Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN: | 9780511415500 0511415508 9780511414176 051141417X 051141482X 9780511414824 9780511790669 051179066X 9780521894944 0521894948 9780521719209 0521719208
|
Notes: | Includes bibliographical references and index. Print version record.
|
Summary: | "Despite implicating ethnicity in everything from civil war to economic failure, researchers seldom consult psychological research when addressing the most basic question: What is ethnicity? The result is a radical scholarly divide generating contradictory recommendations for solving ethnic conflict. Research into how the human brain actually works demands a revision of existing schools of thought. Hale argues ethnic identity is a cognitive uncertainty-reduction device with special capacity to exacerbate, but not cause, collective action problems. This produces a new general theory of ethnic conflict that can improve both understanding and practice. A deep study of separatism in the USSR and CIS demonstrates the theory's potential, mobilizing evidence from elite interviews, three local languages, and mass surveys. The outcome significantly reinterprets nationalism's role in CIS relations and the USSR's breakup, which turns out to have been a far more contingent event than commonly recognized"--Back cover.
|
Other form: | Print version: Hale, Henry E., 1966- Foundations of ethnic politics. Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2008 9780521894944 0521894948
|