The Halle Approach to Integration and Conflict

Günther Schlee
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale

Günther Schlee

Ethnicity and religion are currently central categories for the explanation of conflicts and for the description of different forms of solidarity and integration. While interest in these topics is now very high, they have not always enjoyed such popularity. At other times, other categories such as class or nation have come to the fore. Since ethnicity and religion are used as explanations for almost everything, I want to start by stating very clearly what, according to our findings, they are not.

What Ethnicity and Religion Are Not
Ethnicity is not the cause of so-called ethnic conflicts. The corresponding thesis about religion is that religion is not the cause of religious conflicts. We continue to talk about ethnic or religious conflicts, because there is much about such conflicts that is indeed ethnic or religious—just not their causes.

Frequently, ethnic or religious polarization only starts to emerge in the course of a conflict, and that is certainly the wrong time to be looking for a cause. So far, I am in accord with most anthropologists and sociologists who are interested in ethnicity. The conviction that ethnicity is not a predetermined feature, but something that is articulated and expressed at borders and in peaceful or hostile confrontations with others, has been dominant among anthropologists ever since the publication of Fredrik Barth’s Ethnic Groups and Boundaries in 1969. But popular opinion and journalistic analyses, which often provide the basis for practical politics, deviate from this view, and the same may be said of some other fields of scholarship.

When socialism collapsed, Samuel Huntington, with his thesis regarding the Clash of Civilizations, was by no means the only one to predict that new battle lines would be drawn along ethnic and religious cleavages. Many assumed that the new and old oppositions were the same. Socialism had only suppressed them temporarily. This is the heavy lid theory. Socialism is said to have been placed over old conflict situations like a heavy lid. Once the lid was removed, the conflicts underneath began seething to the surface. On occasion, I have jokingly called this the “volcanic” theory of ethnicity: According to this view, socialism was the cold crust under which hot primordial forces were bubbling. The crust broke, and the temporarily contained ethnic conflicts erupted anew.

Empirical Studies Needed
So there is no lack of perspectives, opinions and catchy images. That makes it even more necessary to proceed empirically in attempting to determine the actual relationship between ethnicity and the occurrence of violent conflict. If ethnicity were the cause of conflict, a higher degree of ethnic difference would necessarily correlate with a higher frequency of conflicts.

Ethnic borders are cultural discontinuities—lines along which several features change simultaneously. These features may correspond to variable languages or dialects, rituals or religious practices, types of occupation, or forms of literary or artistic expression, among other possible examples. The greater the number of variable features and the greater the degree of variability for each feature, the greater the cultural difference. Surely one could assign quantitative values to these differences, make calculations regarding the corresponding conflicts, assess their relative intensity, and attempt to determine statistically how strongly cultural differences correlate with the occurrence of violent conflicts.

I have not done that. Why not? One reason is, certainly, that this would not be easy methodologically. The exact valuation of individual characteristics and the determination of degrees of difference could be subjects of endless debate. But there is another reason for abstaining from the kind of quantitative analysis alluded to above: The cases that occur to me when reflecting on the connection between difference and conflict are, actually, all counterexamples. In fact, the most severe and horrifying conflicts always seem to take place between conflicting parties that are especially similar to one another. Somalia and Yugoslavia are cases in point. The world wars of the 20th century did not involve the cultures of that epoch that differed most radically from one another; rather, they took as their point of departure the rivalries among neighbouring European nation-states that shared long lists of common characteristics.

On the other hand, we find peaceful forms of coexistence based on the dissimilarity of the participating groups: integration through difference. Just as similarities can lead to competition, so differences can result in the avoidance of competition and the emergence of complementary relationships.

So much for the connection between the amalgam of characteristics called “culture” and the frequency and intensity of conflicts. A positive correlation between cultural differences and the potential for conflict evidently does not exist.

Resources and Identity Involved in Conflict
In order to find out which links can be established between the identification with first, a collective, a nation, a clan, an ethnic group, a religious community, or other such group and second, constellations of conflict, we have to dispense with complex amalgams such as “culture” and focus on individual characteristics. These individual characteristics, which provide people with the means for understanding themselves and their relationships with others, have variable distributions and may, therefore, be used to draw boundaries more narrowly or more widely—or to define people situationally as belonging to one group or another.

Every competent strategist, opinion leader, politician, vote broker—or, more generally, every political actor, even down to the level of village or family politics—must be able to include or exclude others, depending on whether he or she needs them at a certain time or not. Those who believe in their own rhetoric, who confuse their own rhetoric with the truth and who, therefore, continually undertake the same identifications and exclusions, are incapable of playing this game.

The ability to switch back and forth between demanding solidarity from others and employing rhetorical means to exclude others in order to retain the greatest possible share of jointly obtained profits for oneself or one’s own narrowly defined group—this ability is the core business of politics and a central component of every political or military power game. Such power games always involve control over resources, such as territory, raw material (oil, water), votes or offices; and power may itself be regarded as an instrumental resource in acquiring other resources. Of course, power may also be an end in itself.

Still, conflicts over resources always also involve social or cultural identifications. Through identity discourses, actors try to expand their group or alliance, if they feel too weak to achieve a strategic goal or to obtain or defend a resource. Or they attempt to reduce the size of their group or alliance, if they are confident in their own strength and want to avoid sharing their booty with too many others. Who is included in a group or alliance, and who is not, often has little to do with the contested resource itself, for example with oil or with water. Rather, cultural classifications come into play at this point: Clan or ethnic group, religion, popular conceptions of culture areas, linguistic closeness or distance, and so on.

In the analysis of any conflict, both aspects, resources and identifications, must be taken into account. To which forms of identification do people appeal under particular conditions? Attention should also be paid to a third aspect: the interdependence of these two factors. How, for example, are group formation and alliances affected by resource situations and power imbalances? This would mean that distinguishing between “resource-based conflicts” and allegedly more virulent “identity-based conflicts,” as has become common in much recent conflict theory, does not make much sense. There are no such distinctions at the empirical level. With each conflict, one has to ask which identity decisions are made under which economic, political and military conditions.

A Theory of Integration and Conflict
For these reasons, I am developing a theory of integration and conflict. In this approach, we must first analyze the semantic space of “identification” by asking: Which systems of categories are used to grasp perceived identities and differences? How are they organized in taxonomies and terminological fields?

Second, we need to model decisions within this semantic space by investigating which identifications are selected or (in case of ascription by others) accepted under which conditions? Criteria of plausibility, which arise from the logic of conceptual attributions or from empirical reality, play a role in such decisions, as do strategies and interests.

Through iterative decisions regarding identification, particularly in discourses and everyday actions, social identities change. Their processually-constituted character is, thus, made clear.

Günther Schlee directs research in Africa, Central Asia and Europe in the department of integration and conflict at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology at Halle/Salle. Identities on the Move: Clanship and Pastoralism in Northern Kenya was published in 1989 in the series of the International African Institute.