International encyclopedia of the social - William A. Darity(5), enc of social
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International Encyclopedia of the
Social Sciences, 2nd edition
International Encyclopedia of the
Social Sciences, 2nd edition
VOLUME
3
ETHNIC CONFLICT–INEQUALITY, GENDER
William A. Darity Jr.
EDITOR IN CHIEF
E
ETHNIC CONFLICT
Ethnicity culturally differentiates groups from one
another based on each group’s prominent characteristics,
including a common history, ancestry, language, as well as
other kinds of symbols, dress, religion, and traditions.
Ethnic affiliations do not necessarily fragment ethnically
diverse societies but the context tends to influence how
individuals organize and define themselves as well as how
others regard them. Ethnic differences can generate ethnic
conflict when these differences are used to promote prej-
udice and discrimination against a group that has been
marked or stigmatized. Stigmatization of groups can occur
within and between countries. It may manifest itself in
various forms and to different degrees. But the pertinent
literature diverges on the root causes of ethnic conflict,
from riots to genocide. Broadly speaking there are two
contending perspectives, the cultural and structural para-
digm. Both perspectives implicitly or explicitly implicate
the role of social institutions.
The cultural paradigm regards ethnic conflict as a
social identity issue prompted by real or perceived threat
to group boundaries and a familiar way of life. In this case
resorting to group identity represents a fallback position
for the frightened, alienated, and the angry as the ethnic
group becomes the magna mater. Structural changes, for
example, rapid, often imposed modernization or dramatic
regime change, both accompanied by institutional fail-
ures, may evoke reactions expressed in cultural terms in
triggering the closing of ethnic group boundaries.
The structural paradigm postulates that ethnic con-
flict is not about ethnicity at all but rather involves eco-
nomic and political factors, including territory. Ethnicity
may be manipulated to gain economic and political
power, and for stratifying societies or nation-states within
the world system. Stratification usually involves exploita-
tion of the less powerful groups.
When diverse ethnic groups share a common terri-
tory they may resort to segregation as one type of ethnic
conflict. Segregation inhibits a group’s contact with other
groups, as was practiced in Europe, beginning in Venice,
Italy, in 1516 with the confinement of Jews to areas of
towns or ghettos. Other examples include blacks in the
United States between the end of slavery and desegre-
gation, and blacks in South Africa under apartheid.
During World War II (1939–1945) the U.S. government
confined Japanese Americans to internment camps.
Generally, forced segregation renders the ghettoized group
vulnerable to individual and institutionalized harassment
by the other group and sexual relations between groups as
well as intermarriage are punishable by law. One of the
unintended consequences of segregation is for the forcibly
isolated group to further accentuate its distinctive cultural
characteristics. This is one area where race and ethnicity
intersect. Segregation may avert ethnic riots, a type of eth-
nic conflict, which involves sudden, often brutal violence
inflicted on members of one ethnic group by members of
another ethnic group.
Expulsion is another strategy of ethnic conflict, when
the dominant group forces a less powerful group to relo-
cate. One historical example is that of European colonists
in the Americas, who conquered territories inhabited by
Native Americans, displacing the indigenous population
from its ancestral lands. Another example is the case of the
Palestinians, who were expelled from Israel to make room
for the Jewish State in 1948. An additional case, rarely dis-
INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, 2ND EDITION
1
Ethnic Enclave
cussed although it constitutes the largest forced migration
of modern times, is the expulsion of 14.5 million
Germans from East Central Europe between 1944 and
1950. Expulsion is a type of ethnic cleansing. Usually the
perpetrators want to achieve simultaneous goals: wipe the
region clean of the expelled ethnic groups and decimate it
in the process.
Ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia attracted
world attention and international intervention largely
because it involved ethnic cleansing. Yugoslavia had been
under the iron fist of communism. With the demise of
communism latent ethnic tensions erupted into open eth-
nic conflict in a civil war in 1991. Yugoslavia disintegrated
as a nation-state, splintering into smaller states with pop-
ulations of numeric majority and minority ethnic groups,
some of which vied for political power. Croatia asserted
state autonomy by forcibly expelling a substantial number
of Serbs that formerly coexisted with Croats. The Bosnian
conflict between Serbs, Croats, and Muslims erupted into
a war in 1992. Serbs attempted to ethnically cleanse
Bosnia of the Muslim population. Serbs’ strategies of eth-
nic cleansing involved the internment in concentration
camps of large numbers of Muslim men, as well as their
torture and murder, and the systematic mass rapes of their
women. In addition to harassment, these are widely used
practices of ethnic cleansers toward survivors of the tar-
geted group, regularly accompanying expulsion. The for-
mer Yugoslavia also generated the 1999 Kosovo War, in
which Serbs attempted to ethnically cleanse the province
of Kosovar Albanian Muslims. Following NATO’s mili-
tary intervention, the process of ethnic cleansing reversed
itself; Kosovar Albanian Muslims turned on Serbs. The
region has remained volatile despite new borders repre-
senting ethnic nationalism and the presence of a United
Nations contingent.
