Constructing ethnicity: culture and ethnic conflict in the new world disorder

The end of the Cold War saw a proliferation of deadly conflicts between ethnic and other so-called identity groups around the world. Building on the tension between the purely "cultural" and politically deployable "ethnic" dimensions of identity, this paper examines the emergence of these conflicts in terms of the disintegration of major power systems--postcolonial, postimperial, postrevolutionary, and postillusionary--that had hitherto operated to constrain conflict. The emergence of the refugee as a new cultural, as well as political, type is discussed as one precipitate of these identity-group conflicts.