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International Encyclopedia of the

Social Sciences, 2nd edition

International Encyclopedia of the

Social Sciences, 2nd edition

VOLUME 3

ETHNIC CONFLICT–INEQUALITY, GENDER

William A. Darity Jr.

EDITOR IN CHIEF

ETHNIC CONFLICT

Ethnicity culturally differentiates groups from one

another based on each group’s prominent characteristics,

including a common history, ancestry, language, as well as

other kinds of symbols, dress, religion, and traditions.

Ethnic affiliations do not necessarily fragment ethnically

diverse societies but the context tends to influence how

individuals organize and define themselves as well as how

others regard them. Ethnic differences can generate ethnic

conflict when these differences are used to promote prej-

udice and discrimination against a group that has been

marked or stigmatized. Stigmatization of groups can occur

within and between countries. It may manifest itself in

various forms and to different degrees. But the pertinent

literature diverges on the root causes of ethnic conflict,

from riots to genocide. Broadly speaking there are two

contending perspectives, the cultural and structural para-

digm. Both perspectives implicitly or explicitly implicate

the role of social institutions.

The cultural paradigm regards ethnic conflict as a

social identity issue prompted by real or perceived threat

to group boundaries and a familiar way of life. In this case

resorting to group identity represents a fallback position

for the frightened, alienated, and the angry as the ethnic

group becomes the magna mater. Structural changes, for

example, rapid, often imposed modernization or dramatic

regime change, both accompanied by institutional fail-

ures, may evoke reactions expressed in cultural terms in

triggering the closing of ethnic group boundaries.

The structural paradigm postulates that ethnic con-

flict is not about ethnicity at all but rather involves eco-

nomic and political factors, including territory. Ethnicity

may be manipulated to gain economic and political

power, and for stratifying societies or nation-states within

the world system. Stratification usually involves exploita-

tion of the less powerful groups.

When diverse ethnic groups share a common terri-

tory they may resort to segregation as one type of ethnic

conflict. Segregation inhibits a group’s contact with other

groups, as was practiced in Europe, beginning in Venice,

Italy, in 1516 with the confinement of Jews to areas of

towns or ghettos. Other examples include blacks in the

United States between the end of slavery and desegre-

gation, and blacks in South Africa under apartheid.

During World War II (1939–1945) the U.S. government

confined Japanese Americans to internment camps.

Generally, forced segregation renders the ghettoized group

vulnerable to individual and institutionalized harassment

by the other group and sexual relations between groups as

well as intermarriage are punishable by law. One of the

unintended consequences of segregation is for the forcibly

isolated group to further accentuate its distinctive cultural

characteristics. This is one area where race and ethnicity

intersect. Segregation may avert ethnic riots, a type of eth-

nic conflict, which involves sudden, often brutal violence

inflicted on members of one ethnic group by members of

another ethnic group.

Expulsion is another strategy of ethnic conflict, when

the dominant group forces a less powerful group to relo-

cate. One historical example is that of European colonists

in the Americas, who conquered territories inhabited by

Native Americans, displacing the indigenous population

from its ancestral lands. Another example is the case of the

Palestinians, who were expelled from Israel to make room

for the Jewish State in 1948. An additional case, rarely dis-

INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, 2ND EDITION

Ethnic Enclave

cussed although it constitutes the largest forced migration

of modern times, is the expulsion of 14.5 million

Germans from East Central Europe between 1944 and

1950. Expulsion is a type of ethnic cleansing. Usually the

perpetrators want to achieve simultaneous goals: wipe the

region clean of the expelled ethnic groups and decimate it

in the process.

Ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia attracted

world attention and international intervention largely

because it involved ethnic cleansing. Yugoslavia had been

under the iron fist of communism. With the demise of

communism latent ethnic tensions erupted into open eth-

nic conflict in a civil war in 1991. Yugoslavia disintegrated

as a nation-state, splintering into smaller states with pop-

ulations of numeric majority and minority ethnic groups,

some of which vied for political power. Croatia asserted

state autonomy by forcibly expelling a substantial number

of Serbs that formerly coexisted with Croats. The Bosnian

conflict between Serbs, Croats, and Muslims erupted into

a war in 1992. Serbs attempted to ethnically cleanse

Bosnia of the Muslim population. Serbs’ strategies of eth-

nic cleansing involved the internment in concentration

camps of large numbers of Muslim men, as well as their

torture and murder, and the systematic mass rapes of their

women. In addition to harassment, these are widely used

practices of ethnic cleansers toward survivors of the tar-

geted group, regularly accompanying expulsion. The for-

mer Yugoslavia also generated the 1999 Kosovo War, in

which Serbs attempted to ethnically cleanse the province

of Kosovar Albanian Muslims. Following NATO’s mili-

tary intervention, the process of ethnic cleansing reversed

itself; Kosovar Albanian Muslims turned on Serbs. The

region has remained volatile despite new borders repre-

senting ethnic nationalism and the presence of a United

Nations contingent.

