Racial and Ethnic Conflicts: A Global Perspective

Abstract

Race and ethnicity provide the most striking example of a general failure among experts to anticipate social developments in varying types of societies. Until recently, there was considerable consensus among many Marxist and non-Marxist scholars that ethnicity reflected the conditions of traditional society, in which people lived in small communities isolated from one another and in which mass communications and transportation were limited. Many expected that industrialization, urbanization, and the spread of education would reduce ethnic consciousness, and that universalism would replace particularism. Marxists were certain that socialism would mean the end of the ethnic tension and consciousness that existed in pre-socialist societies. Non-Marxists sociologists in western countries assumed that industialization and modernization would do the same. Assimilation of minorities into a large integrated whole was viewed as the inevitable future.KeywordsEthnic GroupEthnic ConflictPolitical MobilizationSchedule CasteEthnic RelationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.