CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2007
| Author | Mirzayev, Sanan |
|---|---|
| Title | The Conflicting Theories of Ethnic Conflict: The Case of Nagorno-Karabakh |
| Summary | Authoritarian and oppressive though their systems were, the socialist multiethnic states, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, managed to escape the nasty face of ethnic violence until the very last days of their existence. Beginning of the end was reached when the truly path-breaking reform package, perestroika, was proposed by Gorbachev subsequent to his reign as last Soviet leader to initiate democratization of the Soviet society. As irony of the history, shortly those states turned into the hub of ethnic violence that is characterized by extreme brutality. This swift transformation of peacefully co-existed, at least seemingly, societies into atrocious adversaries became the center of scholarly attention throughout the last decade. Increasing numbers of scholars from various backgrounds devoted their time and energy in formulating theories to understand nature and underlying reasons recent ethnic violence. In this thesis, I am going to look at theories offered by scholars as an explanation to prevalence of ethnic conflict in post-Soviet regions. However, due to the time and space limitation I will focus on only the most recent and notorious explanations. More specifically, the focus on the rational choice approaches of ethnic conflict will constitute the embryo of the present thesis. Rationalist theorists came to be believed in superiority of their explanations over the other literatures on ethnic conflict. Nonetheless, in my thesis I hypothesize that the rationalist theories are far from providing plausible explanations to post-Soviet violent ethnic conflicts. As I will turn in more detail, these theories can offer only partial explanations, due to their failure to appreciate the complexity of ethnic conflict and attribution of too much rationality to participants of the conflicts. |
| Supervisor | Miller Alexei |
| Department | Nationalism Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2007/mirzayev_sanan.pdf |
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