The most extreme form of ethnic cleansing is geno-

cide, the intent to systematically destroy an entire national

or ethnic group. The term genocide was first applied to the

attempted extermination of Jews by the National

Socialists or Nazis in Germany. Millions of Jews and oth-

ers deemed unfit or dangerous to Adolf Hitler’s regime

were murdered in concentration camps during World War

II, in the context of a well-orchestrated campaign of viru-

lent anti-Semitic propaganda. History witnessed addi-

tional instances of attempted genocide, including the

Turkish Ottoman Empire’s massacre of more than 1 mil-

lion Armenians between 1915 and 1923, the killing fields

of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s where 2 million

Cambodians perished, and the Hutu’s slaughter of the

Tutsis during the 1990s in Rwanda, Africa. The structural

school of thought views the Rwandan case as a class war

instead of ethnic cleansing. Some regard the forced migra-

tion of 14.5 million Germans from East Central Europe,

resulting in more than 2 million civilian deaths, and the

fire bombing of Dresden at the close of World War II,

additionally killing several hundred thousand civilians, as

attempted genocide. Scholars disagree, however, on which

cases besides the Jewish case constitute genocide.

If one applies the structural lens to the ethnic conflict

in Iraq that erupted since the U.S. war on that country

and the removal of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial regime,

one can explain the conflict between Shi’is, Sunnis, and

Kurds as an attempt by elites to gain political and eco-

nomic power by appealing to the respective ethnic group.

The absence of strong institutions able to mediate exacer-

bates this conflict. Similar to the former Yugoslavia, each

power broker tries to capitalize from long-standing ten-

sions between the groups. The international context and

external powers are implicated as well.

SEE ALSO Ethnic Fractionalization; Ethnocentrism;

Genocide

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bardhan, Pranab. 1997. Method in Madness? A Political-

Economy Analysis of Ethnic Conflicts in Less Developed

Countries. World Development 25 (9): 1381–1398.

Horowitz, Donald L. 1985. Ethnic Groups in Conflict . Berkeley:

University of California Press.

Horowitz, Donald L. 2001. The Deadly Ethnic Riot . Berkeley:

University of California Press.

Rudolph, Joseph R., ed. 2003. Encyclopedia of Modern Ethnic

Conflicts . Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Van den Berghe, Pierre. 1981. Ethnic Phenomenon . New York:

Elsevier North Holland.

Várdy, Steven Béla, and T. Hunt Tooley, eds. 2003. Ethnic

Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe . New York: Columbia

University Press.

Brigitte U. Neary

ETHNIC ENCLAVE

The term ethnic enclave first emerged in the contemporary

sociological literature in 1967 (Hanna and Hanna 1967).

However, Alejandro Portes and his colleagues (Portes and

Bach 1985; Portes and Manning 1985; and Portes and

Stepick 1985; but see also Model 1985) are credited with

developing the concept theoretically and bringing it to the

forefront in our understanding of the labor market expe-

riences of marginalized workers, particularly immigrants.

A review of the literature shows that while the ethnic

enclave concept gained popularity during the 1985–1994

period, it continued to receive attention in the 1995–

2005 period.

INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, 2ND EDITION

Ethnic Enclave

THEORETICAL ORIGINS OF THE

ETHNIC ENCLAVE CONCEPT

The origins of the ethnic enclave concept can be traced to

the segmented labor market perspective (Sanders and Nee

1987), which is an extension of dual economy theory

(Averitt 1968; Galbraith 1971). According to this per-

spective, the labor market is segmented in advanced capi-

talistic societies into at least two labor markets (Edwards

1975; Gordon 1972). Primary labor markets are charac-

terized by stable working conditions, high wages, scarce

skill specifications, internal labor markets, and high

returns to human capital investments for workers. In con-

trast, secondary labor markets are characterized by high

turnover rates, low wages, low skills, lack of opportunities

for promotion, and lower returns to human capital. Given

that advanced capitalism requires the continual flow of

low-wage and relatively unskilled labor to fill undesirable

jobs (Burawoy 1976; Piore 1979; Sassen-Koob 1978),

minorities, women, and immigrants are disproportion-

ately clustered in secondary labor markets (Light and

Gold 2000; Sanders and Nee 1987; Tolbert et al. 1980).

