed at preventing violent escalation if local and international political leaders have sufficient political will.
Ethnic Conflict
Twenty Years On and Twenty Years Ahead
While resistance to HCNM involvement is likely to increase in an era in which sovereignty concerns all too often trump concerns over human and minority rights, this does not make the institution of the HCNM itself irrelevant — on the contrary. I argue in this article that there are three areas in which the HCNM has a future role to play: monitoring, preventive quiet diplomacy, and policy transfer.
Self-determination after Kosovo
Co–edited with Annemarie Peen Rodt, this special issue was published by Europe-Asia Studies. It presents the results...
The Regional Dimensions of State Failure
Published in the Review of International Studies in 2011, this article starts by considering the academic and policy debate on state failure since the early 1990s. Since then, its empirical and analytical sophistication has grown, yet the fact that state failure is a...
Managing ethno-national conflict: towards an analytical framework
Published in 2011, this article argues that the management of ethno-national conflict remains an important issue on the security agendas of states and international organisations alike, from the Western Balkans to the Middle East and Asia Pacific, from sub-Saharan...
The Routledge Handbook of Ethnic Conflict
Co-edited with Karl Cordell and featuring contributions from leading scholars in the field, the Routledge Handbook of Ethnic Conflict offers the definitive global survey of the interaction of race, ethnicity, nationalism and politics. It blends theoretically grounded,...
The relationships between states and non-state peoples: a comparative view of the Kurds in Iraq
Published in The Kurdish Policy Imperative (ed. by Robert Lowe and Gareth Stansfield, Chatham House/Brookings Institution, 2010), this chapter outlines a variety of dimensions that can help to specify the situation of particular non-state peoples. This situational...
Consociationalism, Power Sharing, and Politics at the Center
Published in The International Studies Encyclopedia in 2010, this chapter outlines the main features of centripetalism, power sharing, and power dividing and of their prescriptions for divided societies. I compare the three schools to one another and showing their...
Ethnic Conflict: Causes, Consequences, and Responses
Why does ethnic conflict remain one of the major security challenges in today's world? Can we avoid another Rwanda in the future? How was it possible, after almost four decades, to achieve a lasting settlement to the conflict in Northern Ireland, while that in Kashmir...