The most extreme form of ethnic cleansing is geno-
cide, the intent to systematically destroy an entire national
or ethnic group. The term
genocide
was first applied to the
attempted extermination of Jews by the National
Socialists or Nazis in Germany. Millions of Jews and oth-
ers deemed unfit or dangerous to Adolf Hitler’s regime
were murdered in concentration camps during World War
II, in the context of a well-orchestrated campaign of viru-
lent anti-Semitic propaganda. History witnessed addi-
tional instances of attempted genocide, including the
Turkish Ottoman Empire’s massacre of more than 1 mil-
lion Armenians between 1915 and 1923, the killing fields
of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s where 2 million
Cambodians perished, and the Hutu’s slaughter of the
Tutsis during the 1990s in Rwanda, Africa. The structural
school of thought views the Rwandan case as a class war
instead of ethnic cleansing. Some regard the forced migra-
tion of 14.5 million Germans from East Central Europe,
resulting in more than 2 million civilian deaths, and the
fire bombing of Dresden at the close of World War II,
additionally killing several hundred thousand civilians, as
attempted genocide. Scholars disagree, however, on which
cases besides the Jewish case constitute genocide.
If one applies the structural lens to the ethnic conflict
in Iraq that erupted since the U.S. war on that country
and the removal of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial regime,
one can explain the conflict between Shi’is, Sunnis, and
Kurds as an attempt by elites to gain political and eco-
nomic power by appealing to the respective ethnic group.
The absence of strong institutions able to mediate exacer-
bates this conflict. Similar to the former Yugoslavia, each
power broker tries to capitalize from long-standing ten-
sions between the groups. The international context and
external powers are implicated as well.
SEE ALSO
Ethnic Fractionalization; Ethnocentrism;
Genocide
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bardhan, Pranab. 1997. Method in Madness? A Political-
Economy Analysis of Ethnic Conflicts in Less Developed
Countries.
World Development
25 (9): 1381–1398.
Horowitz, Donald L. 1985.
Ethnic Groups in Conflict
. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Horowitz, Donald L. 2001.
The Deadly Ethnic Riot
. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Rudolph, Joseph R., ed. 2003.
Encyclopedia of Modern Ethnic
Conflicts
. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Van den Berghe, Pierre. 1981.
Ethnic Phenomenon
. New York:
Elsevier North Holland.
Várdy, Steven Béla, and T. Hunt Tooley, eds. 2003.
Ethnic
Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe
. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Brigitte U. Neary
ETHNIC ENCLAVE
The term
ethnic enclave
first emerged in the contemporary
sociological literature in 1967 (Hanna and Hanna 1967).
However, Alejandro Portes and his colleagues (Portes and
Bach 1985; Portes and Manning 1985; and Portes and
Stepick 1985; but see also Model 1985) are credited with
developing the concept theoretically and bringing it to the
forefront in our understanding of the labor market expe-
riences of marginalized workers, particularly immigrants.
A review of the literature shows that while the ethnic
enclave concept gained popularity during the 1985–1994
period, it continued to receive attention in the 1995–
2005 period.
2
INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, 2ND EDITION
Ethnic Enclave
THEORETICAL ORIGINS OF THE
ETHNIC ENCLAVE CONCEPT
The origins of the ethnic enclave concept can be traced to
the segmented labor market perspective (Sanders and Nee
1987), which is an extension of dual economy theory
(Averitt 1968; Galbraith 1971). According to this per-
spective, the labor market is segmented in advanced capi-
talistic societies into at least two labor markets (Edwards
1975; Gordon 1972). Primary labor markets are charac-
terized by stable working conditions, high wages, scarce
skill specifications, internal labor markets, and high
returns to human capital investments for workers. In con-
trast, secondary labor markets are characterized by high
turnover rates, low wages, low skills, lack of opportunities
for promotion, and lower returns to human capital. Given
that advanced capitalism requires the continual flow of
low-wage and relatively unskilled labor to fill undesirable
jobs (Burawoy 1976; Piore 1979; Sassen-Koob 1978),
minorities, women, and immigrants are disproportion-
ately clustered in secondary labor markets (Light and
Gold 2000; Sanders and Nee 1987; Tolbert et al. 1980).