However, Kenneth Wilson and Portes (1980) shifted

the focus from “ethnic” to “immigrant” enclaves in one of

the earliest recalibrations of the ethnic enclave concept.

Subsequently, Portes defined the enclave economy as

involving “immigrant groups which concentrate in a dis-

tinct spatial location and organize a variety of enterprises

serving their own ethnic market and/or the general popu-

lation. Their basic characteristic is that a significant pro-

portion of the immigrant workforce is employed in

enterprises owned by other immigrants” (1981, p. 291).

Hence, Portes’s (1981) “immigrant enclave” concept

has two characteristics: (1) a critical mass of immigrant-

owned business firms that employ a critical mass of co-

ethnic workers; and (2) spatial clustering of enterprises.

Although Portes and his associates (Portes and Jensen

1992; Portes and Bach 1985) have altered the definition,

it has basically followed the general conceptualization of

immigrant enclaves.

The term ethnic enclave economy has come to stand

for the economic advantage of location clustering (Light

and Gold 2000). Some argue that one of the benefits of

ethnic enclaves is protection from discrimination (Portes

and Bach 1985; Zhou 1992). Accordingly, ethnic enclaves

allow workers from discriminated groups to overcome the

barriers for which they are punished in mainstream labor

markets. As such, the process of ethnic enclave formation

compensates for background deficits and discrimination

that ethnic groups encounter in the general labor market.

Examples of successful groups in ethnic enclaves include

Japanese Americans in the early twentieth century

(Bonacich and Modell 1980) and Cubans in contempo-

rary Miami (Portes and Jensen 1992).

In contrast, some argue that ethnic enclaves are used

to maintain and enforce sweatshop conditions, including

low-wages and restrictions against union organizing

(Sanders and Nee 1987). Additionally, ethnic enclaves

may fuel paternalistic ethnic assistantship in which immi-

grants who depend on kinship or ethnic-group assistance

in the initial stage of adaptation to a host society may

become caught in a web of obligations that interfere with

rational pursuits of economic opportunities (Li 1977).

Furthermore, as long as immigrant and minority workers

are restricted to ethnic enclaves, entrepreneurs can profit

from the surplus of cheap labor (Schrover 2001) and

impede upward mobility by restricting the accumulation

of skills (e.g., proficiency in English) to compete in gen-

eral labor markets (Sanders and Nee 1987). Indeed, in a

study of Cuban and Chinese immigrants, Jimmy Sanders

and Victor Nee (1987) observed that the positive eco-

nomic rewards of the ethnic enclave apply only to entre-

preneurs but not to their workers.

In sum, immigrants, and their native-born counter-

parts to a lesser extent, participate in ethnic enclaves

because of their limited human capital, their exclusion

from mainstream labor markets, and as a protective mech-

anism from discrimination. However, there is no agree-

ment about the benefits of these ethnic enclaves,

particularly in light of the characteristics often associated

with them—unsafe working conditions, low-wages partic-

ularly for rank-and-file laborers, workers being overbur-

dened with obligations, and the entrapment of workers

that impedes their acquisition of the human-capital

resources needed to gain greater economic rewards.

SEE ALSO Assimilation; Ethnic Enterprises; Immigrants to

North America; Networks

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Averitt, Robert T. 1968. The Dual Economy: The Dynamics of

American Industry Structure . New York: Norton.

Bonacich, Edna, and John Modell. 1980. The Economic Basis of

Ethnic Solidarity: Small Business in the Japanese American

Community . Berkeley: University of California Press.

Burawoy, Michael. 1976. The Functions and Reproduction of

Migrant Labor: Comparative Material from Southern Africa

and the United States. American Journal of Sociology 81:

1050–1087.

Edwards, Richard C. 1975. The Social Relations on Production

in the Firm and Labor Market Structure. In Labor Market

Segmentation , eds. Richard C. Edwards, Michael Reich, and

David M. Gordon, 3–26. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath.

Galbraith, John Kenneth. 1971. The New Industrial State . New

York: Mentor.

Gordon, David. 1972. Theories of Poverty and Underemployment:

Orthodox, Radical, and Dual Labor Market . Lexington, MA:

Lexington Books.

INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, 2ND EDITION

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