Conflict, Migration, and the Expression of Ethnicity.

This volume contains a collection of papers on conflict migration and ethnicity. The papers in this book not only document the fact that local conflict spawns refugeeism but several deal with ensuing events in the receiving societies including the rise of new inter-ethnic tensions when the refugees are defined as unwelcome intruders--sometimes by preceding refugee groups who fear erosion of their own beachhead. Although refugees sometimes readily find work in the industrial sector of the receiving society most live in sub-standard conditions and usually are forced to depend for some of their subsistence on national and international welfare agencies. Local citizens may resent this although it is not fashionable in the US to admit this. Some ethnic cleavages have long historical roots that maintain latent conflict and intermittently produce violence but in other cases ethnicity may be invented or reawakened as a reaction to outside forces. Ethnic revival or ethnoregenesis may occur either in a foreign setting among people only distantly bound together or in a homeland where other allegiances have superseded the ethnic for various reasons. The taking on of characteristics of the host society by migrants who are thereby perceived differently and so defined by their compatriots left behind is certainly more common than has heretofore been recognized. The chapters are organized in 3 different stages of development in which conflict and migration result. The 1st is that in which the state apparatus when faced with internal conflict with ethnic expressions tries to coopt the dissidents by downplaying ethnic differences and at the same time promoting loyalty to the larger whole. A 2nd stage can be seen in the response of dissidents under such pressure who emigrate to another country. Finally such migration may lead to another stage of further ethnic conflict in the receiving society.