However, Kenneth Wilson and Portes (1980) shifted
the focus from “ethnic” to “immigrant” enclaves in one of
the earliest recalibrations of the ethnic enclave concept.
Subsequently, Portes defined the enclave economy as
involving “immigrant groups which concentrate in a dis-
tinct spatial location and organize a variety of enterprises
serving their own ethnic market and/or the general popu-
lation. Their basic characteristic is that a significant pro-
portion of the immigrant workforce is employed in
enterprises owned by other immigrants” (1981, p. 291).
Hence, Portes’s (1981) “immigrant enclave” concept
has two characteristics: (1) a critical mass of immigrant-
owned business firms that employ a critical mass of co-
ethnic workers; and (2) spatial clustering of enterprises.
Although Portes and his associates (Portes and Jensen
1992; Portes and Bach 1985) have altered the definition,
it has basically followed the general conceptualization of
immigrant enclaves.
The term
ethnic enclave economy
has come to stand
for the economic advantage of location clustering (Light
and Gold 2000). Some argue that one of the benefits of
ethnic enclaves is protection from discrimination (Portes
and Bach 1985; Zhou 1992). Accordingly, ethnic enclaves
allow workers from discriminated groups to overcome the
barriers for which they are punished in mainstream labor
markets. As such, the process of ethnic enclave formation
compensates for background deficits and discrimination
that ethnic groups encounter in the general labor market.
Examples of successful groups in ethnic enclaves include
Japanese Americans in the early twentieth century
(Bonacich and Modell 1980) and Cubans in contempo-
rary Miami (Portes and Jensen 1992).
In contrast, some argue that ethnic enclaves are used
to maintain and enforce sweatshop conditions, including
low-wages and restrictions against union organizing
(Sanders and Nee 1987). Additionally, ethnic enclaves
may fuel paternalistic ethnic assistantship in which immi-
grants who depend on kinship or ethnic-group assistance
in the initial stage of adaptation to a host society may
become caught in a web of obligations that interfere with
rational pursuits of economic opportunities (Li 1977).
Furthermore, as long as immigrant and minority workers
are restricted to ethnic enclaves, entrepreneurs can profit
from the surplus of cheap labor (Schrover 2001) and
impede upward mobility by restricting the accumulation
of skills (e.g., proficiency in English) to compete in gen-
eral labor markets (Sanders and Nee 1987). Indeed, in a
study of Cuban and Chinese immigrants, Jimmy Sanders
and Victor Nee (1987) observed that the positive eco-
nomic rewards of the ethnic enclave apply only to entre-
preneurs but not to their workers.
In sum, immigrants, and their native-born counter-
parts to a lesser extent, participate in ethnic enclaves
because of their limited human capital, their exclusion
from mainstream labor markets, and as a protective mech-
anism from discrimination. However, there is no agree-
ment about the benefits of these ethnic enclaves,
particularly in light of the characteristics often associated
with them—unsafe working conditions, low-wages partic-
ularly for rank-and-file laborers, workers being overbur-
dened with obligations, and the entrapment of workers
that impedes their acquisition of the human-capital
resources needed to gain greater economic rewards.
SEE ALSO
Assimilation; Ethnic Enterprises; Immigrants to
North America; Networks
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Averitt, Robert T. 1968.
The Dual Economy: The Dynamics of
American Industry Structure
. New York: Norton.
Bonacich, Edna, and John Modell. 1980.
The Economic Basis of
Ethnic Solidarity: Small Business in the Japanese American
Community
. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Burawoy, Michael. 1976. The Functions and Reproduction of
Migrant Labor: Comparative Material from Southern Africa
and the United States.
American Journal of Sociology
81:
1050–1087.
Edwards, Richard C. 1975. The Social Relations on Production
in the Firm and Labor Market Structure. In
Labor Market
Segmentation
, eds. Richard C. Edwards, Michael Reich, and
David M. Gordon, 3–26. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath.
Galbraith, John Kenneth. 1971.
The New Industrial State
. New
York: Mentor.
Gordon, David. 1972.
Theories of Poverty and Underemployment:
Orthodox, Radical, and Dual Labor Market
. Lexington, MA:
Lexington Books.
INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, 2ND EDITION
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