INTL420 Week 5 Discussion

INTL420 Week 5 

Discussion Board writing assignment for Week Five

1. John Mueller argues "that the whole concept of 'ethnic warfare' may be severely misguided." How was the "banality of ethnic war" borne out in the cases of Croatia and Bosnia, and Rwanda, according to Mueller? 

2. According to Hutchinson, how has Nuer ethnicity been militarized?  What behavioral and social changes does Hutchinson cite as evidence of this militarization of the Nuer? 

3. In "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War," Fearon and Laitin critique "an influential conventional wisdom [which] holds that civil wars proliferated rapidly with the end of the Cold War and that the root cause of many or most of these has been ethnic and religious antagonisms." What did Fearon and Laitin find to be the direct causes of civil conflict?  What did they find to be indirect causes, in other words, which factors did they find to be more weakly correlated with civil wars?